Size Twelve is Definitely Pissing Me Off

Meg Cabot, Big Boned

The most recent book in Cabot’s series starring Heather Wells, an overweight ex-popstar who now works as a dorm manager at an Ivy League New York school.

Cabot has dabbled in a lot of different genres:  she’s done historical and contemporary romance, sci-fi/fantasy, books for adults, teens, and younger readers, and now she’s doing mysteries.  Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same-no matter what genre she’s working in, her heroine is almost always spastic and twitchy.  Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t-Mia Thermpolis of The Princess Diaries is weirdly endearing, but she’s fifteen.  When Cabot writes a character with an almost-identical personality who’s supposed to be close to thirty…uh, no.  That’s what’s happened with Heather Wells:  whenever she agonizes over whether Cooper (her love interest) likes her, the same sort of whingeing could have been ripped from the pages of Mia’s diary.  I tolerate it from Mia because teenagers genuinely think like that, but a woman who’s pushing thirty and who’s still all but practicing how to write her “married name” in a class notebook?  I’mma kill that bitch.

Also, I really don’t know what Cabot is going for here with Heather’s weight.  She packs it on steadily throughout the series:  in what seems to be about a calendar year or two (I don’t have the first book, unfortunately, so I can’t be sure), she goes from a 12 to a 16.  That’s a significant weight gain in a relatively short period of time, and it ain’t cause Heather’s just naturally a big girl:  she is always eating something containing cream cheese or bacon, or both.  I’m not mentioning this because I’m scandalized (how dare she!), but because Cabot depicts her as being kind of moron about the whole weight gain thing-Heather hates to exercise, she’s always (seemingly unironically) trying to make completely awful for you things seem like they have some kind of nutritional value…in short, she’s the fat person who’s fat ‘cause she’s dumb.  Dude, I have been overweight almost my entire life, but I was never under any illusions that my constant diet of French fries had nothing to do with it.  When I went for that second slice of cake every night, I knew that it had something to do with how big my butt was.  Don’t be condescending, Meg.  I know you were shooting for denial, but it just came off as dumbfuckery.  Please correct that in the next book.  I appreciate the fact that the people around Heather don’t think less of her because she’s overweight, and I really, really love the fact that she doesn’t have to lose weight to suddenly become happy and fulfilled.  I’ll even admit that whole inversion of the “fat person loses weight, becomes huge popstar and finds happiness!” cliché is pretty well-done and clever.  But don’t make the fattie a dummy, is all I’m sayin’.

As for the actual book:  bleh.  There are some genuinely hilarious moments in Big Boned–Heather and Cooper’s passive-aggressive fight over homemade ice cream sandwiches is to die for, and Heather’s interactions with her former boss are a scream.  And Gavin, the college student who won’t stop mooning over Heather, steals every scene he’s in.  But as for the mystery itself?  Feh.  Cabot’s major strengths are her humor and her excellent eye for relationships–her plots have always been rather beside the point.  That…doesn’t so much work in the mystery genre.  I’m not saying that Big Boned is a bad book:  it’s not.  But if this were my first exposure to Cabot’s work, I wouldn’t exactly be frothing at the mouth to get my hands on another one of her novels. 

Recommended for:  Die-hard mystery fans, die-hard Cabot fans, die-hard chick-lit fans–basically, for fanatics of all kinds.

 

Read Full Post »

Paying a tithe to hell

Okay, this isn’t about a book, or a movie, or anything that has to do with entertainment.  This is about…public transportation.

 Oh, yeeeeeah…

I don’t take the Metro very often, for the simple reason that I live in a mass transit dead zone and the closest station is twenty minutes away.  By car.  So, approximately four thousand minutes away by foot.  This morning, though, my carpool was pooling elsewhere (bitches had a doctor’s appointment), so one of my roommates very graciously offered to drop me off at the Metro so that I could drag ass into work more or less on time (I was *only* twenty minutes late).  The morning started off most auspiciously, with me managing to pour water all over my lap so it looked like I peed myself–also, I bumped my head on the top of the car on the way out the door.  Graceful!  The Metro itself was…well, it was about what you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong:  people who bitch about the DC Metro need to get over themselves, because although it’s crowded and busted and the Metro “authorities” are usually goblins, it could be worse.  The Paris Metro, for example, always smells very strongly of urine.  Goblins…or urine.  Goblins…or urine.  Personally, I’ll take the goblins any day.  Also, the DC Metro averages less than one complete nutjob per day trip (night is an entirely different playing field, obviously), and those odds are comparable to what you’ll find on the Asheville city bus system.  And Asheville is like, a sleepy little town full of accordian-playing hippies–not exactly a hotbed of psychosis. 

