Carpe vitam

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
     The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly - and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

Whether or not Edward FitzGerald's translation is faithful to Omar Khayyam's original quatrain, this one has always been my favorite. I first read it in high school, and it's still the one that speaks to me the most whenever I re-read stanzas. Maybe it's just part of my obsession with Time and clocks and Prufrock and "Acquainted With the Night". But this verse has always conveyed going beyond a mere "Carpe diem!" to me.

As I'm starting new rounds of treatment, seizing one day at a time seems like the obvious solution to seemingly insurmountable challenges. But taking a step back, 2012 has been completely amazing so far because I've consciously staked out territory for my own. Week Seven was a horrible, time-warped glitch. But I can fight back and reclaim the rest of the year.

Two of Spades

February is perfect for reading noir. Or so it normally is, with the Northwest's perpetually gray and soggy weather. This February, however, has been gorgeous. So it's been hard to stay indoors and read gray detective tales.

City of Dragons takes place in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1940, and the heroine is a cynical, hardened private investor, former escort, and nurse who lost the love of her life in the Spanish Civil War. She has friends in the press, but the police dislike (even try to frame) her. She doesn't get along with her father, and grew up without a mother. She gets beat up badly by gangsters in her attempt to solve several murders that involve drugs, human trafficking, and embezzlement.

This Dame for Hire is set in New York in 1943, and the heroine is a wise-cracking assistant to a private investigator who takes over his business when he goes off to war. She has friends on the police force, and her best friend is a psychic who sometimes helps with her cases. She doesn't get along with her father, and grew up without a mother. She gets beat up by a suspect in her attempt to solve several murders that involve actors, academia, and abortions.

Because I read them back-to-back, it's a little hard to see any major differences. I appreciated the gritty portrait of San Francisco in Dragons; I appreciated the consistency of slang in Dame ("ya" for "you" everywhere, "g" dropped from "ing", etc). I didn't really love either book, and neither was very riveting, but they did make for decent late-night reading on ridiculously warm February nights.

Ka mate! Ka ora!

A few days ago I went to see the Seattle Art Museum's newest exhibit, Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. I haven't studied much of Gauguin, except for the fact that he's a Post-Impressionist, so I was looking forward to seeing his work. The connection to the South Pacific was also appealing.

The really interesting aspect was that Marquesan and Maori art was displayed alongside Gauguin's - partly to give greater background into what influenced his work, and to give context for the cultures he encountered and painted (and sketched and wood-carved).

The "noble savage" idea definitely pervaded much of his work from Tahiti: Gauguin went in search of a mythical paradise that had already been plundered by the time he arrived and was probably never as idyllic as he projected it to be.

The connection to New Zealand was also very timely: Mi Madre just flew there to visit the nieces and neffy. A colleague of hers, who helps with community tax workshops, stopped by before she left and mentioned that a lot of Islanders try to claim other people's children as dependents on their tax deductions because culturally everybody shares responsibility for raising kids. So seeing Gauguin's "Tehamana Has Two Mothers" had a bit more personal meaning for me.

The colors are so vivid and gorgeous in almost all of Gauguin's paintings. I could practically feel myself amid tropical flowers and sun and heat.

By being displayed right next to Marquesan war club (those things are HUGE!) and intricate Maori carvings, Gauguin's work gained perspective and far more cultural and historical context than most paintings I've ever seen in art museums. I really appreciated that added depth!

Bear in mind

Summer of the Bear addresses how one family copes with the death of a loved one. A diplomat in Bonn falls to his death from the top of a building; his widow, two teenage daughters, and developmentally challenged son spend their typical summer vacation at the family home in the Outer Hebrides, trying to come to terms with the mystery surrounding his demise. He helped smuggle someone out of East Germany, he was suspected of being a double agent, he helped fabricate reports. Did he commit suicide? Was he murdered?

Bella Pollen switches points-of-view between each of the characters, and does a fantastic job of capturing the growing pains of the children and the individual grief of each family member. The unexpected twist at the end brings peace to the reader as well as the family.

