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I found the middle of that one especially good. Also THE phone call.

Just finished the Lacuna, by Barbara Kingslover.

Excellent and highly recommended.

Brief of the storyline:

Boy (Sheppard) born in US in 1916 of an American father and Mexican mother. Mother and father divorce when boy young, mother takes boy to Mexico. The place where they land is on the coast and nearby is a cave which is visible only at low tide. Sheppard discovers the cave (lacuna) is a tube to an outlet on the other side which is an whole different world.

Sheppard grows and comes to live at the home of Diego Rivera from a chance meeting of Frida Kahlo who lived with him. Sheppard becomes a cook there, goes to live with Frida at her place, and eventually with "Lev" Trotsky - yes, that Trotsky.

Years pass, Frida asks Sheppard to escort some of her paintings to the US and he ends up staying, living in North Carolina. He has all along kept a running diary since childhood and begins to write novels about Mexican early history. He becomes a best seller.

Cut to the Dies UnAmarican Activities committee and all that follows it, he is accused of being a Communist and the story then heads toward its ending, which I will let you discover on your own.

Excellent writing, done in the conceit of a retelling of the journals, with letters, by Sheppard's stenographer from N. Carolina.

I read it on Kindle so not sure how many pages, but seemed a moderate length.

Interesting. I'd NOT wanted to read her Poisonwood Bible for years, then a fiend-not Kathy--forced it on me and I really enjoyed it. I'll give this one a try.

Mostly Pat Conroy's South of Broad bored me. A group of high school enemies-before-they-were-friends meet years later to bring home one of their own, a piano player who is dying of AIDS. Of course, they have all become successful or even mega-successful in their chosen fields. And, of course, while they pursue their goal, they reveal all the horrible things that happened in their youth and, in some cases, are still happening. Sadly never once in this melodramatic plot did these events ring true.

But there were spots—some good, some not—that did catch my attention. (But, as you can see, only two of them passed the do-I-really-want-to-talk-about-this test.)

1) The first thing that jumped out at me was—horror of horrors—a grammatical error. "At night, he would take my brother, Steve, and I out …" (page 3) Come on, Mr. Conroy. "Me" is not a dirty word. Regardless of the beating it has taken in the last decade, there are times when it is the proper pronoun to use. Like when it is an indirect object. Like in the sentence here discussed. I found it particularly unnerving to find "I" misused in Conroy's writing because one reason why he has stayed on my hardback-buy-immediately list of writers is his use of language. And, yes. Kathy, even at times in his description.

2) "I was the only kid in the American South whose mother had received a doctorate by writing a perfectly unreadable dissertation on the religious symbolism in James Joyce's equally unreadable Ulysses, which I considered the worse book ever written by anyone." (page 20) Amusing character, the mother. And an amusing characteristic. Conroy gets an "A" for her. But do the Ulysses references amuse and captivate me enough that'll I'll try to read it? Again? Quoth our own Pastor Ag, "I think not."

The book's conclusion was better than a lot of went before it. Mostly the good guys won, and one plot thread ended unexpectedly. Usually "surprise" in plotting is a good thing, but even though I enjoyed this one, I have doubts. It's the resolution of a plot line that's primary at the start of the book, then gets lost, IMHO, in the adventures of the group of high school friends. When the surprise conclusion happens, I first thought, "Cool." Then, "Shoot. I'd totally forgotten that plot thread." I'm not sure I can completely embrace a literary "surprise" whose major surprise involves, "Dang! I'd forgotten that was a plot line."

Anyway, I'll keep reading Conroy, hoping one of his books might again enthrall me as, say, The Great Santini did, but I can't help but wonder if he has told all the stories his life provided him. Or maybe it's time for him to leave his teenage years behind him and find stories in his life after those years.

Have you read Conroy's My Losing Season? It's ages old, but some incredible writing. I don't care about basketball and never did but he made it come alive; I can still hear the squeak of the shoes on the basketball court, and it's been several years since I read it.

When he is bad, he is really, really bad - but when he is good he's amazing.

I think I've read all of them, except the cookbook and a very early one, pre The Water Is Wide. I thnik he began to fade with Beach Music. I read the basketball one and remember some parts of it as being really well written.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed has been on and off my to-be-read list since it was first published in 2001. She's the writer who went undercover to work at minimum wage jobs and prove whether those wages were livable or not. The book is her answer, said answer being, "No!"

I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. (Actually it only made it off the to-be-read list and onto the to-be-read shelf when a friend of a friend who hadn't liked the book forced her copy on me.) I think I'd seen the author on a talk show and not been terribly impressed. I did, however, like the book. I think the reason for my continuing dislike of her is pretty much exemplified by her actions at the end of her stint working as a maid for one of the national housecleaning outfits like Mini Maid or Merry Maid. She finishes that segment of research and tells her fellow workers that she'd not one of them, that she's a writer doing research. Then she's surprised at the lukewarm response her announcement receives. Eventually her co-workers become friendly again when they interpret what she's been doing as a plot against their immediate supervisor. The whole thing mystifies Ms Ehrenreich. And that annoys me. Why? Truth is I'd like a writer to have a little more sensitivity. She joins a group of women, works with them, then announces that she doesn't really need this kind of work, that she's actually a professional just dropping by to see what the lives of underpaid, struggling women would be like? I think she's lucky a co-workers didn't dump a bucket of dirty water on her head.

