Love: Audio Book Style*

I'm not a fan of listening to the radio in the car, so I always try to keep an audio book handy.  And, since the majority of my driving is in fifteen-minute stints, I usually select light books for less strain on my limited memory.  But perhaps it's time to change my ways.  The last two selections have been disappointing.  While I may not be the most assertive person and occasionally allow myself to get walked on, it annoys me when my heroine does it.


Crazy for You by Jennifer Crusie: Quinn McKenzie is dating the world’s nicest guy, she has a good job as a high school art teacher, she’s surrounded by family and friends who rely on her, and she’s bored to the point of insanity. But when Quinn decides to change her life by adopting a stray dog over everyone’s objections, everything begins to spiral out of control. Now she’s coping with dognapping, breaking and entering, seduction, sabotage, stalking, more secrets than she really wants to know, and two men who are suddenly crazy . . . for her.

"The world's nicest guy" turns out to be a psychotic stalker and Quinn turns out to be a non-too-bright wimp.  This story was a cross between The Three Stooges and Fatal Attraction - and if somehow that sounds like a good mix, I haven't adequately described it.  I did finish listening just to be sure that the happy ending came through - and it did.  

Ask Again Later by Jill A. Davis: Emily has a tendency to live with one foot out the door. For her, the best thing about a family crisis is the excuse to cut and run. When her mother dramatically announces they've found a lump, Emily gladly takes a rain check on life to be by her mother's side, leaving behind her career, her boyfriend, and those pesky, unanswerable questions about who she is and what she's doing with her life.  One evening, Emily opens the door, quite literally, to find her past staring her in the face. How do you forge a relationship with the father who left when you were five years old? As Emily attempts to find balance on the emotional seesaw of her life, with the help of two hopeful suitors and her Park Avenue Princess sister, she takes a no-risk job as a receptionist at her father's law firm and slowly gets to know the man she once pretended was dead. 

Ditto!  Different situation, different names, same personality, same ending.

So, I'm swearing off romances.  Life's too short to read mediocre books and I'm tired of listening to myself whine after I do.  I don't usually make New Year Resolutions, but here goes - 2012 will be the year of deeper reading.  Don't get carried away, I'm never going to completely abandon thrillers and cozy mysteries - occasionally you run across one that is exceptional - but I resolve to keep the "fluff" to a minimum.

*In case you're too young to remember, there used to be a TV show called Love: American Style which was a series of short, silly sketches about, obviously, love and romance.

Christmas Cookies

The tradition of decorating sugar cookies for Christmas has been part of my family's Christmas celebration for at least five generations.  If you want the background, read my Virtual Advent post from 2009.  The short version is that Grandmas make sugar cookies in holiday shapes and grandchildren gather around the table to decorate them - and eat them.  Due to distance, I had never gotten the chance to carry on the fun with our grandsons, but during the Great Thanksgiving Disaster of 2011 we found a few quiet moments to pull out the icing and sprinkles.

Zerrik - age 5

At first, the boys were more interested in Legos and K-Nex than cookies, so the "big kids" (Amanda and Amy) helped me out.  They are amazingly creative ladies and took more time decorating each cookie than it took me to bake them all.

Eventually the little ones got curious (or finished constructing their Lego creations) and joined us.  Their creative efforts were more along the lines of "how much sugar can you pile on one cookie?" - much like my own at their age. (My apologies to Trey, the eldest grandson.  My snapshots of him were more blur than picture.)

We ate a large portion of the finished product, but there are some in the freezer awaiting Christmas Eve. We will continue the cookie tradition - even if we have to do it in July - and I look forward to the day that the table is full of grandkids making memories that they can pass on.

Amanda

Amy

The Dog Ate My Nativity

In the early 1990's, Avon made the "My First Christmas Story" nativity set for children.  The figurines came in three three-piece sets of soft rubber figurines:  1.  Mary, Joseph and Jesus 2. Three Wise Men, and 3. cow, donkey and sheep.  If my memory serves me correctly - and I'm pretty sure this is one of the rare times it does - Mitch and Amanda were ages 2 and 1 the year I bought the whole set so they could have their own nativity, and to distract them from wanting to play with the breakable figures in our larger nativity.  

Image from E-bay Auction

And, what's a nativity without a stable?  So Dave and Mitch built a stable out of scraps of lumber with a wood shingle roof.  Of course, Dave made the cuts, but Mitch helped pound the nails with his own little 2 or 3-year-old hands.  For nearly twenty years, this little nativity has been a part of our family decorations, always placed on a low shelf or under the Christmas tree where little ones were free to play and rearrange to their little hearts delight.  

It became a sort of running joke for Dave to put one of the Wise Men behind the stable (claiming it had been a long trip so naturally he needed a "rest stop") just so Amanda would get annoyed and move it back.  Then she would put all the figures inside the stable - where it's warmer and they could see better - and I would move most of them back out so the arrangement looked nicer....

