elkit in wonderland

My Ride's Here (38/52)

I don't think I've told you yet that I went to Kepler's a few weeks ago, where Laura Rennert appeared at story time, reading from her new book, Buying, Training, and Caring for Your Dinosaur. The audience was mostly kids and their parents, but I'll bet you I had as good a time as all the smaller people did.

If you or your kids are in the market for a dinosaur, get this book! It'll help you pick out which kind of dinosaur matches your personality and your lifestyle, and it'll help you train your new pet. 

I really want a velociraptor, but I know that wouldn't work so well with my cats. Maybe we'll get a stegosaurus instead. 

Hey Now, Put Your Lights On (37/52)

Lifting two figs from the tree next door, I am reminded of fhe First Fig and the Second Fig:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends,
   It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

(I've been reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's Selected Poems in bed at night. They are good night poems.)

Ell Oh Ell Oh Lola

I attended two Yale literature lectures today. They're from the course "The American Novel since 1945", and I watched two of them on the internet, thanks to Academic Earth. 

I think I'll try to finish this course, and definitely check out the lectures about Cormac McCarthy (whom I still haven't read). Of all the novels the course covers, I have only read one. Hrmpf.

Don't Rain On My Parade (36/52)

I managed to pick up a good novel and actually finish it within a few days last week. Way behind on my 52-in-52 quota though. Not sure what to make of this one. I really liked Revolutionary Road, however bleak it was. This other novel by Richard Yates, The Easter Parade, was not as depressing and despairing as Revolutionary Road, which is nice, but I couldn't connect with the characters as well. Yates opens the story by proclaiming that the two sister protagonists are predestined to have unhappy lives because their parents divorced when they were little, and that one of the sisters "never understood anything". I dunno, I didn't really get that from the story. I didn't think their lives were so terribly unhappy. Just ordinary. And I didn't really understand why Emily supposedly didn't understand anything. Maybe I am just as thick. I did still kinda like the book; Yates is a very good writer. But this one didn't draw me in like Revolutionary Road did. (I'm actually kind of glad. Now that the days are getting shorter, I don't really need extra downers. You know?)

Hey Now. Put Your Lights On (35/52)

Hey, I read another book this weekend! Playing with my new love has really cut into my reading time - I usually read at night in bed, but I've been making out with my iPhone since I bought it a month ago. But yesterday afternoon, I picked up Light Raid, and read it all in one day. Wheeeee! It's easy reading - I've read another novel co-written by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, and it was similar to this: a science fiction screwball comedy. This one had an added dimension of opposing political forces within a family, and I kept waiting and wondering as I read: can there really be a villain in the protagonist's family? And if so, is it the father or the mother? What's really going on? Is there another plot twist coming? 

Great summer/weekend read. 

Building A Mystery

John Crowley: I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to—what the story’s up to—and I’m giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover. It’s very important to me that readers win the game: i.e., come to understand what’s at stake, perhaps all in a moment (James Joyce’s “epiphany,” which happens both to the character and the reader) and perhaps in a gradual accumulation. I can’t guarantee readers will win in that sense, or that all of them will; and I of course want to leave some mysterious and unresolved remainder.

via www.avclub.com

The A.V. Club, which always has great interviews, notes that a 25th-anniversary edition of Crowley's Little, Big, with an essay by Bloom and art by Peter Milton, is coming out this fall. Sounds like that would be a great time to read again the story of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater and their families. But now back to the interview ... if you'll excuse me ...

This Near Wild Heaven (29, 30, 31, 32, 34/52)

Right, the backlog.