Specifics:

1) Her charade has allowed her insights into aspects of our society we don't want to think about. "… what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch diggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society." (page 117) Yep. Insight.

2) In a Wal-Mart her job is to re-hang and neatly fold clothes that have been tried on and left in the dressing rooms. The author's view of her job: "No one will go hungry or die or be hurt if I screw up; in fact, how could anyone ever know if I screwed up, given the customers constant depredations?" (page 156) Interesting, but I'm sensing elitist airs on her part that show up way too frequently, IMHO.

3) Laughed in spite of myself: "Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because the mother finally tells him to stop. (page 163)

All in all, I'm glad I read it—and I eagerly await her newest book on the fallacy of positive thinking to be released in paperback.

The premise behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, was too bizarre to pass up, so I started reading. Alternately I was amused and repulsed, until page 101 when boredom overtook them both, and I put the book down. It is, however, illustrated with not-enough pen and ink drawings that are pretty cool.

Damn! I just finished a detailed review of Julie and Julia and managed, through the work of god-damned finger spasms, to delete it. If Mr. Humph can't find it in a back-up area, the review now is: good book. If he finds my hour-plus's worth of work, I'll post it.,

Julie and Julia: take two

(Yes, I'm rewriting. The truth as I see it is that the book is too good to have its review extinguished by the nasty, ol' MS. And I apologize for yesterday's anger and profanity. I was TICKED. Now, back to the review.)

I really liked Julie Powell's Julie and Julia—even if I didn't expect to do so. The thing is that after I'd seen previews and decided the movie Julie and Julia was one I HAD to see, I was in Barnes and Noble and came across the book, which I bought. Then I saw the movie and decided the book was going to be terrible. Why? Mainly because it was based on a blog. Now, books based on blogs may be a wave of the future, but I wasn't ready. Of course, regardless of my state of my mental preparedness, the book kept steadily making its way across my shelf of un-reads. Then it made it to spot one, so I read it. And liked it. Again, why? Reasons follow.

Specifics:

1) I wasn't far into the book before I began liking the author. At this point she's explaining why when she was a child, she never searched for Christmas presents. "… I didn't want to find anything that would prove for once and for all that Santa didn't really exist. I pretty much knew that, but I didn't want to admit it, because what would Christmas be without Santa?" (page 36) I identified with that. Boy, did I identify. When I was around ten, my parents had to resort to trickery to make me stop believing in Santa. Even then, they did it wrong and I refused to stop believing.

2) Here the author is describing the result of her first attempt at eggs in aspic, which started with bone marrow so she could make her own gelatin. I do like people who don't take what they're doing all that seriously.

3) "December descended." I like that. It's alliterative. And December does descend. It's a busy month with tons of things to be done—by those, at least, who indulge in such things.

4) Julie Powell's day job all during the time she was cooking her way through The Art of French Cooking was working for a government agency. She leaves it unidentified but the implication is that it was connected with the 9-11 memorial. One day she receives a call from a woman who turns out to run an S&M dungeon in lower Manhattan. The conversation is a) funny. The woman asks, "'Can I be honest with you?' … (Julie) was intrigued: Can I be honest with you? (italics hers) is not a question you get asked a lot when you work for a government agency." (page 186) At least it amused me.

5) The same conversation is also b) functional to the story. On the next page after the woman describes the desires of one client, Julie says, "She erupted in laughter, and I felt a pang of envy. It's not that I think clog dancing naked for financial analysts is really my bag. But I can't imagine loving my job. I never have." (page 187) And so she's set to "go for it" when the idea of working her way through the recipes in The Art of French Cooking presents itself.

6) "Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don't talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make." (page 251) Don't know if I can go along with that—and I've cooked many of Julia Child's recipes. Anyone out there, have you ever found a food that was "sexy to make"?

7) by the end of the book, I still liked Julie Powell, and that's saying something because I came across many things about her to dislike. The following illustrates why I kept going back to like her regardless of what I disliked. Here,Julie is talking about Julia's death. "… there is no tragedy in such a peaceful death, after such a long and rich and generous life. It's the death that all of us wish for—well, either that or finding out you have a terminal brain tumor and going out and assassinating some plutocratic m-fer who's systematically destroying America's democracy brick by brick, before you get shot down in a rain of glory. Or maybe that's just me." (page 353) Cool, huh?

I have to end with the expected question: so which is better, the book or the movie? IMHO, since the movie 1) softens Julie up a bit so she's more likeable and 2) has Meryl Streep in the cast, I'll vote for the movie. But the book's good, too.