Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 27

How my garden grows

I'm FINALLY having luck with native wildflowers. Photos on Facebook.

Coral bells, red valerian, baby blue-eyes, red ribbons, blueblossom, crimson columbine, jellybean monkeyflower, even - FINALLY - California poppies!

My Gala apple tree has tiny apples, the green cherries have remained largely uneaten, and I have little green blueberries...

...and I am taking off on July 20 to go to France and Bulgaria for a month, so I may not get to taste any of the fruits of my labors. Get ripening, cherries!

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The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side, by Agatha Christie

Changes have come to St. Mary's Mead. A big housing development (known as the Development) has sprung up, Mrs. Bantry has sold her house to a movie star after her husband's death, and Miss Marple has become frail enough that her doctor has ordered her to have a 24-7 caregiver. The caregiver, Mrs. Knight, is obnoxious and infantilizing, and Miss Marple is depressed and diminished under her care. But a murder turns out to be (literally!) just what the doctor ordered...

This has a great hook for the mystery. Marina, the movie star, and her director husband Jason host a charity open house. A local woman, Heather Badcock, is a huge fan of Marina and met her once some ten years ago. While Heather is recounting well-worn story to Marina, Mrs. Bantry sees a frozen look of utter shock come over Marina's face as she stares straight past Heather at the party crowd. When Heather's drink is spilled, Marina gives Heather her own drink. Heather drinks it and dies.

Who or what did Marina see? Was the poison meant for Marina? Will Miss Marple ever get out from under the thumb of the awful Mrs. Knight?

I'd read this before and had remembered the murder mystery fairly well, particularly its very memorable motive. (I read this while on vacation, and freegratis had also read it and recalled the motive.) I'd forgotten the storyline involving Miss Marple and her caregiver, and was very invested in it on this read.

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I have to note that this book includes characters named Badcock, Allcock, Lowcock, and Clithering. That is a lot of cocks and clits, in addition to the inevitable "old pussy."

Christie Ism Scale: Ableism, both embedded in the narrative and depicted but not narratively endorsed. Anti-Italian slurs.

Next up: A Caribbean Mystery.

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Book Barn

I went to the Book Barn in Niantic, CT: three locations, two goats and three cats spotted (one of which licked and two of which bit me), and a very large book haul.

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Thoughts on any of the books?

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Taste of Fears, by Margaret Millar

Lucille is the second wife of a doctor, Andrew. His first wife, Mildred, died under mysterious circumstances sixteen years ago. Mildred and Lucille were close friends. A small package is delivered by hand to Lucille, who takes it to her bedroom, screams, and runs out of the house. She doesn't come back...

Margaret Millar was a popular mystery writer in the 1950s who has now fallen out of fashion. She was married to Ross McDonald; I bet dinners at their house were really something. This was my first book by her so I'm not sure how typical it is. There is a mystery but it's more a work of psychological suspense. The structure is a bit unusual, in three parts, and the third section and to a lesser degree the second sags a bit. It's written in a very well-handled omniscient POV and a rather distant, chilly sensibility.

What's really notable is the prose, which is fantastic.

She had the subtle but supreme vanity that often masquerades under prettier names, devotion, unselfishness, generosity. It lay in the back of her mind, a blind, deaf, and hungry little beast that must always be fed indirectly through a cord.

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A Pair of DNFs

I did not get very far into either of these, despite one of them having an all-time great title. Here are some representative excerpts which may explain why.

Are Snakes Necessary? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

Her stiff yellow apron barely contains her voluptuous curves. For a moment Brock imagines a wrestling match between her giant breasts and the tight seams of her Ronald McDonald wear. His better ball starts to tingle.

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Legends of the Jews, by Louis Ginzberg

Poetic phantasmagoria, frequently the vaporings of morbid visionaries, is the material out of which these scholars construct the theologic system of the Rabbis, and fairy tales, the spontaneous creations of the people, which take the form of sacred legend in Jewish literature, are denominated the Scriptural exegesis of the Rabbis, and condemned incontinently as nugae rabbinorum.

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The Girl at the End of the World, by Richard Levesque

An extremely generic fungus apocalypse novel with a mildly grabby beginning. I read this while half-delirious from lack of sleep on a red-eye plane trip, then deleted as I would never read it again.

Scarlett is a fifteen-year-old in Los Angeles who goes to a baseball game at Dodger Stadium with her family the day the world ends. A man starts screaming about foul balls, then his head explodes. Two white fungus stalks poke out of what remains of his head and form balls at the top which explode in a cloud of spores. A day or two later, everyone in LA but her is dead of exploding head fungus. She appears to be immune.