Through it all, an escaped grizzly bear roams the Scottish island, watching over the family. Could he be their father, sort-of reincarnated? It's the height of the Cold War; does the bear represent the threat of Russia, as the Ministry of Defence makes known its intention to mar the pastoral Hebridean community by building a military installation? Each character, including the bear, is so captivating and believable. And the narrative flow well: each family member has a piece of the puzzle, each has flashbacks that provide insight as the story progresses.

The book also draws from real life: Hercules the Grizzly really did escape and spend a month in the wild in the Hebrides. Pollen does a masterful job of weaving together elements of everyday life amid changing societies into a captivating tale.

Also, I've added another place to visit to my bucket list: the Outer Hebrides.

No bailouts, no handouts, no copouts

A quick note to say how AWESOME 2012 has been so far! And the Year of the Dragon too.

I've already gone snowshoeing twice this year, have a snowshoe 5K lined up (to combine two of my interests), have some 5Ks lined up, have some vacation trips planned, and it snowed(!!!) in Seattle.

It also dawned on me randomly the other day that I also missed one more thing from my 2011 "firsts" list:

• Went to a baseball game at a National League stadium. Still to see the Mariners play, though! I've never seen any other team. Granted, I've only ever been to Seattle and Boston to see them play, but seeing them (blow it in the bottom of the 9th like only my hometeam can) in DC was a cool new experience.

Life is beautiful!

En anglais, bitte schön

An old colleague recommended Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, a book about the development of the English language. Everybody already knows that English added words from every period of its history (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French, etc), but this book addresses how the grammar itself changed, not just the vocabulary.

Linguist John McWhorter presents a very strong case for his belief that Celtic, Welsh, and Viking influences changed English grammar. In the first half of the book, he points out that Anglo-Saxon English had no instances of meaningless "do" or progressive present tense (still unlike any other Germanic language) until it came into contact with Celtic and Welsh, which do contain those grammatical oddities.

The book is clearly not written for an academic audience, but I found myself a little irritated by how overly simplified it sometimes was. The fact that McWhorter rarely names the linguists whose positions he is refuting seemed a little disingenuous. He makes vague mentions of "one renowned scholar" or "the pre-eminent linguist in this field", etc. But where I hoped to find easy references for their work, there were few immediately available. The "Notes on Sources" section at the end contained everything, but while reading the chapters there was no way to easily cross-reference. I like my footnotes, damn it!

In the middle, I got bored by an attempt to discredit the Whorf hypothesis. And the book ends with a theory that Proto-IndoEuropean (Proto-German's ancestor and thus English's as well) changed its grammar because of proximity to ancient Semitic languages. I appreciated the round-robin ending: that syntactical changes are part of the history and nature of English and languages in general.

Despite the brief annoyances, I couldn't put the book down. McWhorter presents such a compelling case and writes in a semi-snarky tone that makes linguistics accessible for armchair linguists. Plus, the idea that the Celts most significantly influenced how the English language developed? SOLD!

Zooming to meet our thunder

Back when I was a junior in college and trying to think of subjects for either an honors thesis or a senior scholars project, the Tuskegee Airmen made my Top 3 list (the 442nd and ads between the World Wars were the other two).

Also, since my parents let us watch any historically-justified violent movie (because violence was ok, but sex was not), my sisters and I have seen almost every movie about World War II. (That's basically all we watched as kids. The one movie I have seen most in my life is The Great Escape. )

I liked Red Tails. I didn't love it, but as the war film genre goes, it's not bad (I've seen far worse). The manly bonding, predictable daredevil exploits, caricatured enemy (the one Nazi pilot was pretty bad), woman representing postwar hope ... they're all familiar.

But as a civil rights movie, it was pretty tame. The Red Tails served as escorts for (white) bombers, ensuring that they reached and bombed their targets with minimal air casualties.
While it's clear the skies are segregated, without any connection to the home front, it's a little disjointed: the characters aren't really developed outside of their unit; they rarely reference home or their pasts or their families, so it's hard to tie the storyline to any historical significance that the viewer doesn't already know. Without that connection, the movie is like any other underdog tale: scrappy unit isn't given respect but eventually proves itself after working through some personal issues and passing tests of valor. Though there are many scenes where the airmen face racism and bigotry, there are also many cheesily heartwarming scenes where white colleagues show their gratitude for the air protection the Red Tails provide. (There's also some bad acting on the part of some of the white pilots.)

