The District sleeps alone tonight

So many friends hyped up The Hunger Games trilogy that I finally had to read the first book. The plot was well-known: in a post-apocalyptic North America, two teenagers from different districts are sent as "tributes" to the Capitol to battle to the death.

For starters, it was written in the present tense, which I hate. It was also predictable, even if the warrior-reality-TV-survival-romance plot was complicated.

I liked the concept, though: the oppressed districts struggle to survive under a brutal regime. The reader can sense a revolution coming in a future book. (Hmmmm, I wonder who will lead it?)

And I loved the fact that traditional gender roles were reversed: the heroine, Katniss, is the fearless archer, hunter, and provider for her family. Her fellow tribute (and predictable love interest) Peeta is the baker's son who is at home in the kitchen; he's the blindly besotted one, wounded and helpless, who has to be rescued by the heroine. It was Girl Power to the extreme. Awesome.

Then I saw the just-released movie. It was remarkably faithful to the book, perhaps because the author helped with the adaptation. Though I'm split on the merits of the few differences between them, I think I liked the movie a little better than the book.

One scene in particular that is very different was the aftermath of the death of Rue, a fellow tribute whom Katniss befriends. While I loved that part of the book (which has District 11's residents scraping together to send Katniss a loaf of bread), the scene in the movie was more powerful (District 11 salutes her , then riots). Not ashamed to say I was crying from the scene where Rue dies, straight through the riots.

The other thing that's missing from the movie is Katniss' own conflicted thoughts about Peeta, her fellow tribute. In the book, it's a little clear she has a subconscious crush on him; in the movie, it's not. Also lost in the movie is Katniss forming a bond with Cinna, her stylist.

The additions in the movie, though, were brilliant: unlike the book, we see exactly how the Capitol manipulates the Hunger Games for ratings and to control the Districts.

The Atlantic had a great analysis of the movie in terms of the Occupy movement and the 99%. So it's hard not to correlate current affairs to the book's development, each time the tributes or the residents of the poorer, outlying districts need basic things like food and health care.

Meanwhile, in the real District of the real Capitol, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act tomorrow....

A world of hopes, a world of fears

Mis hermanas and I loved The Littles when we were kids; The Borrowers we considered the slightly boring ancestor, but liked conceptually nonetheless. So when Mi Hermana en Michigan mentioned that The Secret World of Arrietty was the only movie she knew about it theatres at the moment, it seemed like Providence when a friend in Seattle suggested watching it.

Overall, the story is cute. A boy with a weak heart goes to the country to recuperate, in a house where a family of tiny people-creatures lives. The Borrower girl, Arrietty, wants to explore the bigger world, but puts her family in jeopardy by befriending humans.

There's a dark sort of undertone to the whole story: the boy is going to have an operation and is obsessed with dying; Arrietty's family lives in isolation, not knowing whether or not there are any other Borrowers like them left; the human housekeeper is a bizarrely controlling and manipulative "caretaker". And then there's the one little "wild" Indian-looking Borrower who runs around with face paint and a bow and arrow, which was not cool; this is 2012, and that sort of imagery is a relic from a more unenlightened era.

As a coming-of-age tale, though, I thought it was aptly unresolved: both Arrietty and the boy learn that change is one of the only constants in life, and that their survival depends on that realization.

Polarized pillars

In an alternate New York post-9/11, a committee (representing victims' families, art critics, funders, and politicians) selects an anonymous artist's sculpture garden to be its memorial. The Submission tells the story of what happens when the artist's name is revealed, and it turns out he's Muslim.

Parts of the book were painful to read, because I know it wasn't fiction. The vitriol, the racism, the profiling, the hate, the fear ... it all happened when plans for a proposed Muslim community center met with vicious opposition. And still happens. The talk show soundbites in Waldman's book have all been said somewhere, the articles already printed, the comments uttered repeatedly in real life. But even though it was realistic, it was still gut-wrenching to read.

The characters are assembled right out of a Law and Order episode: the stubborn and egotistical artist who, though agnostic, refuses to answer questions that would not be asked of a non-Muslim; the widow whose role is to represent the interests of the victims' families but finds herself at odds with them; the undocumented Bangladeshi Muslim woman who lost her husband in the towers; the working-class unfavorite son who finds the only meaning in his life in leading an anti-Islam movement.

The cast of individuals in the story spans the wealthy and privileged to the invisible and vulnerable. The changes they undergo as the protests against the memorial mount are, amazingly, unpredictable. Though the community dynamics and identity politics were all uncomfortably familiar (uneasy coalitions, performing for cameras, etc), I was surprised at the twists and turns the characters themselves took.

The book wasn't exactly riveting, nor were the characters especially complicated. Yet I couldn't stop reading because in some way, I was hoping for some minor resolutions in this fictional plot for the mirrored real-life issues and concerns.

Of course, there are none.

Full of grace

I absolutely loved Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, so I brought his debut novel The Virgin Suicides with me to Michigan to read in between toddler birthday parties and gymnastics practices.

I'll admit, I was a little uneasy about the subject of the book, especially given the need for a recent project like "It Gets Better". But when I read the book as a dark comedy rather than a commentary on teenage suicide and the meaning of adolescence in America, it became less grim.

The plot is fairly straightforward, from the first few paragraphs: five teenage sisters all commit suicide within the space of a year. Was it a pact? Was it because their parents were extremely strict? Was it because their peers thought they were reclusive and weird? Was it due to depression? There are no answers, just as there are rarely any answers with a topic as complex as suicide.