"White stalks poking through" the remains of heads are described in those exact words over and over and over. (They never thrust or protrude or grow. They only ever poke.) Scarlett grabs supplies, then worries that other survivors, if they exist, will steal them from her. Why would they steal the supplies she grabbed from random houses and stores when everyone is dead and they can grab their own supplies from houses and stores?

There is a general problem with the author bringing up issues that don't really make sense, or only to unconvincingly dismiss them. Scarlett realizes that pets are locked up in homes and pet stores, and animals are locked up in zoos. She thinks of releasing as many as she can to save their lives, then decides that it's enough of a problem for her dealing with the dogs that are already loose and she doesn't want to be stalked by a jaguar.

Why not release only the harmless animals? This feels like an issue that the author thought of, then didn't want to write about, so he brought it up only to dismiss it. I think if he didn't want to deal with it, then he should have just not mentioned it. Having Scarlett deliberately decide to leave a lot of harmless animals to die does not make her sympathetic, but it's clearly meant to make her seem practical rather than selfish.

It's annoying when an author brings up a potentially interesting plotline only to dismiss it in favor of a boring one. Have Scarlett go to the zoo to release the animals, not just wander around LA alone some more! Have Mrs. Pollifax impersonate a fortuneteller while hiding out at a carnival, not lock herself up alone in a caravan!

The rest of the fungus book proceeds along incredibly predictable paths.

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This book is not good, but it served to entertain me when I could barely pay attention to anything, so it served its purpose.

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Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh

After a war between humans and aliens ends in Earth getting blown up, a rag-tag group of human survivors set up a fascist cult on an asteroid, intent on revenge. Kyr, short for Valkyr, is its perfect child: genetically altered to be be a supreme soldier, and fanatically devoted to the cause. But when she gets the one-two punch of being assigned to forced pregnancy rather than to the military, followed by her brother being sent off on a highly suspicious mission, she starts having second thoughts. S

I strongly suspect that this book was inspired by the "Humans are space orcs" Tumblr post. Humans are bigger, stronger, faster, and tougher than any alien species. They can easily kill aliens in hand-to-hand combat. But aliens have superior technology.

I'd heard this was extremely grim and it has a very long list of trigger warnings (genocide, child abuse, fascism, homophobia, etc) but I idly clicked on the Look Inside and got so hooked that I bought it and read it in a day. It has some grim content and Kyr is terrible at first because she's been brainwashed from birth, but it's a compelling, fast-paced, fun read with a surprising amount of humor. Kyr's character development is very well-done - her morality and perspective changes, but she becomes essentially a better version of the same person. It has some unexpected plot developments that I enjoyed a lot, plus a lot of nifty space opera tropes and gadgets.

I enjoyed this a lot right up until the last few pages, which introduce a plot twist I hated on every possible level.

If you count Silver on the Tree/The Drowned Country as a single work, Tesh is now two for two for writing books where I loved the first part, only to be disappointed by very strange authorial choices later that I not only hated, but which cast an unpleasant retroactive shadow on the earlier parts that I'd initially loved.

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Cat in the Mirror, by Mary Stolz

A children's fantasy timeslip novel about a modern girl in New York and a girl in ancient Egypt, who may somehow be the same girl. This was a re-read of one of my favorite childhood novels. I've re-read it a bunch of times, though not recently, and it holds up.

Erin, living in New York City in 1975, has problems. She's bullied at school, has what are clearly panic attacks though she has no idea what they are, and is forever fighting with her glamorous mother, Belle, who is confused and annoyed by her weird daughter. Erin loves her father, Peter, a businessman fascinated by ancient Egypt, but while he's loving to her when he's there, he's often gone and avoids conflict when he's present. She loves cats, but Belle won't let her have one.

Erin's sources of comfort are the straight-talking housekeeper Flora, and her slowly budding friendship with the new boy at school, Seti, who is Egyptian. (Not, as he keeps having to explain, a descendant of the ancient Egyptians.) There's some excellent low-key comedy when the school bullies decide to make a movie set in ancient Egypt, and Seti quietly places bets with himself over exactly how cliched it will be.

This is all very sharply observed, with lightly sketched but real-feeling characters. Because Erin, her father, and Seti are interested in ancient Egypt and it's being discussed at school, there's a lot of discussion about ancient Egypt and its beliefs. It's interesting in its own right, but also works as characterization because the characters are personally invested in it for various reasons.

The bullies alternately mock Egypt and think it's cool because it's a vehicle for their own status, Belle points out (correctly!) that it had slavery and (arguably) that all they cared about was death, because she dislikes her husband having interests other than her. Peter, who wishes he'd been an Egyptologist instead of a strike-breaking businessman, argues that the slaves were relatively well-treated and that the preparations for death were because they loved life and believed that it continued after death. Seti, who has an analytical frame of mind, notices the contradictory beliefs in both a perpetual afterlife and reincarnation, with people working their way up through animal forms and back to human over a 3000-year timespan.

