A Mystery…

If you don’t get that reference, it’s probably because you don’t own sixteen volumes of Fruits Basket.  Unlike me.  Because I’m lame.  And now, poor.

Miyuke Miyabe, Shadow Family

A middle-aged man and a young woman are murdered in different ways, at different locations, and several days apart, but physical evidence links the two crimes.  Police are stymied about a possible motive, but then they discover that the man had a “shadow family”:  instead of spending time with his real-life wife and daughter, he was emailing and chatting with three people who pretended to be his wife, daughter, and son.

I actually wanted to read another book by this author–All She Was Worth–but booksfree offered this one up first, and beggars cannot be choosers.  It was…underwhelming, to say the least.  I’m still going to read All She Was Worth when it eventually comes up, but I’ve definitely decided against buying it because of Shadow Family.  To begin with, the prose was beyond terrible.  I usually make a point of not picking on word choice or phrasing in foreign-language novels, because I just don’t think it’s fair to judge a writer by her translator.  But this was so bad, y’all.  I don’t know if it was Miyabe’s fault or translator Juliet Winters’, but either way, the prose was actually painful to read.  Ugh.

As for the plot itself–well, let’s just say that it shows its age.  Shadow Family was first published in 2001, back when The Sims was a big deal and ordinary people actually spent time in chat rooms.  So what probably seemed like a new and fresh idea at the time–man forms entire family over the internet!–is now just kind of…eh.  I’m like, “Didn’t I see an episode of Law & Order where something like that happened?  And then an episode of SVU where something similar (but different from the plot on L&O, of course!) happened?  And then an episode of…yeah, you get the point.”  The theme of human beings trying to form essential relationships via the internet is an important one, but I feel like the fear-mongering, “it will only lead to suffering!” interpretation of it is played out.  Not Miyabe’s fault–I doubt it was done to death in 2001–but it doesn’t make for very interesting reading seven years later.

Recommended for:  You know, I’m not going to lie:  this was pretty dreadful, but it kept me reasonably entertained on a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was feeling sluggish.  If you find yourself in similar circumstances, have at it.

Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

Oh, guys.  Oh guys.  This actually made me cry a little, and that’s no mean feat, considering my abnormally dry eyes and my shriveled, withered heart.  The premise itself is heartbreaking:  in the mid-1970s, two sisters, Sunny and Heather Bethany, disappeared from a Baltimore mall.  One was almost twelve, the other was fifteen.  They were never found.  Thirty years later, a woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident; she’s the person who did the hitting and the running, so in an effort to weasel out of being charged, she claims to be the younger of the two Bethany girls.  The thing is, she doesn’t appear to be lying-she knows all sorts of details about the crime itself, and seems very familiar with the events of the Bethanys’ woefully short lives.  And yet she also withholds crucial information (such as the location of her older sister’s body), and just seems…off to the police involved in her case.

The mystery in this one was very well-done; I changed my mind about whether the woman actually was Heather Bethany (the younger victim) about four or five times.  I had no idea who she was, what she was doing, or why she was doing it until the very end–and looking back, I can’t say it’s because I was a sloppy reader.  Lippman’s strength isn’t in immediately presenting you with all the information you need but downplaying the parts that really matter; her strategy is to withhold the tiniest, most important pieces until the very end, and then whallop you over the head with them.  Is that cheating?  Yeah, kind of.  But it totally works.

I will have to spoil you to tell you what I really loved about this book, though.  Join me after the cut if you’re not a big scaredy-pants boo boo head.

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Girlbomb

Janice Erlbaum, Girlbomb

I feel like I’ve headed into an entirely different stage of my life, because a few years ago, I would have said that because I didn’t like this book, it must suck.  But now that I’m a little older, I understand that this book didn’t suck–it just wasn’t my thing.

I know.  Like you care about my growth as a human being.

Anyway–Erlbaum’s mother was a much-married, probably manic-depressive single mom.  Erlbaum basically got thrown over for a stepfather twice:  once when she was around nine, and again when she was fifteen.  The first time, she lived with her biological father for a few months; she eventually returned to her mother because her dad was physically abusive (he choked her at one point.  She was nine).  When she was fifteen, Erlbaum walked out because her mother took back her crazy, sleazy third husband.  Again.  This time, Erlbaum didn’t bother living with her father:  she went straight to a homeless shelter, where she stayed until she was placed in a group home.

