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In fairness, most of the members of my book club liked the book, some emphatically so. It is kind of a weird story line, and that may have impacted my reactions.

okay, I had to look it up just to be sure, "make a leg" is a type of deep bow. I have seen it in reference to addressing nobles/royalty. One website claimed the phrase was used to refer to the cast bow at the end of a performance.
I assume this is an alternate pronunciation/spelling of "farthing", a small denomination british coin. Since he has used "wittles" as an alternate for "victuals", it seems like a reasonable supposition.

Thanks--especially for the making a leg explanation. I'd been looking for a visual and coming up with Disney's Ichabod Crane in all sorts of odd postures.

Also, I knew there was some financial amount circling just under my brain. It was farthing, but until I read your post, it still hadn't come to me.

When You Reach Me, a YA novel by Rebecca Snead, is a pretty good mystery. Actually, I thought it was terrific until it turned all time-travel and new-age-ish. Then, while I guess that element made it a contender for last year's Newberry, I was annoyed because I was having too much fun figuring out whodunit. I never like it when my mental gymnastics are rendered useless. And it isn't like the mystical element hadn't been prepared for. References to A Wrinkle in Time abound. Truthfully though, the book I thought I was reading wouldn't have been award quality. The book I actually read was.

Specifics:

1) There's a brief discussion of the phrase "latchkey child." A page later, the narrator, Miranda, has polished off a bag of Cheez Doodles and says, "After-school junk food is another fundamental right of the latchkey child." (page 5) Took me back. I was a latchkey child, and my memory is that the first activity after arriving home from school was eating.

2) Miranda has done a project which presents possible reasons for yawning. "My own theory, which I included on the poster, is that yawning is a semipolite way of telling someone that they're boring everyone else to death." (page 23) Semipolite? What is our youth becoming? (Not terribly literate, that's for sure. "They" agrees with "someone"? I don't think so. But be gone, Miss Picky. The narrator is in the fourth grade, and the book's tone is conversational.)

3) Of course any new-age YA book is going to have deep and meaningful moments. Actually, I kind of like that. A lot.

4) "Warm almonds sounds (sic) kind of yuck …" (page 111) This time Miss Picky will not be ignored. To the best of my knowledge "warm almonds" is not a collective noun, and I know of no exception to subject/verb agreement rules that says if the writer sees several items as a single identity, those items become a collective noun. Am I wrong? Is there something new?

5) Miss Picky again. Maybe. The book is set in 1979, and it's Christmas. "I had bought Mom … a bottle of purple nail polish with glitter in it …" (page 134) My memory is that glitter nail polish wasn't in vogue until the mid or late nineties. Anyone know for sure?

6) "I walked up a hill where the sunlight seemed to touch everything like it was a hyper kid running all over a toy store …" (page 139) Good simile, IMHO.

Bottom line: If anyone has children or grandchildren* who are fans of Madeline L'Engle, When You Reach Me would make a terrific Christmas present.

*(or is/was a fan him/herself)

47 pages of How to Wash a Cat by Rebecca M. Hale, and I'm outta here. All I can say in defense of my decision to give it a try is it had a really good cover.

Hi Martha! Happy New Year!!

Back at you!

I regret giving up on Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, but I have done so. I’ll lay the blame on the unpleasant medical events of the past month and store the book with thoughts of giving it another try. I did have hopes for it. Phil’s reading group gave it high marks, and I’ve liked several they did. But my history with Kingsolver’s work has not been great. I read one of her early works—Pigs in Heaven, I think—but was not impressed. Years later a friend forced The Poisonwood Bible on me, and, much to my surprise, I loved it. I was ready to give her another try. Perhaps someday both the spirit and the flesh will be willing and I’ll have yet another go at The Lacuna.

Finally! I finished an entire book, specifically Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided. I had expected more from it because I really liked her Nickled and Dimed in America. The major difference in the two, I think, was that while Nickled and Dimed combined interviews with straight research, Bright-Sided was totally reporting on research. I often thought of Alice's comment in Alice in Wonderland when she wonders, "What is the use of a book … without pictures or conversation?" But, differing from Alice who stopped listening to her tutor, I did finish the book. In a general sense Bright-Sided takes on the issue of positive thinking. Is it possible for a person to think his way out of the disease or to a better financial situation? Ehrenreich argues the negative. She had experienced breast cancer and was fed up with pink teddy bears, pink ribbons, and other displays of positive thinking. Personally, having endured many years of people telling me the MS would improve or the treatments would work longer if I had a better attitude, I identified with her a whole lot. I guess that is why I had such hopes for the book and why I was ultimately disappointed. But on to specifics:

General stuff:

1) An interesting discussion, IMHO, of two terms: "Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice." (page 4) I agree. Personally I still have a lot of hope, but positive thinking that contradicts reality drives me crazy. I'll also amend that to say my hope comes from things I think I can still control. Or at least I can do my part towards controlling. Example: the writing. I can still write, but have accepted the fact that I have no control over a book being published or a play being produced. I write something that's the best I can do and then send it out into the cold, cruel world.

