Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 34

#BookADayUK 12: I pretend to have read it

OK, this one’s got me completely stumped.

Today’s #BookADayUK suggestion from Borough Press is one that I don’t have a book for. I mean, a book I pretend to have read—why would you do that? I suppose I can imagine a lot of people pretending to have read, I don’t know, the Bible, perhaps. I would say that I wish I knew more about the Bible, considering how often it’s (mis)used to condemn others, but I don’t pretend to have read more than a scattering of verses. Not being a person of faith, it’s probably something I won’t ever follow through on, but, you know, never say never.

So, yeah, I got nothin’. But! Tomorrow’s prompt, “Makes me laugh,” is going to be a tricky one, because there are so many books that fall into that category. I might do more than one, to make up for the lack of one today. Expect an appearance by at least one of the titles from the Rob Byrnes collection of capers.

#BookADayUK 11: Secondhand bookshop gem, or “Not the aspic!”

Oh, I’ve been meaning to write about this book for a long time now.

Okay, so I didn’t actually get this from a secondhand bookshop, as Borough Press‘s #BookADayUK prompt suggests. However, I did get it secondhand, and boy oh boy, is it a gem.

I picked up Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, Vol. 1 (yes, there are apparently more volumes; is that a threat on their part?) from the breakroom table at my last job. When I began flipping through the pages, my first thought was of BE BOLD WITH BANANAS.

Never be bold with bananas, kids.

The Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, Vol. 1 is not quite as bold or ground-breaking as BE BOLD WITH BANANAS—thank heavens for that—but it covers everything from abalone to bean sprouts, and that’s a lot of room to do a lot of damage.

Take, for example, artichokes. I love a good artichoke, but you have to think, the first person who ever looked at one of those plants and thought, “Hey, I bet this would be DELICIOUS” must have been close to starving, because those things are like the porcupines of the vegetable world.

But they don’t deserve this:

My first thought upon seeing this was “OMG WHAT ARE THOSE GRAINY ROUND THINGS ON THE OUTSIDE?” My second thought was that the little salt cellar is adorable. But it doesn’t make up for the travesty sitting front and center.

Backing up alphabetically to apricots, we can see that even fruit is not safe in this chamber of horrors:

For starters, canned apricots. Secondly WHAT ARE THOSE ARE THOSE HOT DOG BUNS WHAT THE HELL?

Oh, but it gets better… or worse, depending on how you look at it. Take curried apricot pork chops.

Good luck finding the pork chops swimming in that soup of sick. Are they trying to traumatize people here? Did the photographer get sick right before he was supposed to take this shot?

What they do to avocados is just as bad, though:

If they wanted to be accurate, they should have called the avocado lime pie “How to turn your kids off of avocados, and limes, and pies. And living.”

As you can tell, sumptuous photography was an important part of this terrine of terror. Take, for example, this photo of several dishes artfully arrayed:

This shows how important it is to make sure the food matches the room. Well, at least the retro sofa looks appealing.

When we dive into the text, we find horrors to match the photos. From the section on “Favorite Recipes from Our Fifty States” we find this under Maryland:

Yeah, I have no words either. Except the one that jumped out at me: intestines. INTESTINES, people.

You like beignets? Not anymore:

Just, no.

Of course, I have saved the worst for last. I can’t spare you from the attack of the aspic:

You want to cook superbly, Helen? Start by never making an aspic, ever.

No.

No.

No!

Nonononono! (Is that—is that blood?)

As you know, I am working on thinning out my bookshelves lately, but I’m torn with this book. Do I get it out of the house, or do I keep it from falling into other unsuspecting hands? The horror, I tell you. The horror.

“How’s the Lambda retreat fundraising going?” you ask? I’m glad you asked, because armadillo

It’s going pretty well! There’s still a ways to go, but we’ve got until July 25 to raise the rest of it. If you have a second and are able to, click the logo over there on the right or click this link right here and you’ll be taken to the fundraising page.

As I mentioned, everyone who donates (no matter how much or how little—I’m an unemployed recent grad student, so I understand little amounts) gets a story from me. It’s been fun trying to figure out which ones to send to people, but there’s one in particular that I’ve been sending to a few contributors. It’s a work in progress, and I figured I’d post a (very small) excerpt from it, called “Little Bastard”:

The daisies rustled in the flowerbed. Alan leaned forward as the flowers jerked back and forth. At first he thought it might be a squirrel, though squirrels weren’t in the habit of burying things this time of year. There were no stray cats to speak of out in those parts, either. He and Martin lived far west of the city, and their nearest neighbor wasn’t so much a long walk away as a short drive.