There was some interesting stuff in here about our cultural attitude toward sexual violence.  Erlbaum notes that people always seemed somehow…”disappointed” when she told them that her stepfather had not molested in her.  I hate to admit it, but she’s right:  have you ever noticed how breathless true crime shows become when a teenage girl is raped or otherwise sexually assaulted?  I…am not entirely sure what that says about us as a society.  I mean, the grossness and sleaziness is pretty much a given, but there’s another layer to it that I’m having a hard time articulating.  It seems like we’re still holding on to this very old attitude that the absolute worst thing that can happen to a girl is “the loss of her virtue”–and that defending her virtue is her only “legitimate excuse” for protecting herself.  From what Erlbaum described, it wasn’t so much that her life with her mother and last stepfather was violent, it was that there was this constant, neverending threat of violence.  Her parents were always fighting, acting crazy, or yelling at her; at one point, when her parents had broken up (again), her stepdad even snatched her baby brother and tried to run off with him while Erlbaum and her mother gave chase.  Her mother took out multiple restraining orders against this man.  Why should Erlbaum, a young teenager, have been expected to live with that kind of instability and fear?  Why should anyone be?  And yet that’s one of the assumptions underlying the “disappointment” Erlbaum describes; no matter how frightened she was, no matter how bad it was, it was not bad enough.  Until he tried to sexually assault her, it was not bad enough.

I’m not trying to downplay sexual assault; I think it’s right that we as a culture are so horrified by it (although I think it’s gross that we’re simultaneously so titillated by it).  But I do hate this kind of underlying attitude that Erlbaum hints at, this idea that molestation is the one bad thing and that all other bad things should be bearable.  Erlbaum’s situation was horrible, and no child should ever be expected to live like that.  And I think it’s sad that we live in a society where situations like that are still even slightly acceptable.

So if it gave me such food for thought, how come I don’t like this book?  Simple:  that’s just the first half.  In the second half, Erlbaum moved back home, but things were not exactly happy and perfect.  Her mother was on anti-anxiety meds that basically turned her into a zombie, and Erlbaum was expected to act as a second parent for her little brother.  Not surprisingly, a lot of class-cutting and self-medicating ensued–for the rest of the book.  And it’s not like the rest of it isn’t well-written or compelling, but I’m personally not into watching people make an endless series of poor life choices.  Erlbaum lies, steals, and constantly tries to please people who are just never going to be pleased–I don’t look down on her for it or blame her for it, but I find it excruciating to read.  Sorry.  Not my thing. 

Recommended for:  People who can stand to watch a trainwreck.  Scratch that–people who enjoy watching trainwrecks.

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Grotesque

Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

Cut for spoilers for both this book and Out.

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Say Hello to My Little Friend

On days like these, I really miss my cat.

Actually, my parents have four cats, and I miss all of them, all of the time–but days like this particular day particularly make me miss Sophie.  Otherwise known as Sophia Louisa, grumpiest cat on the face of this planet.

Sophie is a bitch.

Today calls for a bitch. 

Because today, I found a mouse in my bathroom.

Now, I know what you other cat-owners are thinking.  You’re thinking, “My cat thinks that mice are just elaborate squeak toys.  Good luck getting her to trap that.”  But you see, Sophie is not like other cats.  Sophie is insane.  And vindictive.  And I know that Sophie is fully capable of killing a mouse, because my father has had to handle the tiny, fuzzy corpses.

Two Thanksgivings ago, my family was celebrating the holiday up near Raleigh instead of in our house near the coast; the reasons for that are many, myriad, and totally confusing, so we won’t delve into them here.  Anyway, my dad and my sister decided to make sure both the outdoor cats were safely indoors before leaving for the city, so they herded Sophie and Sonic inside.  Because Sonic was twelve years old and already incredibly senile, they were mostly focused on persuading her that yes, she actually does know this place and these people–who are nice people.  Look, they have food!  In any case, Dad and Katie weren’t paying any attention to Sophie, because she was in full possession of her faculties.  Her evil, evil faculties.

Now, there are some people who say that an animal can’t be evil; those people have obviously never spent any time with cats-in particular, my cats.  I mean, Sophie once took a giant piss on my purse while I was standing right in front of her.  I was trapped behind some packing boxes and screaming, “Sophie!  SOPHIE!  Not the leather!” but she didn’t care.  She just kept on peeing, staring at me with her malevolent yellow eyes and clearly saying, “That’s the last time you try to keep me from sleeping in your freshly-packed winter clothes, all right?  Have I made myself clear, or am I going to have to work up a number two as well?”

All I’m saying is, that cat is mean.  Also, she still owes me a new purse.

But anyway, my dad was trying to get this senile little black cat indoors without incident, so he didn’t notice until it was too late that Sophie’s mouth looked suspiciously full.  “Soooooooophie,” he finally said when he did see it, “let it out.”  And, ever obedient, she did.