The book is narrated by a collective group of neighborhood boys who are obsessed with the sisters; there is no "I" in the storytelling, only "we". Through the eyes of middle aged men recalling their youth, the reader also becomes the voyeur, bears part of the responsibility for both the ostracism and objectification of the girls, and serves as historical record. The narrators, like society, are gruesomely interested in the suicides (even years later) and yet also ironically supplying the social atmosphere in which they can take place. Are the "Virgin" suicides the girls themselves, innocent lives cut short before the passing of decades and declining of health makes their peers nostalgic for a perceived simpler youth or America?

Eugenides is a brilliant writer. His descriptions of little social details and observations are spot-on, hilarious, and oftentimes poignant. Like Middlesex, it definitely kept the reader hooked and engaged by throwing little interesting crumbs down, little tidbits about plot developments.

Perhaps the underlying discomfort I had with the story stems from some long-buried critique of Durkheim, or in the gritty, uneasy reality that this exaggerated tale is a pretty apt portrait of a cultural obsession.

Four of spades

I read the first books in two similar series' at the same time, so I figured I'd do the same thing with the second (and last) books. They were, once again, bizarrely parallel.

City of Secrets: San Francisco, 1940. Tough, chain-smoking, wise-cracking female private investigator solves murders that have a sickening anti-Semitic overtone. Meanwhile, in her personal life, she gets a mysterious note from the mother who abandoned her; she also has to deal with potential suitors who don't necessarily like the nature of her work. She works alone, but her "partner" in solving crimes is a journalist always out for a hot story. Her apartment is a target for the bad guys. There is also a subplot involving eugenics and illegal abortions.

Too Darn Hot: New York City, 1943. Tough, chain-smoking, wise-cracking female private investigator solves murders that have an anti-Semitic undertone. Meanwhile, in her personal life, she tries to confront her painful past with a mother who never loved her; she also has to deal with a boyfriend who doesn't necessarily like how her work takes up all of her time. She works alone, but her "partner" in solving crimes is a cop always out for a hot case. Her apartment is a target for the bad guys. There is also a subplot involving a pregnancy scandal and rape.

Though the two books were so similar, I enjoyed them more than the first books in the series. City's tone was a lot more cynical that its predecessor - the writing style was even choppier and more hard-edged. Too Darn Hot was the same blend of sarcasm and sappy that worked well for the main character.

Maybe it was the blatant contrast between a starkly dark, gritty tone and sardonic but light-hearted irreverence. In the end, Sandra Scoppetone's setting and characters grew on me. Kelli Stanley's didn't.

Truffula oil

I saw The Lorax on opening night with a friend who didn't want to see anything serious. Though I haven't read the Dr. Seuss book in a very long time, I remember the general storyline: a boy wants to know why trees have disappeared, and a mysterious Once-ler reveals that it was his own greed that killed them off many years ago.

In general, I was disappointed and bored with the movie. The addition of an air-in-a-can Big Business industry was something I don't think was in the original Dr. Seuss book, but it did fit rather well for turning the story into a longer animated film. It also gave the movie an evil corporate villain for the audience to rally around.

But the breaks into song and dance were a little annoying and out-of-place, though all the little kids in the audience seemed to love it. (They chair-danced during most of the songs. We were surrounded.) I also thought the little romance between the two kids was a little weird: the plot would have worked fine if Ted, the boy, simply had a curious intellectual interest in trees. Why was it necessary for him to want a tree to impress a girl? Luckily, the movie is short enough that I don't think my entire time was wasted watching it; plus, it gave me a quick break from the coup in Olympia that ate up my time until 3am.

Then I read this BBC analysis and this review of The Lorax and didn't feel so bad.

Hemlock and rank fumitory

I wanted to love Breakfast with Socrates. I thought it would be an amazingly deep, academic journey through Western philosophy and its relevance to modern daily life.

Surprisingly, it wasn't as academic as I expected, which ended up being both relieving and disappointing. Robert Rowland Smith walks through an average day and connects certain aspects (waking up, commuting, having lunch, shopping) to a larger discussion of being and meaning. Since I was familiar with some of the philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Marx), it was a little frustrating that their ideas weren't explained in their complex entirely; and knowing that, I wasn't sure how to put into context the philosophers with whom I was less familiar.

The chapters, each dealing with a different realm of a day, were hit or miss: either I was really intrigued or I was bored. There were even a few instances where the end of a chapter came with an irritatingly moralizing tone (for example, the admonition that you should definitely let your parents buy you lunch, or some of Smith's reflections on the nature of love). However, I did enjoy Smith's writing style: peppered with alliteration and every kind of literary or musical references, he is enjoyably witty. But the book wasn't so much the introduction to applied philosophy as I hoped it would be.

Oh, lady be good

I might be too tired of the wise-cracking, chain-smoking, disillusioned female private eye on the brink of World War II. Either that, or Kansas City just isn't a sexy enough locale for me to love a mystery series set in it.

One O'Clock Jump was a little too vague with some of the characters' backgrounds, and I didn't find the plot all that engaging. The switchblade-carrying heroine certainly has an interesting past, including a stint in juvenile detention. Some of the gaps were filled in in the sequel, though. Sweet and Lowdown was the better of the two - it also had better historical tie-ins (including Wendell Willkie, the Negro Leagues, and Silver Legion).

Though I can't say I loved the books, I didn't entirely dislike them, either. They provided decent enough entertainment that made up for my cancelled-due-to-avalanche-danger snowshoeing plans.

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.