He set his cup down on the table and stood, his chair scraping along the paving stones as he pushed it back. The daisies stopped waving and suddenly, leaping almost straight up, was a gray, round thing. At first Alan wasn’t quite sure what it was—a possum, maybe—until it scurried through the flowerbed and trundled across the yard as fast as it could. At a distance with an unimpeded view, he saw the hardshell back of the armadillo before it disappeared into the trees.

“A what?” Martin asked later when he’d woken up. They stood in the kitchen, Alan on his second cup of coffee and Martin filling a water glass at the kitchen sink. Martin’s hair was still a confused mess sticking out in multiple directions.

“An armadillo,” Alan repeated, sipping his coffee. “He dug up a bunch of the daisies before I scared him away.” Scaring the creature away had been more accidental than deliberate, but Alan didn’t see the need to clarify that.

“What’s an armadillo doing in Missouri?” Martin asked.

Alan scowled. “How would I know? All I know is the daisies are completely messed up.”

“I thought they lived in, I don’t know, Texas?” Martin asked. “Oklahoma?”

“I guess we’ve got one around here that likes to travel.”

This is a story that I began in an informal writing group that my friend Sugar and I ran at Green College, and that I finished drafting for Linda Svendsen’s fiction workshop at UBC. In the writing group, it began with all of us going around in a circle and saying a word at random, and our writing prompt was to write anything that included all those words. The word I contributed was “armadillo.” I don’t know why, I think I had Steel Magnolias on the brain. Anyway, things just sort of took off from there. (As it happens, armadillos really are moving into southern Missouri and have been seen even north of the St. Louis area. Drive cafefully!)

If you’d like to read the rest, I hope you’ll consider contributing. Thanks!

#BookADayUK 10: Reminds me of someone I love

(Note: The hashtag has changed, you’ll note. It turns out that Borough Press was using a hashtag that had been created by educator Donalyn Miller to encourage people to read over school breaks and summer vacations. Regardless of what you call it, I’m still talking about a book a day. Now if only I could read that fast….)

A book that reminds me of someone I love? I have to confess, today’s #BookADayUK suggestion from Borough Press had me stumped at first. I tend to think of books as their own sorts of characters or personalities, so a book tends to remind me of itself and nothing else.

That sounds weird, I know. I don’t think I’m phrasing it quite right. But anyway.

So, faced with this quandary, I went to my bookshelves and gave them a stern looking-at. The answer, to my relief but not to my surprise, jumped out at me almost immediately.

I had the good fortune in 2008 to start working for the Missouri Botanical Garden, which is doing major work to catalog and preserve plant biodiversity globally. (It’s also an unbelievably gorgeous place.) Even luckier, my boss, Elizabeth, turned out to be one of the best people I’ve ever had the privilege to work for. We clicked really well and her managerial style meshed with my work style. She knew when to let people do their thing, when to step in, and was a fierce advocate for her team of people. You can’t really ask for better than that. But she’s also an avid reader and so we often got to talking about what was on our to-read stack. In addition, she’s a phenomenal editor and gave me a lot of great feedback from an early read of my first novel.

Fast-forward a couple years, to my 40th birthday, which I’ve mentioned on this #BookADayUK project. We met up with Elizabeth and her husband and our friends Julie and Bill for drinks and a few rounds of pool that evening, and Elizabeth brought me two bags of books: one was a collection of authors from her own shelves that she thought I’d be interested in, and that I could borrow as long as I liked. That’s how I came to read writers like John Banville, Jim Crace, and Orhan Pamuk. In the other bag: even more books, some from the writers who were on my wish list and others that she had a feeling I’d enjoy. Among these was Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America:

From the opening story, “Willing”, about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being, Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. (from Goodreads)

Yet another of many confessions that #BookADayUK has brought up: I haven’t read this yet. But, I’ve moved it to my to-read stack. I loved A Gate at the Stairs, and the stories of Moore’s that I’ve read in magazines have been fantastic. I have no doubt that I’ll love it. Thanks, Elizabeth!

#BookADay, Day 9: Don’t wait for the book?

The book’s always better than the movie. I’m just going to go on record and say that right here. There have been movies I’ve enjoyed almost as much as the book on which they’re based, but never have I seen a movie that was as good as the book, certainly not better.