It skittered away too quickly for my dad to catch it, but it was going slow enough that he could tell it was brown and fuzzy and had a long, skinny tail.  Sophie immediately got booted from the house, on the general principle that no one should have to come home to mouse guts smeared all over the place by a spiteful feline.

“But you have four cats,” I’m sure you’re thinking.  “Why wouldn’t one of them eat it?”  Well, gentle reader, Sonic is insane and kinda blind; even seeing the mouse would be a challenge for her.  Casanova (yes, I named a cat Casanova, SHUT UP) didn’t live with my parents yet, and Howard…oh, Howard.  Howard is the cat who, when he finally managed to escape from the house, spent his entire jailbreak sitting underneath a bush and screaming furiously until someone came and got him away from all that disgusting nature.  He is much more likely to run from a mouse than he is to chase it, is all I’m sayin’.

So anyway, we arrived back at the house a day or so later and there were…signs that a mouse had been there.  And continued to be there.  So my father, in his infinite wisdom, sighed and let Sophie back inside.  “I managed to get her to let go of it before she ate its head,” he said glumly.  “Which she was going to do.  Right in front of me.  Because she’s evil.”

Oh, Sophie.  How I miss you!  Especially right now, since this morning when I stumbled into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I saw this gigantic black shape out of the corner of my eye.  I automatically assumed that it was a GIGANTIC cockroach, because I automatically assume that God hates me.  So I screamed.  Loudly.  Like a girl.  And then felt a little foolish when I thought, “Jesus Christ, have they started growing tails now?”

No, no they haven’t.  Thank heavens for small favors…

Where’s my little psycho-kitty when I need her?

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The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight

Cut because I like to kick small puppies and eat tiny kittens, but spoilers make me sad inside.

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WALL*E and Mark Twain

WALL*E

You know the drill:  adorable robots.  Lumbering fat humans (for a really good critique of that part of it, go here).  I don’t really feel like I have anything to add to this discussion beside the totes obvs.  Which is–PIXAR?  Quit trying to make me think that revolting, plague-bearing vermin are adorable.  You tried it with rats in Ratatouille, and now you’re pulling the same thing with cockroaches in WALL*E.  In a word:  ugh!  In two words:  gross!  I could go on, but eventually we’d reach the limits of my vocabulary and I’d be reduced to screaming, “The bug!  The bug!  KILL IT!”

Seriously, guys.  One of those things chased me up the stairs when I was five.  They are one species that I’d happily see extinct–and in fact, between the carcinogenic chemicals I spray around my house and the large, heavy objects I use to crush stray roaches, I am doing my level best to make that dream a reality.  My.  Level.  Best.

So don’t try to make kids think cockroaches cute.  If my theoretical android baby one day asks for a roach farm instead of an ant farm, I will personally hunt down every single person affiliated with this movie and pour said roach farm down their throats.  And then spray them with Raid.  Because I take no prisoners.  And also because Raid is so ineffectual that it almost certainly wouldn’t kill them–so I could only be charged with attempted murder.

Whenever possible, go for the lighter jail sentence.

In conclusion, don’t make me introduce you to my family’s copy of The Collected Works of Mark Twain, y’all.  You see those stains?  Mark has killed cockroaches on like, two separate continents and in two island nations.  In addition to being a literary icon, he is also an international insect assassin.  So if the next PIXAR movie stars a trash can and his loveable pet slime eel, I will be introducing the PIXAR studio heads to Mr. Twain.  HARD.  IN THE FACE.

Recommended for:  Wait for the DVD so that you can fast-forward through the scenes with…the bug.

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I Kissed a Girl

Boy howdy, this has been kind of a sucky week–sucky enough to make me say things like “boy howdy,” even.  I was fifteen minutes late to work on Monday because my bus got stopped on the toll road FOREVER, someone lost their balance on the Metro on the way home that night and clawed me in an attempt to regain their balance, and…well, let’s not finish that thought.  It’s depressing.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple books to write up:  Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Janice Earlbaum’s Girlbomb, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburned Country.  But my brain is a little too fried right now, so instead I’m going to share something beautiful that I found on youtube last night:

Katy Perry, I Kissed a Girl

I refuse to get into the relative merits of this song, WHICH IS AWESOMELY HORRIBLE, BTW.  But please check out the live version, where Katy Perry was wearing a dress so short that for the first twenty seconds or so it’s clear she had no idea how to dance without flashing her vagina.  She finally managed it, but not before she did this weird shuffling that kind of made her look like she was about to wet her (nonexistent) pants.  Also?  At the very beginning of the video, she was trying to do the “Praise Jesus” cool arm wave thing, but it was more ”surreptitiously sniffing her armpit” than “accepting the due worship of her audience.”