And then it's sobering to realize that the Civil Rights movement doesn't reach its apex for another two decades, and that racism in the military or anywhere else isn't close to being eradicated, either.

Overall, the movie is pretty light-hearted, as many in the genre can be.

And speaking of the genre... In one subplot, one of the Red Tails is shot down and taken to a POW camp, where he takes part in an escape. The scene where the German guard patrolling the forest stumbles upon an escaping prisoner is taken almost directly from The Great Escape. (See above. The Palmer girls, we have that movie memorized.)

But my big geek-out moment (I believe I squealed in the theatre) was when I recognized Adam from MI-5 faking an American accent in the 3 minutes he's barely onscreen.

Above us only sky

I was really excited when the latest Maisie Dobbs book arrived for me at the library. But then snowshoeing and soccer and Jasper Fforde and Snowpocalypse 2012 took up a lot of my time. So I risked more overdue fines (snow-induced overdue fines, to boot!) to finish the book.

Each Maisie Dobbs book addresses some aspect of the Great War (cartographers, chemists, artists, disabled veterans). In A Lesson in Secrets, conscientious objectors take the stage. Maisie goes undercover for Special Branch, teaching philosophy at a college to determine whether or not political forces that do not have the interest of the Crown at heart are infiltrating Britain's institutions of learning. And of course, there's a murder that she has to solve that happens to be connected to her task.

Maisie as a character has definitely blossomed in the past few books; Jacqueline Winspear does a wonderful job at slowly developing our heroine's character. For much of the series, Maisie was serious and rather dour, held back by an inability to let go of her war trauma. But since both her wartime love and her lifelong mentor died in recent books, sad as those events were, it's as if our heroine finally has wings of her own to grow.

The next book is due out in March. I'm already on the waiting list at the library!

Virtual verisimilitude

Once again, Jasper Fforde managed to top his last creative achievement. As if the entire Thursday Next series weren't already a testament to ingenuity and imagination, the latest book adds one more meta-layer to the intersections of mind, text, and conceptions of reality.

The first five books star a kick-ass character named Thursday Next, who is able to both book-jump and time travel. She interacts with characters from books as well as people in the "real" word (an alternate-history version of Swindon, England).

One of Our Thursdays is Missing stars the written version of Thursday, a character in the books based on the "real" Thursday's adventures. The real Thursday has gone missing in the middle of a possible genre war, and the key to her whereabouts lies in various nefarious characters' attempts to control natural resources of unmined metaphor in the land of Fiction.

It's Jasper Fforde; it's automatically brilliant.

Reel diversions

I hadn't planned on seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but Thuter's text that Colin Firth is in it was enough to get me to the theater. I've never read Le Carre's book, but I think I saw the 1979 film version a long time ago. This latest was good; though at times it was rather slow, it was an old-fashioned Cold War spy thriller. (It's been a while since "defection" has been central to a film plot.) The costumes and set design were all admirably (sometimes disturbingly) spot-on for capturing the early 1970s in all its fashion "glory" and technological limitations.

I had to counter the heavy espionage subject matter with something light and fluffy, so a friend and I watched The Adventures of Tintin. I've never read the original comics, but I did read a great article in The Atlantic about how Spielberg handled some of the racist stereotypes from the original Tintin books.

I really liked Tintin. It was good fun, an whirlwind adventure story à la Indiana Jones and National Treasure: there's a pirate treasure, travel by air and sea, the Sahara, and a sheikh's palace. It provided a good counterbalance to Tinker!

...and beyond

Ammo, amas, amat

I forgot one rather important "first" from 2011...

• Going shooting at a gun range - It was definitely a cross-cultural experience. I didn't like the idea of shooting at a target that looked like a human, so my friend and I chose a zombie. My only other experience at a gun range was when my father took me and my sisters once, almost 20 years ago, because he thought we should be prepared for the Apocalypse (much like all the camping trips where we had to "rough it"). It's a pretty traumatic memory, so the fact that I went voluntarily as an adult was a huge step. My politics regarding guns and gun laws, probably due to that adolescent memory, remain the same. I know Mi Hermana and La Otra Hermana were equally as affected.
  