Last Saturday, the My First Christmas Story scene met a tragic end.  Dave and I went to Manhattan to the KSU/ISU football game and returned home late - thanks to a faulty speed sensor which would not allow the transmission to shift, which meant we drove 120 miles at a max of 40 mph, but that's another story - to find that the stable and it's inhabitants had been chewed to bits (literally) by Gabby the Big Red Idiot Dog.  Below is all that remains - a lone Wise Man and the baby Jesus in a roofless, slightly gnawed stable. Somewhere in a box in the basement is a very grateful lamb who got separated from the others during the move and so avoided the massacre.

Though we are long past the need for our kids to have a plastic nativity, I still loved it for the sentimental value and hoped that grandkids would play with it some day.  The stable can be repaired so, just out of curiosity, I searched E-bay for replacement figurines.  The only full set I found was going for $76!  So I guess it is not to be.  But I think I will continue to display the sad little Wise Man and the baby Jesus as a monument to . . .  Well, I'm not sure to what - I suppose to having your pets spayed or neutered to avoid more Big Red Idiot Dogs.

Dec. 2 Puzzling Post: The Answers

Evidently this puzzle turned out to be more difficult than I had intended, but thanks for playing along anyway.  Here are the answers:

1.  Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) 

2.  The Boy in the Suitcase (Lene Kaaberbol)  I'll admit this was the toughest for three reasons: a) it is such a new book (published Nov. 2011) but I chose it because it's making the rounds on the book blogs  b) when searching for a picture of a "suit" I intentionally chose a suit on George Clooney to make it more difficult and  c) those not familiar with farm equipment may not recognize the tractor as a Case - but in my defense it is printed on the side of the tractor in very, very small letters.  

3.  The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) 

4.  Middlemarch (George Eliot)

5.  Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) - Alice Cooper + Holiday Inn + Wonder bread + land

6.  A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickins) 

7.  No Country For Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

8.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

9.  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski) - finger pointing at one story of the building + Edgar Allan Poe + a saw + tell (as in tell a secret)

10.  The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

Now that you see how my diabolical mind works, we'll revisit this type of puzzle someday.

Ranchero by Rick Gavin

Repo man Nick Reid had a seemingly simple job to do: talk to Percy Dwayne Dubois about the payments he’s behind on for a flat screen TV, or repossess it. But Percy Dwayne wouldn't give in.  Instead he decided that since the world was stacked against him anyway, he might as well fight it. He hit Nick over the head with a fireplace shovel, tied him up with a length of lamp cord, and stole the mint-condition calypso coral-colored 1969 Ranchero that Nick had borrowed from his landlady.  And he took the TV with him on a rowdy ride across the Mississippi Delta.

Nick has no choice but to go after him. The fact that the trail eventually leads to Guy, a meth cooker recently set up in the Delta after the Feds ran him out of New Orleans, is of no consequence - Nick will do anything to get the Ranchero back.  And it turns out he might have to.

Dave and I read this book in one sitting during a recent drive to Manhattan - or should that be two sittings?  On the way there, and on the way back?  Either way, we read it in a day.  It just seemed like a natural choice for a road trip, as the plot revolves around a prolonged car chase.  The main characters, Nick and his sidekick, Desmond, reminded me of Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Hawk, with a southern accent.  The chase was fast-moving and fun, with a slew of quirky characters and vivid descriptions of the Mississippi Delta.

The writing is full of unique phrases - the bad guy "saw fit to go all white-trash philosophical" - that added to the southern flavor, but we agreed that the author needs to step away from the thesaurus.  The regionalisms added flavor, but combined with a love of complex sentences and big words, they almost made us wish we had a decoder ring to unravel some portions.  

Our combined rating for this book would be three out of five stars.  It kept our interest and was fun to read, but - as Simon Cowell would say - it was "forgettable".  Although there was nothing seriously "bad" about the book, neither was there anything outstanding. If it comes up in conversation we'll be saying "I know I read that, but can't remember what it's about."

Our copy of Ranchero was courtesy of Macmillan Library Marketing through a Twitter give-away.  (@MacmillanLib)

A Puzzling Post

Each row of pictures below represents a book title.  Some small words (the, a, an, of...) have been omitted, and some license has been taken with homonyms.  How many can you piece together?  All pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them.


1.

2

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Starting with the cover art (the picture doesn't even come close to doing it justice), The Night Circus is a book of beauty.  The circus, the clocks, the attractions in the tents, even the people themselves, are intricate and creative yet there is room for interpretation.  The reader can create her own magical world.

The story is also intricate, sometimes to the point of confusion, but in an intriguing way.  The characters and their histories are revealed in minute increments, like blossoms from a circus garden - little surprises springing open at just the right moment.  Like the writing, the plot somehow blends detail with space for each reader's imagination.  The Night Circus is unlike any other book I've read, and I'm anxious for the next unique world that Ms. Morgenstern creates.