But… books based on movies or TV shows, as today’s #BookADay suggestion from Borough Press states? I’ll be honest, I haven’t read any in ages. When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Star Trek and Doctor Who novels. The Doctor Who novels were mostly novelizations of stories that had already aired, so I suppose in that case you could say that the show was better than the book. (Some of those books were atrociously written. Some of them were fantastic, though, and went beyond what was shown on the screen and developed back stories for characters and histories for alien civilizations.) The Star Trek books, though, were new stories created for the page, and as you might imagine with a novel series written by a range of authors, quality varied considerably.

But I do remember one that I enjoyed immensely, and that was The Wounded Sky by Diane Duane. I don’t remember a whole lot about the plot, but I do remember that I found it very touching.

An alien scientist invents the Intergalactic Inversion Drive, an engine system that transcends warp drive, and the U.S.S. Enterprise will be the first to test it! The Klingons attempt to thwart the test, but a greater danger looms when strange symptoms surface among the crew, and time becomes meaningless.

Captain Kirk and his friends must repair the fabric of the Universe before time is lost forever. (from Goodreads)

I think the description leaves out a lot of what I found touching about it, but I’m inclined not to go back and revisit it. I worry that it won’t be the same as I remember it….

 

Against Ruth Graham

You know, if Slate’s Ruth Graham had said “I don’t like YA” and left it at that, I would say she’s completely entitled to her opinion and her tastes. We all like different books, different genres, different authors. And that’s great! There’s never been a time when we’ve had so many alternatives at our fingertips. You can read anything from Beowulf to the latest Patterson thriller and even have it at your fingertips in seconds.

But.

She didn’t stop there, as this delightful piece on CNN.com indicates. (Yes, I know I just used the words “delightful” and “CNN.com” in the same sentence. It boggles my mind too.) Nope, if you’re above the age of 18 and you’re reading a YA novel, not only should you not be reading that novel, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Can you just picture the wagging finger?

I’m not going to link to Miss Graham’s article, because I don’t really think Slate needs more traffic and unlike Miss Graham, I know that my readers are intelligent and can use Google and find it on their own if they really want to. Apparently, she thinks that if you’re reading YA you’re doing so at the expense of “serious” literature or books for grown-ups. Apparently, it also never occurred to her that a reader could read both YA and “grown-up” literature (whatever that is) and enjoy and appreciate both.

And even if some adults are reading YA instead of Graham-approved choices, so what?

I could go on and on about how YA novels can present a unique point of view about characters outside of our own narrow set of experiences, how they can tackle themes and situations that are often all too real, and how they can, yes, be entertaining and provide a bit of escapism. I could also point out that I’m not completely unbiased in this since, you know, I write YA.

But I won’t do that, because I have another novel to work on, a story to edit, and so many books to read, one of which happens to be a YA novel.

So! To make this long story short, here’s the best response to someone saying you should be ashamed of reading anything:

As for Miss Graham, she’s still entitled to her opinion! As for the whole pathetic attempt at lit-shaming, well, bless her heart.

#BookADay, Days 7 and 8: ‘Cause they’re kind of the same….

When I used to buy Wonder Woman comic books on the regular, I had this bad habit of missing an issue or two and then, when I’d get to the comics shop, forgetting which issues I’d missed and which ones I still needed to complete my set. Many were the times when I got home and started to file them away only to realize I had multiple copies of the same issue. Same thing happened with Buffy comics as well. This never bothered me too much since it meant that I was only out a couple bucks, and if I’d had the good luck to pick up copies with variant covers, well then, it was like I’d meant to do it.

With books, not so much. So for this weekend’s #BookADay suggestions from Borough Press, #7 and #8 are the same book for me. I forgot I owned it, and because of that, I bought a second copy.

Given that I have two copies, you’d figure that by now I might have actually read The Beloved Son by Jay Quinn, but I have to confess, it’s still sitting on my to-read pile. Nope. For no particular reason, I haven’t gotten around to it. This happens a lot. (See what I mean when I say I have a book-buying addiction? Obviously, it outpaces my book-reading addiction.)

It’s called the “sandwich” generation, grown children who are simultaneously caring for both aging parents and nearly adult children. Karl Preston, at fifty-two, certainly fits this image, as he lives an emotionally comfortable life with his wife and daughter in an affluent North Carolina suburb. But preparing for a weekend visit to his elderly parents’ Florida home, Karl becomes increasingly aware of the pressing concerns of their faltering lives-realizing too it will be the first time in years he has seen his gay brother, Sven. (from Goodreads)

I ordered my first copy when it was a selection of the month from the (now-defunct) InsightOut Books. The second one was bought at Left Bank Books, I think. One of these days I will eventually get around to reading it.