I've read five more books since I last reported, and I have three more in the works. They kind of all fit the "wild" theme, check it out:

• Unearthed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the garage recently, and couldn't resist picking it up again. It had been so long, I forgot most of the characters. It was almost as funny as I remembered it.
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler was a great read. I just love her writing. I never heard about her until she died, when my sci-fi reading friends lamented her passing, and I was all, "Who?" Picked up a collection of short stories, and was hooked. This one is a vampire story. But not exactly. Butler is a bit hard to categorize, because it's always more than just the genre. She always makes me think, but never so hard that I'm not entertained. But don't take my word for it. Check her out for yourself. I read this one on the plane to Chicago, and in my hotel room at night, in between pillowfights and partying.
• I picked up a little something to read for the way home at the airport. I was in a non-fiction mood, and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto looked good.
• Staying on my non-fiction/food roll, next up was Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, which I'd started before the trip to BlogHer. I'd put it aside because it was hard to deal with the facts. Man oh man, we do terrible things to animals! And while we're at that, we do terrible things to the environment too. Oh, and the meat and eggs we get aren't so great, so we do terrible things to our health too.
• So my brain was full of non-fiction, and I switched to something short, sweet, and lovely: Where the Wild Things Are. Really looking forward to the movie.

Sweetness Follows (26, 27, 28/52)

Surely you have heard by now that I bought an ice cream maker. Oh yes! It's the talk of the town!

I've also invested in three very different sets of recipes: Ice Cream Deck, a set of cards with a recipe each, Lick It!, which has vegan recipes, substituting nondairy milks, and including lots of sorbet and fruit sauce recipes, and Making Artisan Gelato, which boasts "45 Recipes and Techniques for Crafting Flavor-Infused Gelato and Sorbet at Home".

I made sorbet from my friend Sherri's excellent Meyer lemons last weekend. It didn't last long, and the crowds outside my house are clamoring for more. My housemate Anna suggested I make popsicles next time, which I think is a great idea ... now where did I put the popsicle molds I bought?

I Just Wanna Be Your Dawg (25/52)

And finally, I was ready to delve into Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard's latest novel. It was great fun, "prepping" for it by reading and re-reading previous books that introduced the characters who reappear here.

I really like that he does this. Another writer who does a wonderful job of this is Scott Turow with his fictional Kindle County and all the attorneys, judges, and cops who keep running into each other, and who take turns in the center of Turow's novels - Rusty Sabich in Presumed Innocent, and his defense attorney Sandy Stern in the "sequel", The Burden of Proof, for example.

But I digress, of course. Back to Road Dogs. Leonard brings back bank robber Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap, and Cundo Rey from LaBrava. Cundo Rey ends up dead at the end of LaBrava, but Leonard resurrects him very nicely. Oh, and Karen Sisco from Out of Sight also makes a cameo appearance. Go Sisco!

Anyway, Foley and Rey are fellow prison inmates in Road Dogs. Navarro is married to Rey, and looking out for his interests in California. Or maybe she's looking out for her own, planning to rip him off big time when he gets out. Good form. Great supporting characters. Well done.

When The Heat Dies Down (24/52)

Keeping on keeping on with my Elmore Leonard run. Next up in the stash was Swag: A Novel. Oh, and let me digress for a moment: why is every novel subtitled ":A Novel" now? It sounds to me like "This door to remain unlocked during business hours." Yes, of course it's a novel! What else did you think it was? A guide to armed robbery? And you're going to sue the writer and/or publisher if you try this at home and end up getting arrested? Jeeeeez.

Alright, alright, getting off the soapbox. This one was good fun like just about every Leonard story I've read (although I haven't cared so much for his early Westerns). The copy I have noted on the cover that this novel was previously published under the name "Ryan's Rules". Ryan is one of the protagonists, a used-car salesman who decides to switch to armed robbery, because the money is better. And, he figures, if you follow a few simple rules, you're not likely to get caught.

Yeah.

I liked the dialogue (always pitch-perfect coming from Leonard), and I really enjoyed how law enforcement doesn't even show up in the story until the very end. I kept wondering how "safe" Ryan and his partner in crime really were with their rules, or if the cops were hot on their heels. But they didn't know, and neither, dear reader, do you. Great fun.