2) Then, less than a page later: "The truly self-confident, or those have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success but it is driven by a terrible insecurity." (pages 5 and 6) Finally, maybe I can relax; the MS is not my fault.

3) Ehrenreich shows a healthy dose of cynicism, which I admire. "Virginia Davis of Aurora, Colorado, was inspired to create the Remembrance Bear by a friend's double mastectomy and told me she sees her work as more of a 'crusade' then a business. When I interviewed her in 2001, she was expecting to ship 10,000 of these teddies, which are manufactured in China, and send part of the money to the race for the cure." ( page 23) I don't know about you, but the phrase "part of the money" jumped out at me. How altruistic can one businesswoman be?

4) "The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a right of passage—not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the lifecycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood. … Even the heavy traffic and personal narratives and practical tips that I found so useful bears an implicit acceptance of the disease and the current clumsy and barbarous approaches to its treatment: you can get so busy comparing attractive headscarves you forget to question whether chemotherapy is really going to be effective in your case." ( page 29) I never got caught up in scarves, but I often wonder if my writing is my scarf. It's not dealing with the disease, but is one thing that makes me totally forget about MS and what it is doing.

5) "Two researchers on benefit finding report that the breast cancer patients they have worked with have mentioned repeatedly that they view even well-intentioned efforts to encourage the benefit finding as insensitive and inept." (page 41) I agree, but I force myself to concentrate on the intent of the speaker rather the message itself. Of course, there is the other extreme. Last week a nurse came by to draw blood, and I told her my coughing had returned and she said, "You do know it's the MS don't you?" I told her yes, but missed my line which should have been, "So doesn't that make what I do before the MS wins the important thing?" I always think of my best lines about 24 hours after the opportunity to say them.

6) Ehrenreich often takes on the value of the power of group think, and always I was reminded of a section from a play by Christopher Durang. The narrator is talking about a production of Peter Pan and he describes the following: "The voice belonged to the actress playing Peter Pan. You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter’s about to drink, in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says that Tinkerbell’s going to die because not enough people believe in fairies, but that if everybody in the audience claps real hard to show that they do believe in fairies, then maybe Tinkerbell won’t die. And so all the children started to clap. We clapped very hard and very long. I clapped so hard my hands started to bleed. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, “That wasn’t enough. You didn’t clap hard enough. Tinkerbell’s dead.” I like that monologue. So much for group think.

7) Ehrenreich talks about pastors at the mega-churches who have substituted positive thinking for lectures from the Bible. One attendee is quoted as saying, "We love it. We don't miss a Sunday. The message is always very positive and the music is great." ( page 144.) Don't you just wish the person had gone ahead and ended with, "I'll give it a 72. It has a great beat and you can dance to it"?

8) And don't you love the following: "Until his death in 2008, Sir John Templeton was fond of bringing scientists and the theologians together with the aim of finding common ground in luxurious tropical resorts." (page 166) "… in luxurious tropical resorts" pretty much says to me what the author thought about the whole thing.

9) I remain fond of her humor. "A restaurant not far from where I live calls itself 'The Positive Pizza and Pasta Place,' apparently distinguishing itself from the many sullen and negative Italian dining options." (page 195)

10) Nearing the end of the book, Ehrenreich writes, "a vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in? Positive thinking convinces that such external factors are incidental compared with one's internal state or attitude or mood." ( page 205) Go, Ehrenreich!

Words

1) Neurasthenia. "Neurasthenia was hardly ever fatal the but to some observers it seemed every bit as destructive as the infectious diseases." Dictionary.com defines neurasthenia as "nervous debility and exhaustion occurring in the absence of objective causes or lesions; nervous exhaustion" and Ehrenreich goes on to describe a mistreatment of the disease as the basis for the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." (Thanks, Julia, for getting me to reread it. Its effect lingers.)

2) Chthonic. "… lingering like the echoes of archaic chthonic cults …" (page 132) dictionary.com defines chthonic as " –adjective Classical Mythology, of or pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth." OK . I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've knowingly encountered the word.

3) Genomes. "… This is how we have reproduced our genomes." ( page 199) Dictionary.com: noun, Genetics ,a full set of chromosomes; all the inheritable traits of an organism." On some level I'm pretty sure I knew, that but since I wasn't completely sure, I looked it up.