Many a weary foot

I love New Year's celebrations. I love the feeling of starting fresh, of a clean slate (haha, get it?), of the almost religious idea of starting anew with no sins. But I also love the idea of a progression, of time and life moving forward and amassing new experiences every day.

As longtime friends and readers know, I reflect on the past year by being thankful for and celebrating "firsts". And 2011 had a lot of firsts for me!

• Snowshoeing - I went several times and liked it so much that I bought myself snowshoes after Thanksgiving. Two trips already planned for January 2012.
  
  
• Baking more than I have, ever - I think I baked more in 2011 than I have the rest of my life combined. In the process, I discovered that it's relaxing and that I'm quite good at it!
  
  
• Visiting the Caribbean - Aside from the beautiful beaches and wonderful sailing weather in the British Virgin Islands and the amazing history of Puerto Rico, there were also many "firsts" for food from this trip: mofongo, plantain lasagna, conch ceviche, and Pusser's very excellent rum. Another "first" from the trip was the agonizing realization that I am either allergic (like Mi Hermana) to a sunscreen ingredient or (like La Otra Hermana) to the combination of sun and sweat.
  
  
• Getting help for anxiety and depression - It took 14 years. What college counselors failed to observe and subsequent MSW therapists failed to point out, both a psychiatrist and a psychologist saw immediately. I'm grateful to everyone who was so supportive in 2011: from driving me to that first appointment, to recommending certain doctors, to calling to see if I was okay when first starting the medication regiment, to checking in every now and then since. It might take a long time to work through, but I think 2012 will build on a lot of the foundation laid in 2011.
  
  
• Paddleboarding - This was the coolest accidental "first" ever - I thought I was going pedal-boating, which I've done before, and ended up trying something leisurely and fun.
  
  
• Being pulled over by a police officer - In 16 years of driving, I'd never been pulled over!
  
  
• Getting a traffic citation - In 16 years of speeding, I'd never gotten a ticket! Figures it'd happen in California...
  
  
• Climbing a rock wall - Turns out, I liked it! It was definitely scary at points, but I managed to coach myself through the paralysis and finish.
  
  
• Shopping on Black Friday ... on Thanksgiving - Mi Hermana and I have napped and gone shopping at 4am in the past, but this time we put the kiddos to bed, then drove to the outlet mall a little before midnight. When we got back to the house around 7am, we slept until 2pm. Living and learning... we might be too old for that now!
  
  
• Running multiple 5Ks - I beat my own record of 2 per year. I ran 5 in 2011!
  
  
• Driving a car onto the ferry - In 16 years of driving and 32 years of living in the Northwest, I've never 1) driven a car onto a ferry and 2) never done it alone. My God! The fare is exorbitant! But it was fun, since it was a first.
  

Here's to 2012, and all the new adventures it will bring!

Some corner of a foreign field

I didn't read the children's book, but I wanted to go see War Horse on Boxing Day. It reminded me a little of Black Beauty - the horse is sold form an English farm to the cavalry, and through the chaos of the battlefields drifts from the British to the German to the French to the Belgian sides, playing a different role in each. It's also a cute boy-and-his-horse tale (also not unlike many other animal stories).

Being a war movie as well as a children's book, you couldn't escape the fact that death and dying are everywhere - but I thought Spielberg did a tasteful job of showing the tragedy of war without getting an R rating: windmill arms block the execution of two teenage boys, a French girl's death is mentioned (but not described) only at the end, the riderless horse charging out of battle lets the viewer know the fate of the cavalry officer. In a way, it was more poignant and heartbreaking not to show how everyone who loved the horse met their ends. I'm not quite sure how the book pulled it off, though.

In the end, most stories about the Great War are anti-war. This one was no different: the Boer War regimental flag that both father and son took with them to their different battlefields signifies the silence of survival and the hope for an end to conflict.

And the scenes of the Devonshire countryside were also beautiful, even if a bit Gone With the Wind-like with the silhouettes against red skies.

What passing-bells for these?

After reading the light-hearted, Riviera-vacationing Lady Georgiana series again, it was back to the legacy of the Great War with Maisie Dobbs.