#BookADay, Day 6: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

No, not the clap. Books! A book is the gift that keeps on giving (and doesn’t require antibiotics either).

On my 40th birthday (which was a number of years ago—all these gray hairs? Earned ‘em.), we had a low-key afternoon party at the house and I had just two gift requests: a donation to Stray Rescue or a book. The animal rescue group got a lot of donations, and I got more than a few books. (True confession: I haven’t read all of them yet. Yes, I’m a slow reader and also an [attempted] recovering book buying addict who has picked up many more books in the four years since then.) I even got three copies of the same book.

So, today’s #BookADay prompt, “The one I always give as a gift,” has made me wonder if there’s really any pattern in the books I give people. I don’t think there is. Then I thought, what’s the one book I lend out that I often never get back?

That would be The Great Gatsby. And if I lend something and it doesn’t come back, that’s kind of like a gift, right?

It’s kind of a gift to myself as well, because I love this book.

A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning–” Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. (from the Goodreads summary)

The first time I read this was in the 10th grade, in Mrs. Accardo’s honors English class. I already knew by that point that I wanted to be a writer, but Gatsby pretty much cemented it. I’ve tried to read it every year since then. Whenever someone has said they’ve never read it, I’ve gone and got my copy and given it to them. Then I go out and get another one.

I should probably keep more than one copy on the shelf, shouldn’t I?

#BookADay, Day 5: Not My Book

As most of you probably know by now, I was attending graduate school in Vancouver the past two years. (You also know that it was fantastic, I love Vancouver and it is probably my favorite North American city bar none at this point, and I made a whole lot of wonderful friends most of whom are still in Vancouver and whom I miss terribly.) I’m back in St. Louis now, and one of the things I’ve been doing is getting rid of stuff.

Well, to be precise, I’ve been making piles of things to get rid of. While I may have brought back enough Doctor Who t-shirts to wear a different one every day of the week without repeating (and then some), the closet is full of a lot of clothes that I don’t really wear. There’s also a pile of electronics in the basement that desperately need to be recycled (any suggestions, people of the interverse?), and there are still some old toys from my ill-considered flirtation with Star Trek collectibles.

There are also books. Lots and lots of books.

I don’t have enough room on the shelves for all my books. Now, most people might say, buy another shelf! Sure, just hand the addict that crack pipe, why don’t ya.

Before I left for grad school, I took five boxes of books to my favorite local indie, where they translated into $50 of store credit. (There’s that crack pipe again.) I figure for every new book I bring into the house, two other books must go. That’s why there’s a stack of books in the hall waiting to be turned in.

I don’t feel bad about that, really. Most of them, even if I enjoyed them the first time around, are not titles I imagine I’ll be inclined to read again. And if I am, by some chance, well there’s always the library.

Which brings us to today’s #BookADay category, a book that doesn’t belong to me. Technically, I don’t have it yet either, but I put a hold request on it at my library yesterday. That’s The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I know, I’m probably the last person in the world who hasn’t read it, but I’m really looking forward to it.

In fact, the book won’t even come into the house, in a manner of speaking. I put in a request for the e-book.

Up tomorrow: probably more Fitzgerald!

#BookADay, Day 4: The Least of the Most

I figured it wouldn’t take long for F. Scott Fitzgerald to pop up on this list.

Anyone who knows me knows that the author of The Great Gatsby is my favorite writer bar none. Gatsby was probably the one book that most influenced my desire to become a writer. On top of that, his short stories are phenomenal, as is his essay “The Crack-up” about his alcoholic breakdown.

But #BookADay Day 4 is about the least favorite book by your most favorite author, and for that I had a bit of trouble. Sure, I love some things better than others, but I can find something to admire in everything I’ve read by Fitzgerald.

But there’s one novel that I haven’t read, even though I’ve owned it for decades. And that’s The Beautiful and Damned. So, while you could say it’s my least favorite, it’s only because I’m completely unfamiliar with it.

First published in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned followed Fitzgerald’s impeccable debut, This Side of Paradise, thus securing his place in the tradition of great American novelists. Embellished with the author’s lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather’s fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche and New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition, The Beautiful and the Damned achieved stature as one of Fitzgerald’s most accomplished novels. Its distinction as a classic endures to this day. (from the Goodreads book page)

This means, of course, that it’s getting put on the top of my to-read stack.