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The 4-Hour Body: 34 lbs of muscle, 28 days, 4 hours per week

I was sitting on my surfboard 20 feet to side of Neil Strauss, author of The Game.

Enough name-dropping, you say; what about the 34 lbs of muscle?!

How Did I Do It?

First, I followed a simple supplement regimen:

Morning: NO-Xplode, Slo-Niacin

Each Meal: ChromeMate, alpha-lipoic acid

Pre-Workout: BodyQUICK.

1. Five supplements five times daily at different times is not simple.

2. When you find yourself swallowing something called NO-Xplode, you really ought to take stock of your life choices.

Similarly to the 15-minute orgasm, the 4-hour body is wildly misleading but has a surprising quantity of actually reasonable techniques mixed in with the bullshit.

How he ACTUALLY gained 34 lbs of muscle in 28 days with 4 hours of exercise per week (IF he did):
He's a very experienced bodybuilder and kickboxer doing the bulk phase of a bulk/cut cycle. He already spent years building the foundation of muscle and fitness, so to bulk he eats a ton of protein and works out intensely. He's not spending a ton of time on exercise because he's doing full-body exercises with very heavy weights, which is a lot of bang for your buck, but you can't start out that heavy unless you've already worked up to it. The supplements may or may not be doing anything other than making sure he doesn't explode. I seriously doubt the time span though.

Once again, I reluctantly found myself thinking that his bulk out techniques make a lot of sense. It's just that you can't do it in one month unless you've already done it a bunch of times, like he had (and I doubt that even he really did do it in one month). But his advice to eat lots of protein, make sure you're getting enough total calories, and to focus on whole-body lifts, working up to heavy ones, is standard weightlifting advice. I'm currently doing the Casey Johnston "Swolewoman"Lift Off protocol, and she advises those exact principles only without a specific timespan.

Casey Johnston has a post on the 4-Hour Body. She also thought it was 38 lbs of bullshit with a surprising scattering of actually good advice:

Ultimately what encapsulates my experience of this book ten-plus years on, is this ur-example of a basically harmless and maybe even qualitatively good but quantitatively impractical recommendation: Macadamia oil.

Macadamia oil is the new and improved olive oil. Since several high-level bodybuilding coaches introduced me to this new kid on the block, I’ve been hooked.

Has anyone ever heard of Macadamia oil before or since? It sure didn’t take the place of olive oil.


Ferriss has a lot of brief rundowns of specific exercises recommended by star weightlifting coaches, some of which sound bogus or impractical but most of which sound fun and/or worth a try. Unusually for this sort of bro-y book, several of the coaches work with female athletes, so he's using women for some of his good examples. Some of this is "if this 16-year-old girl who weighs 120 lbs can be trained to lift this, so can you," but some of it is just "Here's what this athlete achieved with these techniques" and the athlete is a woman. I sincerely appreciated this.

For the bullshit quotient, meet the "Slow Carb" diet. This is for weight loss, unrelated to his build strength/bulk out advice. It bans white foods and fruit, supplements with lemon juice and garlic, and advises eating the exact same meals every day selected from a limited list of foods, plus unlimited "eat whatever you want" every Saturday. I suspect that it does work for weight loss temporarily, just like basically every diet works for weight loss temporarily. It's dumb but honestly, I've come across much dumber diets. At least he doesn't say cavemen never ate carbs.

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The Babysitter Lives, by Stephen Graham Jones

Charlotte, a high school senior, is the best babysitter around. Absolutely, she can babysit six-year-old twins! They'll have a great time, and after they go to bed, she can study for the SAT. With any luck, her girlfriend Murphy will come over for some forbidden on-the-job visiting.

That's before she encounters the creepy father and his spy camera, a wildly offensive Halloween costume, and the twins' spooky mentions of a "Gray Lady" who shows them "funny places." Not to mention the world's creepiest jack-in-the-box....

This short horror novel is an audio original. I have mixed feelings about that. The audio is excellent, but the story gets pretty complex, particularly when it comes to the rules of the spooky stuff that's happening. Especially toward the end, I kept wanting to flip back and check things, and I couldn't. Hopefully it will eventually come out in print.

A lot of the story successfully captures the feeling of a nightmare: being trapped, being watched, being responsible for helpless living beings in danger, not being able to remember how things happened, a specific type of spoilery body horror, and even having a test you keep not having time to study for. It's very effectively scary, and also very effectively tense.

Charlotte is a very likable, resourceful heroine - Stephen Graham Jones excels at writing teenage girls. I was really rooting for her.

I'm not sure it all quite came together at the end - the final image is excellent, but I'm not sure I totally understand how it ended up there. I would have liked to have flipped back, but...

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