In Among the Mad, our psychologist-detective heroine works with Special Branch forces in a race to find a terrorist (though I'm not sure they had that term in 1931). With still-shell-shocked veterans being released onto the streets at the beginning of the Depression, someone intends to set off a gas bomb on New Year's Eve at St. Paul's. But, like the anthrax attacks 70 years later, the particular gas used as a warning is military-grade. It's a decent thriller, and sets up the reader for Maisie's involvement with Special Branch or other intelligence-gathering efforts later.

The Mapping of Love and Death actually had more significant character development and drama: Maisie's mentor dies, she strikes up a relationship with her old employer's son, her briefcase (a gift from her fellow servants when she went off to Cambridge, symbolizing her working-class, pre-war past) is stolen. The case at the center of the book is fascinating as well: the role of cartographers in World War I. The remains of a cartography unit listed as missing in 1916 are recently discovered, and an autopsy suggests an American mapmaker in the unit was murdered. One of the characters from the first book in the series also makes an appearance, making the plot ends come full circle. It's as if Jacqueline Winspear is collecting bits of the past in order to set readers up for an entirely new Maisie. I certainly hope so!

Counter rucking

We had to memorize "Invictus" back in seventh grade, and it's a fairly easy poem to keep in one's memory. So when the movie about South Africa's victory over New Zealand in the 2005 Rugby World Cup came out about a year ago, my curiosity was piqued. (My rugby-playing Kiwi bro-in-law also rushed out to see it.)

Since New Zealand won it this year - and I had some free time over Christmas break - I finally watched it. I do tend to like movies about sports teams: in the end, they're about working out differences and cooperating, which is why they also make such great parallel stories about nation-shaping and identity-forging.

But I'll admit, I was a little disappointed with Invictus. I wanted to love it, because the set-up was so great: a Nobel Peace Prize-wining man who spent 27 years in prison becomes president of a country struggling with racial strife and poverty and all the other legacies of apartheid, and an almost-all-white rugby team comes from behind to unite their divided country and win the World Cup. It's a great story. But for some reason, I found the characters to be pretty one-dimensional: Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela was always the wise Madiba and only seemed like an ordinary human in a few scenes, when his estrangement from his family is mentioned. Similarly, Matt Damon as the national rugby captain seems to just shuffle along - there's never any insight into his words or actions.

To me, the most compelling characters weren't the rugby team or the history-making President; the motley crew that made up Mandela's security detail were actually the most fascinating. Rugby was irrelevant to their transition from old guard to integrated unit, from pre-apartheid suspicions of each other to trusting each other as a cohort protecting the President. That was the story I was looking for in this movie, with rugby as the metaphor. Turns out, it didn't really need rugby to tell it.

No. 5

Having finished both of the Rhys Bowen mystery series I loved, I can now only wait for new books to come out. So I was ecstatic when, instead of reminding me I had overdue fines, the library notified me that Naughty in Nice was the fifth and newest book in the Lady Georgiana series.

Nice, as in the city in France. (I do love a good pun.)

Coco Chanel, a stolen royal necklace, and fabulous parties and yachts are all part of the plot. All of society are vacationing in Nice, where the Queen sends Georgie to discreetly steal back her favorite snuffbox from a rich kleptomaniac.

It was a good, fun, light read (as much as murder mysteries can be), especially after the heavy slavery double-whammy of March and Kindred.

It's also a bit fascinating to read the Lady Georgiana series at the same time as I'm reading the Maisie Dobbs series: both take place in the early 1930s, both heroines have one Cockney relative and one partying best friend, and both settings emphasize the Depression. But Georgie's world is all glamour and glitz and trying to hold on to the Roaring Twenties; Maisie's world is still emerging from the gray, silent horrors of the Great War. It's a sobering difference indeed.

As harsh as truth

Because I rifled through Mi Cunado's book collection while in Michigan, I ordered March from the library when I got home. Told from the point of view of the father in Little Women during his time away during the Civil War, it was an intriguing tale of idealism clashing with reality.

The protagonist was an incredibly naive abolitionist minister; for much of the book, he worked in Union-held territory teaching slaves how to read. His life story flashes back to his strong abolitionist past, his friendships with Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Brown. And as the eager Northern do-gooder encounters the real-world scenarios of his ideals, the reader too has to witness the horrors of both slavery and war.