Truly, the DC Metro is a really decent system–except for the goblins.  They are, really, the worst part about dealing with the whole thing.  This morning, for example, I was using an old fare card to get through the turnstiles (“If it still has over three bucks on it, why buy another?” I foolishly reasoned), and I got rejected on the way out of Foggy Bottom.  Re-jected.  Re.  Jected.  I am not the kind of girl who typically gets chided for insufficient funds, so I was a little discombobulated by the whole thing.  By which I mean, I totally had no fucking clue what was going on.  “Ma’am,” the station manager finally had to say, “You need to go put more money on that fare card.”

“Oh, but I have this other one,” I said, all innocence.  “Can’t I just use that?”

“No.  Put more money on the card.”

Well, all right then.  Since the guy had actually spoken to me in complete sentences without sighing or rolling his eyes once (a miracle!), I took it in stride and moseyed over to the machine.  I stuck in my farecard.  I inserted a dollar bill.  And…the machine spat out four quarters and threw up my card.  “Okay, fine,” I shrugged, putting in another one of my fare cards and shoveling quarters into the machine.  Same deal.  “Ask station manager for assistance,” it blinked at me.  I began to be seriously annoyed; I may have even stomped my foot like a three-year-old.  Okay, I totally stomped my foot like a three-year-old.  And cursed the fact that’d I’d worn flats instead of my big, more satisfyingly stompy combat boots.  I never claimed to have good anger management skills, okay?  Anyway, I took my fare cards and my four quarters and tried to go through the damn turnstiles again.  Nothing.  I sighed, and manned up to the fact that I would just have to–shudder–speak to some of the Metro workers lounging around the exit.  Since that one guy who was vaguely polite to me earlier was among the crowd, I zeroed in on him.  “Excuse me, sir,” I said timidly, “But the machine rejected my money and the turnstile won’t let me through.”  He grunted, took my card, then handed it back to me and told me to go through.  Aaaaand…the turnstile promptly told me to go see the station manager again.  I sighed, but the station workers just shook their heads impatiently at me.

“Go through, ma’am,” they said, clearly trying to restrain themselves from beating my stupid head in.

Wonder of wonders, I…actually made it through.  Without actually adding any money to my fare card.  Like, for serious.  After all that, I paid…exactly what was on my card to begin with.  Yeah.  So, as far as I can tell, subway systems run mostly off the irritation of their customers–which makes sense, considering what shitholes most of them are.  But, since the DC Metro isn’t really all that innately irritating, it really has to WORK to piss you off.  Which is why there was that to-do with my fare card.  The powers that be were all, “Oh, yeah, she looks like she peed herself, and that’s annoying–but that’s her own clumsy fault, not ours.  Also, it happened in a car, so no dice.  Plus, a train was literally sitting right there when she got down into the station this morning, so she didn’t have to wait at all, and she got on at the first fucking stop, so she got to sit the whole way.  Clearly, this trip was way too easy.  If she doesn’t grind her teeth with exhausted rage at least once,  how will we generate the electricity necessary to power this contraption through the gates of hell to the Smithsonian?  Quickly!  Let us fuck with her exit fare!”

As I raced up the escalator and into the frigid cold (so pleasant when your butt’s still wet, by the way), I felt as if I’d paid my tithe to hell. 

 Can we work on this whole teleportation technology?  Like, really?