BEST.  PERFORMANCE.  EVER.

You can thank me later.  With your TEARS OF LAUGHTER.  Or pain.  You know, whichever.

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Save the Children!

Found a link to this, and thought it was interesting.  For those of you who don’t feel like reading it or who have placed The New Yorker in a timeout until it can learn the difference between satire and racism, the summary is thus:  Anne Carroll Moore was the Children’s Librarian for the New York Public Library at the turn of the last century.  She basically invented the children’s library as we know it today–the little tables, the staff that didn’t kick you out for breathing too loudly–but in her old age, she kind of went mad with power.  MAD WITH POWAH.  She’d spent decades being THE authority on children’s literature, setting the fashion in books, making or breaking sales through her reviews and her purchase orders.  Which is all very great, but she pretty much threw her literary legacy under the bus by trying to get E.B. White’s Stuart Little banned.  Yeah, that’s right:  Stuart Little.  Not like, The Catcher in the Rye or The Story of O or even To Kill a Mockingbird.  Stuart.  Little.

And hilariously enough, Moore seems to have wanted to see the book banned not because it contained such questionable content, but because…she just thought it was bad.  Here’s the pertinent section from the article:

To the Whites she sent a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment, and begging the author to reconsider its publication [. . . .] the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy-”The two worlds were all mixed up”-and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered.

It’s funny to me, because Moore clearly couched it in terms of “saving the children,” but when you break down what she actually wrote, that doesn’t seem to have been it at all.  Basically, Stuart Little was fantasy, and she didn’t like fantasy.  Moreover, she didn’t like a fantasy that was supposedly set in a world very like (or identical) to her own.  She thought it was “confusing,” and she assumed that everyone else would, too.

In all fairness, I have to admit that Ms. Moore probably really did honestly believe that reading Stuart Little would be confusing and unpleasant for small children.  She probably really did believe that stopping publication or banning it would be preferable to hordes of befuddled third graders.  But this is a clear case of the reviewer thinking that her reaction would be everyone’s reaction, and thinking that it was entirely appropriate to use whatever clout she had (and she had plenty) to try to keep this book from being read.  And that’s just…really, deeply wrong.

It’s true that there are plenty of books that are simply not appropriate for children.  Eight-year-olds do not need to read about sex or drug trafficking or the Holocaust; they’re not really ready for any of those things.  But frankly, there’s not much risk that an eight-year-old will read about any of those things.  Because if you hand a child a book on a topic that he or she is really two young for, one of two things is likely to happen:  either the kid will read a few pages, decide the book isn’t at all interesting, and quit, or the kid will read the entire book without really understanding what’s going at all.  On some rare occasions the kid will read something and actually be freaked out by it, but unless the child’s already got a few screws loose, that’ll just keep him or her from going back for more of the same disturbing stuff.  It’s the literary equivalent of sticking your finger in a light-socket:  you’ll sure as hell never do that again.

Of course, banning books is rarely about actually protecting children from material they’re not ready to handle yet.  Most book-banning parents aren’t particularly worried about little Johnny accidentally reading a Stephen King novel and having nightmares about The Shining for the next three weeks:  they’re worried that their kids will read about evolution, or teh gayzor sexing, or a religion that is not their own.  Moreover, they’re worried that their kids will read about those things and go on to hold opinions that are–gasp!–different from their parents’.  Which is a pretty valid fear, honestly.  Speaking as someone who grew up in a pretty conservative, fundamentalist Christian region, I have to admit that I knew plenty of people whose beliefs were based less on faith and more on ignorance.  And beliefs like that usually don’t stand up to scrutiny; in fact, they often wilt in the face of counter-evidence and can only be maintained by strictly adhering to an incredibly skewed view of the world.  Therefore, a certain subset of people believe not out of faith, but out of willful misinformation:  they work very hard at never “doubting”–that is, questioning–anything they were raised to believe.  So if you tell them that they have the right to question, their worlds start to crumble.  After all, if they start to ask things like “If the bible is absolute truth and therefore homosexuality is wrong, then why the hell am I eating pork?” where will it end?  It starts off with seemingly innocent questions, and ends up with a radical rejection of everything they’ve been raised to believe.  Believe me, I seen it.  Because in a really understated way, it happened to me.

Anyway! 