4) Cormorant. "The cormorant restlessly scans the water for expected splashes …" (page 200) dictionary.com: "noun, any of several voracious, totipalmate seabirds of the family Phalacrocoracidae, as Phalacrocorax carbo, of America, europe, and Asia, having a long neck and a distensible pouch under the bill for holding captured fish, used in china for catching fish." I knew generally; now I know more specifically. But I would've been happy with pelican.


Proofing the above, it seems I got more out of the book than I thought I did. I'll go ahead and recommend it, providing the reader can wade through boring writing.

Sometimes it's fun to wallow in trash. Dominick Dunne's Another City, Not My Own provides a fine opportunity to do so. It's his version of the OJ trial, presented as a novel. At times this format bothered me. Dominick Dunne appears as a character named Gus, who is reporting on the OJ trial for Vanity Fair, which is of course what Mr. Dunne did. At the end of the book his reason for the choice of the non-novel format became obvious when Gus/Dunne/the narrator is killed.

All in all, the book was readable. Stuff:

1) The biggest turnoff, IMHO, was Dunne's incessant name dropping. If there was any chance the reader wouldn't know who he was talking about, he would identify the person—along with who his mother and father were, their children, what motion pictures or television shows they had produced, directed, or starred in, and in what upscale residential area they lived. Incidentally, the worst name dropping occurred during a frequently used (by which I mean in many novels) subplot, which whenever it shows up pulls me out of whatever I'm reading. Gus—I don't know about Dominic Dunne personally—has an ex-wife who has MS. Name dropping and MS converged when one of Dominic's sons was lost in a hiking accident. For four days police searched for him, and during that time Dominic and his other son debated telling their mother about their worries. Finally Dominic decides to, and there's an overly dramatic scene at her bedside. She's lying there paralyzed, and in one paragraph which lasts four pages he talks about everyone they had known in their life—all the parties they had been to and all the but places they had gone. Somewhere in the middle of the marathon paragraph he tells her that their son is missing but, hopefully, not dead. All of you, please know if I'm ever bedridden and you need to tell me something, just do it. Don't bother me with four pages of babel. Another thing I kept thinking during these pages was that William Faulkner can bring off a multi-page paragraph and make it close to readable; Dominick Dunne can't.

2) "You'd be surprised at how much input OJ has the strategy of his defense. Just because he spelled his kid's name wrong in the suicide note, don't ever mistake this guy for a dummy." ( page 145) I'm having trouble with this one because one book I read years ago printed a note that he sent to the defense where he spelled start "starte." Maybe to Dominick Dunne OJ seemed smart. I'm not convinced.

3) At one point someone refers to some trouble Dominick Dunne had with Frank Sinatra. Apparently Sinatra had at some party walked up and slugged Dominick Dunne . In this book he refers to never understanding why. The word "toadie" came frequently to mind while reading this book, and I can understand Sinitra's dislike.

4) Another annoying trait in which Dominick Dunne indulges is overwriting. At one point in the book he meets Princess Diana. She comes up to him and says, "'Don't tell me they've let you out of the trial!" He adds "acknowledging in that sentence who he was and what he did for a living." (page 205) Mr. Dunn, we don't need the explanation. It's completely obvious through what she said.

5) Another problem with overwriting is that sometimes it can insult the intelligence of the reader. "Barbara Sinatra was a stunning, witty blond who Guy had met years before on a yacht in Acapulco when she was married to Zeppo Marx, one of the Marx Brothers." ( page 188) Is that last phrase really needed? Are there are dozens of Zeppos running around Hollywood?

6) Another rather disconcerting device Dominick Dunne users is when Guy comments on how a certain person will show up in the novel he's planning on writing, presumably the book I've just finished reading. Way too surreal for me. At least in this type of book.

7) Towards the end of the book Guy is asked why he thought that OJ ultimately won. He gave credit to Jo Ellen Demetrius, the woman who advised on jury selection, saying, "She understood the brilliance of stupidity." (page 314)


One word was unknown: vitrine. (Gee: word doesn't like it either. It's underlined in red.) "The book was on display in the vitrine." (page 39) www.dictionary says, "a glass display case or cabinet for works of art, curios, etc." Guess neither word nor I am hanging out at museums enough.

Recommend? Nah. Too much has already been written and read about that trial. Why continue to give it publicity?

So, why did I read it? I've read some things about and by Dominick Dunne, none of them terribly impressive, but I was curious about his take on the trial. I imagine it's the last Dominick Dunne I'll read.