Read Full Post »

Life is not a narrative; also, publishers lie like dogs

Annie Choi, Happy Birthday or Whatever:  Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters

I read this book because Meg Cabot told me to.  Don’t think I’m weak-willed:  I’ve never done anything else simply because Meg Cabot told me to do it.  I mean, I love Meg Cabot, but I think she would be the first person to admit that if you’re looking for a life coach, she’s probably not it–after all, following the Cabot Way would involve drinking a lot more Tab than is really practical, and watching a lot more awesomely bad TV than is strictly healthy.  Still, you could do worse.  And although I don’t think our tastes usually quite line up, with Happy Birthday or Whatever, we’ve finally come to a happy medium.  I like Annie Choi.  I like her family.  I like her book.

I don’t know if I do anything more than like it, though…

Happy Birthday or Whatever is a collection of essays about Choi and her Korean-American family, and (to quote her website) “how I want to mace the crap out of my family but also give them a hug.”  Choi is an affable storyteller, and she’s got plenty of material to work with.  Every single essay in Happy Birthday is funny and reasonably heartfelt, but…this book is remarkably diffuse.  Even though Choi obviously has a lot of issues with her parents, the way in which she’s structured the book kind of kneecaps any efforts at showing some sort of centralized conflict.  She jumps backwards, forwards, and sideways in time; one essay ends with her at seventeen, and the next one picks up when she’s fifteen.  Resolution is reached, then erased; personally, I prefer a tighter, less meandering storyline than that.  Well, frankly I prefer an actual storyline, and not just “This is my life.  Whee!”  I know that life is not a narrative, but LET’S PRETEND LIKE IT IS, OKAY? 

That’s my major issue with the book–and it’s not a terribly uncommon one to have with a first work.  Hopefully, Choi will improve her pacing next time around.  But I had another problem while I was reading Happy Birthday, one that has absolutely nothing to do with Choi.  Basically, I have very rarely seen a jacket summary so willfully misrepresent someone’s writing.  It’s like the people who write that shit read her book and went, “Crap!  There’s no central conflict.  We have to make one up!”  If you read the back cover (and my suggestion is that you DON’T DO THAT), it makes it sound as if Annie had this terribly, terribly tense relationship with her family until her mother got cancer, at which point her life turned into a Hallmark movie and they used the opportunity to Grow As People.

Yeah.  Sure.  Whatever.  Not supported by anything in the book, really, but okay!

Ultimately, I would recommend this is you’re a complete memoir whore like me, or if you’ve been to Choi’s blog and really like her writing.  The book might also interest you if you’re fascinated by the tensions between first and second generation Americans.  Personally, though, I’m holding out for Choi’s next book–this is a good first effort, but I want to see if Choi’s pacing will improve.

Read Full Post »

Kung Fu Hustle

My review of this movie consists of:  “Omigod, that’s RIDICULOUS!  Also, I think I just wet my pants!”

 There is no substance to this movie, and very little style.  However, it is unspeakably, unbelievably funny.  Also, unlike many genre spoofs, this one is actually still completely hilarious even if you’ve never seen a single kung fu movie.  That was not the case with, say, Shaun of the Dead, which is only funny if you’ve seen about 8 million zombie flicks.  Otherwise, you mostly just sit there and flinch every time someone loses a body part.

I could tell what the jokes were, children; I just had no idea why I was supposed to find them so gut-bustingly hilarious.  Anyway.

Kung Fu Hustle is well worth the price of admission.  Or rather, it’s well worth the price of borrowing it from someone who bought it when it first came out exactly eight million years ago.  Okay, fine–it’s also well worth the price of buying the damn DVD.  But not the special edition one, because really.  Why?

Recommended for:  People with functioning senses of humor.

Read Full Post »

Yes, I AM judging you

I should probably preface this by reminding you that not only am I on the rag, I am wickedly, horribly, TERRIFYINGLY AND PAINFULLY on the rag.  I am so on the rag that this morning, when the sweet old lady I work with innocently asked me how I’m feeling (I had to take the day before yesterday off work because I am THAT on the rag), I actually seriously contemplated punching her in the face.  A little old lady!

I am about one menstrual cycle away from eating an infant.  And I’ m not even kidding about that.