All of this is to say:  I get where Moore was going with this.  She’d been revered and respected for decades, she’d genuinely done great things for lots of kids, but ultimately, she kinda lost her shit there at the end.  I mean, it’s fine to dislike a book, to tell all your friends not to read it, to say that it sucks and it blows and it is just generally no good–but to outright tell someone that they shouldn’t publish it, or to try to get it banned?  Among many other things, that’s a pretty incredible act of hubris right there.  “I don’t like it, I don’t get it, it threatens me, therefore no one should ever read it?”  Really?  Seriously?  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I know that I express a lot of strong opinions on this site, and that I have said, on at least one occasion, that I really wish people who disagreed with me just…wouldn’t.  I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t really feel that way:  on days when people tell me that Danielle Steele is their favorite author, I really do question the existence of a just and loving God.  But, given my druthers, I wouldn’t ban anything.  Even if someone said, “Here, you’re in charge, DO YOUR WORST,” I…wouldn’t.  I mean, it’s not even just a question of screwing other people over and ruining their enjoyment of literature:  it’s a question of screwing yourself over, too.  I cannot count the number of books that I hated on a first reading but later came to love.  I also cannot count the number of books that I loved on a first reading but later came to loathe when I was a little older and a completely different person.  There is no immutable, unchanging criteria for what makes good literature–and there’s not even immutable, unchanging criteria for what makes good literature to you.  So why destroy your own options?  Even leaving aside other people and the fact that you really have to learn to let them think for themselves, why screw yourself out of what might end up later being one of your favorite books?

These are the sorts of questions you ask yourself when you’re a total nerd.

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Stardust

Do not read this review if you care very deeply about being spoiled for Stardust as either a film or a book.  Now, ONWARD!

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Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

So far as I can tell, this is Pratchett’s first novel about the witches-Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, and Magrat Garlick. It was…pretty good. Just as he would later take on The Phantom of the Opera in Maskerade, in Wyrd Sisters Pratchett manages to reverse-engineer something very strongly resembling Macbeth.  The plot is thus:  three witches are meeting a hilltop when a dying coach driver delivers a baby prince to them; they manage to hide the child with some roving players, but the kingdom still suffers under the reign of an evil duke and his even more vile wife. At first, no one’s very bothered by the assassination of the old king, the disappearance of his heir, or even by the fact that the duke has a penchant for setting houses on fire with the tenants still inside.  Eventually, though, even the extremely hardy peasants of Lancre have had enough royal nonsense, and then the duke has the witches to reckon with.

I really have to give Pratchett this much: I thought he’d telegraphed the ultimate plot twist within about fifty pages of the opening line, and he had…but then he yanked it out from under me at the very last second. I had forgotten that even when Pratchett seems to be going for the conventional story, he’ll twist it a little to account for people’s innate earthiness. I’m not always thrilled by the way the he portrays “reality,” because it usually seems to involve more sharp edges and more boogers than are strictly necessary, but I have to admit that it almost always makes the books more interesting.

The only real criticism I have here is that although Pratchett certainly makes fun of the way everyone looks, he reserves a certain extended mockery for teenage girls/younger female protagonists.  And really, that’s just not as funny as he thinks it is. Speaking as someone who actually was a teenage girl not too long ago and still is a relatively young woman: there’s a reason we’re so “silly” and “preoccupied with our looks,” and it has more to do with crushing societal pressure than innate shallowness. So the fact that Pratchett constantly mocks plain girls for trying to gussy themselves up is just…mean, and not in a particularly intelligent way.  The thing that usually makes Pratchett so powerful and so funny is that he sends up all the nasty little flaws that people are often completely unaware they have. But I can assure you that if I have a bodily flaw, I fucking know about it-either because someone else told me about it in an attempt to be “helpful,” or because I stood in front of the mirror after one of those “helpful” hints and tried to find and categorize everything else that was wrong with me.  Plain, ugly, or just indifferent girls almost always know it, because no one has much interest making sure that girls feel confident and comfortable with what they’ve got. I mean, hell, just last week one of my friends got told by total strangers that she needed to shave her legs, and not so long ago, I was walking home and a bunch of teenage boys I’d never seen before called me ugly. So guess what? Cataloging the physical flaws of a young woman–in this case, Magrat–is not “subversive” or “unexpected” or whatever Pratchett wanted it to be.  It’s just a thoroughly typical slap in the face to female readers.

And that slap in the face doesn’t make me dislike his work, but it does make me respect it less.

Recommended for: Anyone with a slightly dirty sense of humor, anyone who can stand to have the author show them every unattractive part of a character, and oh-anyone who likes fantasy.

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