I appreciated how Geraldine Brooks added more flair to snippets from Little Women. In this alternate telling, the March family were secretly all involved in the Underground Railroad. Marmee's temper - mentioned briefly in Alcott's classic because she tells Jo she learned to master it - takes center stage in many of the chapters (actually, it was a little scary how Marmee's temper in March reminded me of mine).

When I finished the book, I knew there was more to the story of the March family - and more to the story of the war, which would drag on for four more years. In Little Women, the characters on the home front are so removed and sheltered from the war that the story could be feasibly occur out of that historical context; for readers raised on Louisa May Alcott, March finally makes a tangible connection to it.

Back when I was read all of Connie Willis' books because she was a female sci-fi writer, I intended to also read Octavia Butler. I finally got around to reading Kindred, and by a total coincidence it had much the same subject matter as March.

An African-American woman in 1976 is repeatedly "called" back to the antebellum South by one of her ancestors, a slave owner. Without knowing when she'll go back and forth between time periods, she becomes more paranoid in the modern world as her encounters in the 19th century become increasingly violent. What starts as meeting her ancestor when he was a small child slowly turns into watching him learn cruelty and how to be the master of a plantation. Kindred is incredibly well-written; I had to read it in one sitting, into the wee hours of the morning, because I couldn't put it down.

The book ends so disturbingly and violently. With no neat resolution, the reader is left to wonder about the symbolism: is the America celebrating its bicentennial trying to reconcile with its past? Is the woman called back specifically because she's in an interracial marriage in the 1970s? The whole story is a jumble of emotions, but in ways that are more thought-provoking than merely shock-inducing.

A pulse in the eternal mind

I love the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Now that I'm halfway through it, I'm starting to get sad that it will end soon.

Messenger of Truth takes our psychologist/detective heroine into the world of art, where she is commissioned to determine whether an artist's tragic death was accidental or connected to any of the controversial scenes he painted.

Parts of An Incomplete Revenge reminded me of "The Lottery" - the book takes Maisie to Kent to uncover the thoroughly dark tale of what one small, xenophobic town does during the War in the aftermath of a Zeppelin raid, as well as in the subsequent ten years during annual hop-picking season when Gypsies and Londoners camp in fields to help with the harvest. (It also reminded me that I've been meaning to read a comprehensive history of the Roma for a long time now.)

In these two books, the main character starts to shed her wartime burdens - a rift with her mentor forces her to be more independent; her wartime love, brain-dead for a decade, finally passes away, so she can no longer carry a torch for him; she starts to have hobbies that bring brightness and color into her life. And readers get to see Britain change with Maisie: slowly, book by book, telephones and electricity reach more homes; cars replace horses and carriages; rigid class distinctions fade.

Of course, the tragedy is that readers know that another war is looming 8 years on the horizon.

Roar!

Between all the reading I've been able to do lately, I also ran two 5K races within 10 days of each other, with a soccer playoff game sandwiched in between.

Aside from the Run for Your Rights, the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot is the only race I've run more than once - and I don't even live in Michigan! I like this new tradition, though I have no idea if Mi Hermana and the kiddos will even be in A2 next year for me to continue it; if Mi Cuñado finishes his dissertation and gets a teaching job elsewhere, they might move.

Mi Hermana the former cross-country runner bluntly informed me that what I've been counting as my watch time was actually my gun time, so I haven't been as slow as I thought. To keep it straight, I made a spreadsheet of all the races I've run in, with both times listed (thanks to Google caching, most records were still online). Fun spreadsheet-making! It was the closest to work that I got over the holidays.

When I returned home after a lovely Thanksgiving holiday meeting my newborn niece, my soccer team's had a playoff game, where I blocked a cannonball kick at point-blank range.
The bruise on my inner left thigh was a big as a soccer ball and shaped like one, too. (I thought it was really bad ass, and took a ton of pictures to show off my war wounds to La Madre, who told me they made me look like I'd been abused. Since the bruise hasn't gone away yet -- 9 days later -- I'm now paranoid about stares in the locker room at the gym.)

Then, with the fresh huge bruise, I ran the Girls on the Run 5K. Another fun race! I've realized I enjoy the family-friendly races where competition isn't the focus on the event.