 So, having duly informed you of my precarious mental state…I recently ran across this, and while intellectually I agree with the author, I also have to be honest:  I TOTALLY think that the books I hate shouldn’t be published.  I also think that people who like them should be stoned in the street, and that anyone who sympathizes with their plight should be arrested as a collaborator and flogged.  Oh, and while we’re being honest?  I really DO wish everyone thought the way that I think.  And no, I’m not going to feed you that line about how it would be boring, because we are all unique and beautiful snowflakes and barf, who believes that shit?  While I often enjoy the exchange of ideas and its accompanying expansion of my mind, sometimes people think things that are completely appalling and I really wish they’d die. 

Or at the very least pretend to agree with everything I say. 

Because, you see, there are all sorts of people in this world–and some people can argue without becoming emotionally involved.  We call these people “politicians.”  Other people cannot divorce their feelings from their arguments.  We call these people “mental patients.”  I’m the latter, not the former, so when I say something controversial?  I will not welcome your counterpoints, I do not invite you to disagree, and I expect nothing less than your complete capitulation to my way of thinking.  This is because I am unreasonable and crazy.  Get over it.

PS:  This post is a joke.  MOSTLY.

Read Full Post »

Maus in the haus

That is the lamest fucking title ever; sorry about that.

I can’t review this one without “spoiling” it a little, but let’s be honest:  this is a memoir about the Holocaust, and the author is pretty upfront from the very beginning about who dies and when.  I’m not going to tell you anything that you can’t figure out within the first twenty pages or so, but if that bothers you, then quit reading now.

Art Spiegelman, Maus:  A Survivor’s Tale:  My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began

Maus is Speigelman’s account of his mother and father’s experiences during WWII:  they were Polish Jews who managed to avoid Auschwitz for most of the war, only to be captured and sent there after a failed attempt to flee to Hungary.  Over the course of the war, they lost their fortune, almost their entire extended family, and their young son, the older brother Art never met.  Speigelman writes in an unsentimental, unembroidered sort of way, which is good–because if he had played up the pathos of any of this, I really think I would have shot myself afterwards.

Maus won the Pulitzer prize, and it’s easy to see why:  it’s an incredibly powerful story, well-told.  Speigelman did his best to capture his parents as people; his mother, who committed suicide about a decade before he began interviewing his father about the Holocaust, is unfortunately only there in a second-hand fashion, but his father is amazingly present.  Speigelman captures the old man’s way of speaking and shows his personality, warts and all:  his unspeakable cheapness (this is a man who returns used food to the supermarket), his unreasonable demands on his second wife and his surviving son, and his passionate devotion to Anja, his first wife, even in death.  Speigelman also makes it clear that as suffocating as his old man can be, the flipside of that neediness and dependency really was love. 

You can’t blame Art for wanting to get the fuck away from him, but you can’t help but feel sorry for the old man, either.

And the ending.  Oh, god…the ending!  The very last page shows Art tucking his dad in after the old man’s been in the hospital for another heart-related problem; Art’s getting the last little bit of his story out of him.  Speigelman the elder’s mind is starting to wander, and he calls Art by his dead brother’s name and ends his story by saying that he and his wife lived “Happy ever after.”  This is heartrending because it reminds you of how much this poor old bastard has lost throughout his life, and because you know that he didn’t live happily ever after, even though he survived the Nazis.  But it’s also a perfect illustration of the central tension in Maus:  what did the Halocaust do to people, and what was always within them? 

Speigelman first tackles this question through the issue of his father’s cheapness:  at one point, he and his stepmother are talking about his father’s tightfistedness, and Art mentions that he always figured that it had something to do with his father’s time in the camps.  But as he and Mala, the stepmother, talk, they both come to the conclusion that this is not a particular trait that all–or even most–Holocaust survivors display.  The question goes deeper than just a certain pinching of pennies, however.  Anja Speigelman killed herself in 1968, over twenty years after WWII; what she endured during the Holocaust undoubtedly had something to do with her death, but as Art’s father’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that Anja had a long history of psychological problems even before the war.  She was on what sounded like some sort of anti-anxiety medication before her marriage, and she had what we would now call post-partum depression after the birth of her first son (she and her husband checked into a sanitarium together, although he claimed that he only went to keep her company).  Would she have killed herself even in a world without Hitler?  Obviously it’s impossible to say, and on one level it’s really insulting:  the woman went through Auschwitz, and I’m trying to imagine a world in which she didn’t?  But on another level, it’s the least insulting thing in the world–because ultimately, Maus is about both a huge historical event and about Speigelman’s parents as individual people.  The people they were before the Holocaust, the people they became after it, and the people they might have been if it had never happened.

Maus is a wonderful book, but it does have some annoying structural flaws.  Graphic novels are only now getting the respect and attention they deserve from critics, and when Speigelman was writing in the ’80s and ’90s, the idea of writing about a subject as intense and important as the Holocaust in “comic” form was a little…well, let’s just say that Speigelman spends a lot of time within Maus grappling with whether his medium can handle his subject matter or not.  And frankly?  That’s irritating.  I am not a big fan of breaking the fourth wall:  I’ve seen it work, but in Maus it comes off as a little too self-conscious and affected.  Maus falters in places where Speigelman gets too into the mechanics of what he’s doing–either in whether or not the medium can handle what he’s trying to make it do, or in whether he’s being “fair” or “objective” about the people he’s writing about.  For instance, when he talks to Mala about a comic he wrote about his mother’s death, she actually calls it “objective.”  That may well have actually happened, but we don’t need to hear it.  As readers, we either trust that Speigelman is doing his best to present things in a “fair” manner, or we don’t.  Being “subtly” told to trust his word is just obnoxious and unecessary.

 All in all, though, Maus is amazing.  It’s a must-read for graphic novel fans, for people interested in WWII and the Holocaust, and for anyone interested in human nature (which should include just about everyone, I hope).

Read Full Post »

Why Atonement is kicking my ass

I have never gotten past the first chapter of Atonement, for the simple reason that the epigraph McEwan placed at the beginning of the book fills me with a rage I cannot quite articulate.

McEwan pulls from Jane Austen, who is almost always an excellently wry, witty choice–except when you’re writing a deep, meaningful literary novel and you’re quoting…Northanger Abbey.

Now, if you haven’t read Northanger Abbey–and chances are that you probably haven’t, because it’s a pretty minor Austen–here’s what you need to know:  it’s a parody.  It’s a well-written, clever little book, but–it’s a just a parody.  My sister read it without knowing that, and hated it.  “The heroine is unbelievably stupid!” she moaned, “And she HAD MY NAME, which made it even WORSE.”

“Whatever,” I sniffed.  “My pop-culture antecedents consist of ‘Everybody run, the Homecoming queen’s got a gun,’ the villain in a Charlaine Harris series, and–get this–a series of really awful pornos.  Excuse me, but why are YOU whining again?”

But I digress.  Anyway, yes:  Northanger Abbey is a really mediocre book if you don’t know that it’s simply meant as a crack on other books–that is, gothic novels.  You know how in Regency Romances, the ladies are always reading novels by Mrs. Radcliffe and they’re completely obsessed with ghosts and Lord Byron?  Yeah, that’s pretty much what Austen was making fun of.  Which is why the heroine is always running around, screaming and overreacting and just generally making an ass of herself.  Good times!  It’s pretty awesome, and it seriously enlivened the semester I spent on the complete works of Jane Austen as an undergrad.

But if you are trying to write a Deep Important Meaningful Work, it’s maybe not the best idea to choose a quote from Northanger Abbey to set the tone.  I mean, it would be a lot like if I chose to begin my (as-yet-unwritten) Great Work with a quote from Hot Shots.  If I took something completely out of context, I’m sure that I could find a series of lines that were perfect–but if someone ever decided to hunt down the source, they’d discover that I was quoting a movie that contains a sex scene where the hero fries strips of bacon on his love-interest’s stomach.