When I entered my gun time and watch time on my newly-created spreadsheet, I realized I also seem to gravitate toward races that focus on women and girls or on women's rights issues (NARAL, BARCC, Iron Girl, Girls on the Run).

Hmmm.

O' both your houses

Because I couldn't stop talking about how wonderful Middlesex was, my bro-in-law said, "I have a few other Pulitzer Prize-winning books too, if you want to read those."

So I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title of which naturally reminded me of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" ... in fact, it was strangely similar enough to the Hemingway short story, and yet different enough that I liked it.

The book moves back and forth between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, between three generations enduring their own hardships, and from the Trujillo dictatorship to teen angst. From the opening lines, the reader knows it's not an entirely happy tale: the idea of a family curse is introduced and reiterated throughout. References to "the final days" and "the end" are repeatedly mentioned, so it's pretty obvious that the characters are ill-fated. Themes of family, sex, and education each alternate as both nurturing and oppressive.

Most of the book drops Spanish phrases or Dominican slang, with no translation. There are footnotes for historical references. The narrator is hilariously snide and irreverent, relating the stories with a mix of multinational street slang. Each portrait of the cursed family is depicted with and bittersweet emotion. The cultural references are brilliantly and intricately mixed: everything from Dominican slang to comic book geekdom to 80s films to sci-fi lore. Through it all, the reader really did become part of the binational, bicultural, class-straddling, racially-polarized world of the main characters.

Then, on the plane ride back home, I realized I had one more library book to read. I no longer remember who recommended it to me, but 2030 was utter crap. The characters lacked depth, the plot read like a B-rated Hollywood movie, and the science, politics, and economics described (hell, the entire book) could have been written by a 12-year-old.

In a nutshell: the cure for cancer leads to prolonged lifespans in the U.S. Young people start to hate old people to the point that there are suicide bombs at AARP headquarters. When a mega-earthquake wipes out the city of Los Angeles, the government can't afford to rebuild because it's been bankrupted by Medicare. So the Chinese offer to rebuild the city for half of the net revenue produced forever after.

I'm not kidding. It was that bad. It was painful to read on two main levels: as a history major and as a politico-wonk. I had to suspend all knowledge of the political process, election campaigns, community organizing, infrastructure, and geology, among many other things.

But I was bored on a plane for 5 hours with nothing else to do. If I hadn't been trapped in the air sans sudoku or crossword, I would never have read the whole thing. Because in the back of my mind the entire time, I kept thinking that the book was written a few years too late to be relevant: #OccupyWallStreet has shown that young people can protest unfair policies in smart and nonviolent ways, we've been post-HCR for a while now, and the separate ideas of a living will and death with dignity were flashes in the news cycle pan during the Bush Administration. 2030 tried too hard to be a social commentary; in the end, it's too shallow to spark any kind of meaningful conversation.

Not a book to read after finishing a well-written, intelligent novel that won a Pulitzer.

But at least I have more books from the library to help me erase the memories of this one...

London to Grosse Point

The great thing about being on vacation is that, once the nieces and nephew zonk out around 8 or 8:30, I have plenty of time to read.

In the third Maisie Dobbs book, our heroine finally returns to France twelve years after her war injury. Two tough cases (both involving MIA soldiers from the Great War), coupled with her suppressed psychological trauma from the War itself, lead to a near-mental breakdown. (But, of course, she muddles through. As one does.) Two interesting developments for the series that I'll be curious to see in the next few books: that a breach of trust occurs between Maisie and her mentor, so she must start to learn to solve her most intellectually rigorous cases alone; and that since she finally returned to the now-graveyard scene of her greatest anguish, even after a decade she can hopefully start healing and moving on.

Books 4 and 5 are waiting for me at the library when I get back home.

But for now, one great thing about being on vacation in Michigan with a brother-in-law who teaches history is that there are tons of spare books in the basement. So I grabbed Middlesex, erroneously conflating it with both Atonement and March (also on the bookshelf).