This is why I just can’t finish Atonement:  I know it’s supposed to be this great, sweeping story, but…well, Jane Austen was too tasteful to fry bacon on an exposed body part, but she comes pretty damn close.  Which makes me think that either McEwan just plain didn’t think I’d be shallow enough to care (which, ha!), or–more cynically–that he thought I’d take one look at “Jane Austen” and be so dazzled by his literary know-how that I wouldn’t give it another thought.  Which…leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  And my brain.  I’m not into authors who name-drop only to impress me, okay?  I’m a snobby little shit, too, as demonstrated by the fact that I spent about three quarters of this entry showing off how much I know about Jane Austen, but even I have limits.  If something works only if you completely remove it from its original context and cross your fingers, hoping that no one will notice?  Yeah, that’s not incredibly clever, or terribly apt.  Try again.

I’m sure Atonement is a great book.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t be reading it anytime soon.

Read Full Post »

For the record…

Now that it is that blessed time of the month when I pop Midol like other people pop M&Ms and moan and clutch my heating pad to my stomach and just generally behave like a walking advertisment for why The Red Tent needs to make a comeback, I wonder:  what did Diablo Cody do when she was on her period?  She mentions another menstruating stripper in Candy Girl, but she never discusses what she herself did when Aunt Flo was visiting.  I mean, tampons are awesome and all, but I imagine that the string would be rather obvious whenever you flashed your crotch at the crowd.  And maybe she could have avoided doing that with conventional stripping, but what about when she was working in the sex show?  Did she just take off work when it was that time of the month, or did she wear a big scarlet “P” around her neck to signal the fetishists in the crowd?

 Why, yes, internet–this is the sort of thing I think about in my spare time. 

Read Full Post »

A Heartwarming Holiday

Well, this is cheating because A.) when I wrote this, Transformers had just come out; and B.) Transformers is a movie, not a book.  But whatever.  That shit’s old now, and that’s all that counts!

I think I can safely say that my family sucks at holidays. It’s not that we have big fights or quietly hate each other or anything like that—it’s just that we are. So. Lazy that we barely celebrate them at all. We manage to go through the motions on Christmas, and Thanksgiving has been okay ever since we figured out that we could A.) just eat Tofurkey if we were so inclined and B.) skip the fucking football game and watch Venture Brothers instead. Fourth of July continues to be a struggle, however, because while it has those joyous pyromaniac tendencies that we (meaning my brother) love, it also requires us to stand outside on a muggy July night in Eastern North Carolina, which is about as much fun as being wrapped in a super-heated wet wool blanket and then being thrown into a cloud of stinging insects.

Actually, that’s exactly what being outside in July in my part of the state is like. So I think I speak for everyone in my family when I say “Fuck that!” Let’s go to the goddamn movies already!” But of course you can’t go to just any old movie on the Fourth of July—it’s got to be an innately American movie. Which means that shit has to blow up. And, this Fourth of July, that meant we had to go see Transformers.

Now, I know that Transformers has gotten some terrible reviews, but…well, let’s just let my mom tackle this one. Mom?

Mom: What’s the point of even giving Transformers a bad review? They’re acting like it was supposed to be a real movie. (Shaking head). Every guy in that theater reverted to the age he was when he used to watch the cartoon. The biggest laugh was when the robot pissed on a guy! And if reviewers can’t understand the innate hilariousness of a bunch of robots tiptoeing around a suburban yard and crushing flowers…

Then I don’t know what’s wrong with this world/what’s happening to our moral values/insert your own mom-ism right here.

Anyway, no, it’s not a good movie, if judged by thing like “character development” and “plot” and “believable dialogue” and even “really fucking obvious and stupid sexism, omigod already.” But if judged by things like “shit blow up good” and “shit blow up better” and “ha ha, little robot pull off boy’s pants!” then…then it just might be the best goddamn movie of the twenty-first century.

And it makes me so, so proud to be an American. I just might tear up…

Anyway, yeah. Shakespeare this ain’t, people—it’s not even Shakespeare in Love, by which I mean it’s not “mediocre at best, but contains enough British accents and references to Romeo and Juliet to confuse the critics into believing it’s a good movie. Silly critics! Now go back to your cages, vermin!” It is just a movie about a boy, his car that kills other cars, and his not-girlfriend who has really nice boobies and a totally extraneous plotline. It’s simple—it’s almost wholesome. It doesn’t need things like “depth” or “meaningfulness.”

For the love of shit, people, it barely needs words. I tell you, that theater was packed, jam-packed, full of Marines having what may only be described as a theater-wide Marine-gasm (for the record, you can always tell a Marine-gasm by the characteristic release of Axe body-spray odor into the air). I mean, it had everything a man in that age-group might want: a female lead in her mid-twenties playing a girl in her mid-teens (and showing way, way too much cleavage in the process), a nerdy guy who wants a hot girl to look past her “shallowness” to date him (but he can’t look past his shallowness to date an Uggo, you notice), lots and lots and lots of explosions, and—perhaps most importantly—a whiny Linkin Park theme song. This, my friends, is marketing at its finest. That shit was focus-grouped and test-audienced until it could do no wrong in the eyes of men ages 18 to 34, and that is what makes this country so great.

Marketing. Soulless, soulless marketing.

Anyway, we left that theater, my family and I, happy, calm, and full of goodwill towards our fellow men—as long as they’re not evil fucking robots. And as my mom drove us home, she said thoughtfully (and a bit wistfully), “So now that Magnavox has been defeated, I guess that means no sequel, huh?”

And after a beat, my father said (lovingly), “Honey, his name was Megatron. Magnavox is our TV.”

And my mom said, “I knew that. I was just making a joke.”

Sure you were mom. Sure you were.

Read Full Post »

How I Spent My Summer–I Mean Winter–Vacation

This Christmas, I did what all good Christians do:  I read.  A lot.   And so, a rapid-fire review of everything I plowed through during that week. 

Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death; Strong Poison

These are both strong, witty, workmanlike mysteries (although, as a Brit, it probably would have killed Sayers to be described as “workmanlike”).  The main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, is highly likeable in that “crazy aristocrat” sort of way, and the side characters-from stern police officer Parker to odd-but-efficient spinster Miss Climpson-serve as an excellent accompaniment to his eccentricity.  The mysteries themselves aren’t that astounding:  Unnatural Death is over eighty years old by this point, so it’s a little unfair to expect shocking twists and turns.  Reading these, I couldn’t help but think about how circumstantial cases had to be in the days before DNA testing, how based on supposition and-frankly-snap judgments made about someone else’s character.  Which leads me to the major gripe I had with both of these:  they are very, very much products of their time, in that Lord Peter makes no bones about judging people based on their gender, their race, their social class, and their jobs.  Oh, and the assumptions he makes based upon these factors?  As fun as it would be to see him lose a case because he couldn’t see past his own prejudices, the truth is that in Sayer’s work, bias always works to the hero’s advantage.  The snap judgments he makes always turn out to be correct. 

Racist, sexist, classist-the “-isms” are out in full force in these.  Still, it’s fun to bask in the old-timey Britishness. 

Recommended for:  obsessive readers of mysteries, people who are reading up on the ‘20s and ‘30s, and/or people who find excessive Britishness soothing. 

Bill Willingham, et al., Fables Vol. 1-9

A series of graphic novels based upon the premise that fairy tale characters are real and are living among us, having been forced to flee from their home worlds by an evil being known as the Adversary.  To give you an idea of how awesome these things are, consider this fact:  Prince Charming has apparently been married to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella (although not all at the same time). I always suspected it! Anyway, pros:  a strong central storyline that unfolds slowly, steadily, and satisfyingly; characters that you can love, love to hate, and actually imagine knowing; often lovely art.  Cons:  from what I understand, these are serialized as comics, and so they have some of the classic comic problems-the most egregious example are the side plots that don’t really matter (“Oh, shit!  I forgot I had to write something this month”).  Also, it has a rotating cast of illustrators, so the style isn’t as consistent as it might be and there’s occasionally a chapter that’s outright fugly.  These are minor quibbles, though, and relatively easy to get past.   This series does have a strong Western slant, which the author acknowledges and which has been worked into the plot with some grace and sense.  I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the treatment of non-Western fairy tales within the novels:  it makes me a little uneasy in a way I can’t quite articulate.  I’d love to hear reactions from anyone else who’s read it.

Recommended for:  People who like comics, people who like fairy tales, people who like watching their childhoods perverted and destroyed. 