Turns out, the books are very, very different. I haven't (yet) read the two I mentally confused with this one, but Middlesex is sheer, utter brilliance. Jeffrey Eugenides' novel about a hermaphrodite growing up in a changing Detroit is extremely well-written. The narrative voice pulls you in from the first couple of lines, hinting at intertwined family scandals and historical flashes and self-discovery spanning 70 years, all with teasing details that aren't fully revealed for several more chapters.

The book's genius is that it also draws on so much literary and historical richness: it starts on the slopes of Mount Olympus in 1922 and moves across violence and Depression to the streets of the Motor City. (Yes, I did feel like re-re-re-watching the Chrysler SuperBowl ad.) The protagonist's grandparents' flight from Smyrna also had me recalling the first vignette from Hemingway's In Our Time; and a chapter that involved the fledgling Nation of Islam had me running out to google-verify that it did, indeed, begin in Detroit. Storyline transitions in Middlesex flow from Old World to New, superstition to science, immigrant to assimilated, rags to (middle class) riches, rural to urban to suburban, east to west, parent to child, girl to boy... and the reader (at least this one) is left with an awe-inspiring, incredible, complex tapestry of overlapping identities, sexualities, and families.

Fear factor

I'd never seen Monsters, Inc. - but a post-turkey Thanksgiving stupor was as good a reason as any to watch it.

I thought it was clever, though I suspect much of it was too sophisticated for smaller children. (Monsters are deployed through doors in the monster world to scare kids in the human world. An energy company, Monsters, Inc., harvests children's screams as energy. One day a little toddler accidentally crosses the threshold to the monster world.)

Boo, the little girl, was adorable. And the ending was wonderfully environmentally positive: instead of relying on energy based on fear and the collection of children's screams, the monsters make a complete U-turn and change to energy consumption based on laughter and fun. I approve.

Dulce et decorum est...

On to the next mystery series featuring a smart female detective! The latest one I've found takes place in the aftermath of the Great War, so naturally it's right up my alley.

Maisie Dobbs makes her debut as a detective in the first book, which details the title character's story: a working-class girl with a keen intellect is given a chance to study and go to university; then World War I breaks out and she becomes a nurse on the frontlines. The reader learns of her story ten years later, when the immediate legacy of the Great War sets the backdrop for our new sleuth's first case. The book is a poignant tribute to the Lost Generation as well as a testament to survivors and strength to rebuild both personal lives and a more egalitarian postwar society.

In Birds of a Feather, Maisie is hired to find a missing heiress whose three friends have just been murdered (and white feathers left hidden at each crime scene). I must admit, the feathers were an immediate clue early on, and I guessed both the motive and the guilty party long before the final chapters revealed them. However, while that usually discourages me from continuing a series for very long, it seemed rather trivial in this one. I love the psychologist-as-detective aspect of the two Maisie Dobbs books I've read so far, I love the fact that the heroine is my age, and I love that the series takes place in my particular pet period of history.

But the real reason I'm drawn to this series is because the main character lives on the edges of identity: a working-class family and childhood erased from her future by a Cambridge education; a woman in a traditionally male profession; a nation desperately trying to forget the War to End All Wars while being constantly reminded of the incredible loss it suffered from it.

I've ordered the rest of the books from the library!

If I can make it there

It's always sad when a good series comes to an end. I've enjoyed Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mystery books, and finally finished the last two.

In The Last Illusion, Molly goes undercover as Harry Houdini's assistant after several gruesome accidents during his shows. I was unaware that Houdini may have been a spy, but the book runs with that premise - Molly not only helps NYPD solve a few cases, but the Secret Service as well. What I did find particularly interesting were the descriptions of a few illusionists' secrets.

Bless the Bride ends the series with Molly's wedding to her NYPD captain (a dance which started with Book 1) . Before the nuptials, however, she gets in one last case: finding a runaway Chinese bride in Chinatown, in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese women from entering the U.S. I've always appreciated how each book in this series makes Molly interact with so many of the different communities that made up New York City circa 1902, and this one was no different. From settlement houses to "paper sons", I re-learned and re-lived a lot of lessons from my women's history and Asian American history classes!

And by complete coincidence, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Chinese Exclusion Act last month.

There aren't any more books in the Molly Murphy series, but I hope there will be more! Of course, I have half a dozen mystery series where I hope there will eventually be more books... Ah, well. On to the next!