Tracy Grant, Secrets of a Lady

Originally published as Daughter of the Game (which was a much more accurate title, not to mention less of a lameass one), this book is about Charles and Melanie Fraser, an aristocratic couple in Regency England whose son is kidnapped.  They must use their skills as former spies(!!1!) to get him back.   I read this and enjoyed the shit out of it; my sister read it as Daughter of the Game and still curls her lip whenever it’s mentioned.  I can see why:  I enjoyed this book immensely because it’s fast-paced, the heroine is way more badass than the hero (who is no slouch himself), and because the poor kidnapped kid is written pretty well.  Also, I have a weakness for A.) Regency romances and B.) Suspense.  Plus it was the first night I went without Ambien, and I really appreciated the fact that it kept me entertained enough so that I could mostly ignore my HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE AWAKENESS.  But there are serious problems with this book.  The biggest one is simply that Charles Fraser accepts things that a man of that day and age almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to.  I mean, there have always been exceptional people who have been exceptionally open-minded (George Eliot’s “husband” was himself a bastard, and we’re reasonably sure that he never knew it because his mother’s husband just quietly accepted him).  But it’s one thing to write a character who is exceptional but still a product of his time-he accepts that his wife had premarital sex, for example, but still believes that non-whites are inferior-and another thing to write a nineteenth century character whose ideas are all straight out of the modern day.  I can’t get too into specifics without giving away the plot, but Charles is very sanguine about certain aspects of his wife’s past that would have given a man of his day and age absolute fits, and he accepts the fact that his mother was mentally ill and couldn’t be held responsible for her actions.  I mean, honestly, he’d be a saint in our time, but back in the days when they routinely transported people for stealing, he’d have been looked upon as the Second Coming. 

My other big gripe with this book has less to do with it by itself and more to do with it as part of the historical fiction genre.  Charles’ mother is pretty clearly meant to be suffering from bipolar disorder:  for the record?  I am tired of BPD.  That is, I am really, seriously fucking sick of historical fiction authors always making one of their characters bipolar–it’s gotten to the point that if someone acts a wee bit “off,” I know I can expect a manic period any page now.  Stop.  It.  There are other mental illnesses out there–have you ever heard of Borderline personality disorder?  Or schizophrenia?  It’s an oldie, but a goodie.  I love manic depression as much as the next reader, but this is getting really old, guys.  It was kind of cool when Judith Merkle Riley did it in The Water Devil, but that was well over a decade ago now.  It’s time to move on.  Bust out your copy of the DSM-IV and start reading up, okay?

Recommended for:  Regency fans who don’t mind a complete absence of sex scenes. 

Meg Cabot, Every Boy’s Got One

Okay, I’ll fess up:  I have a terribly conflicted relationship with Meg Cabot.  When she’s on, she is on, but when she’s off, she gets on my last fucking nerve.  After due consideration, though, I have to admit that while this book made me throw up in my mouth a little, that is almost certainly not Cabot’s fault this time around.  I just have an irrational hatred for the premise-that the heroine believes in love and marriage and the hero doesn’t.  My fucking sweet Lord in heaven, I hate that plot with every fiber of my being.  It always starts off with two cardboard cutout characters (because they are not actual people, they are merely vehicles for ideas) woodenly stating their respective positions.  And it always ends with the hero spewing sap everywhere.  WE HATES IT SO MUCH.

Recommended for:  People who like that shit.  And don’t tell me who you are, because I’ll fucking punch you. 

Oh, and one book I purposely didn’t finish-

Dashiell Hammet, The Thin Man

I got sixty pages into this shit-which was blurbed as being “deeply romantic”-and had to stop because it was just…wow.  The bitter, alcoholic cynicism was more than I could stand.  I have never encountered a main character with a bigger, more completely unacknowledged drinking problem; and until now, I had never read a book with a lead couple I’d more gladly spit on in the street.  I felt my heart shriveling and my liver pickling as I read this.  Golden age of mystery my ass.

Recommended for:  Noir fans.  If you like bitter alcoholic heroes and heroines who cheerfully take all the shit they get handed because they’re just that “cool and collected,” then this is the book for you.  You sick, sick fuck.

Read Full Post »