2008 Book Recommendations

I read 55 books last year (including 2 I abandoned. Life is too short to stick with books that aren’t engaging). 4 of these were classics, 4 non-fiction, 22 young adult, and 4 kid lit (that I didn’t read aloud).

The notes below are notes from right now. Notes from when I read the book and the rest of the books I read this year are all at Good Reads. The links below are clickable.

The 5 Stars:

Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories Strout, Elizabeth – This is my big recommendation. Excellent excellent character development, and I have never before so much loved reading such a disagreeable character. Three cheers for fantastic writing.

The Hearts of Horses Gloss, Molly, More excellent writing here. Molly Gloss is an Oregon writing who Ed and I both quickly snatch up as soon as she puts out a new book. I must admit I hate the title. Don’t let that stop you from reading this one.

The Pesthouse Crace, Jim – I have a soft spot in my heart for apocalyptic novels and it seems I read a bunch of them this year, but The Pesthouse stands out. I liked it better than The Road which I also read this year and I also liked.

Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal Peet, Mal Tamar

is categorized as Young Adult, but I don’t know that it belongs there. The narrative is setup as a teenager on a quest or a bit of a wild goose chase for details regarding her grandparents' histories in WWII. Chapters alternate between a page turning WWII Dutch spy story and the modern day unfolding of the consequences of that spy story. Well put together.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret Selznick, Brian. Kid-Lit. This story won some awards, and also received some serious criticism for being a little thin on substance. Okay, maybe it was a bit thin, but it is a heck of a good tale laid out in narrative and pictures in a way I’ve never experienced before.

Some 4 Stars:

The House at Sugar Beach: A Memoir Cooper, Helene –African memoir. Cooper comes to some great conclusions about her privileged (for a time at least) childhood. And it is now fun coming across her byline in the NY Times every so often.

The Sparrow Russell, Mary Doria – Science Fiction isn’t exactly my thing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like some of it. This is fantastic and thoughtful. I also read the sequel, which is also pretty good.

The Senator's Wife Miller, Sue I don’t remember the Senator’s Wife’s name, but I liked her.

Astrid and Veronika (Let me sing you gentle songs) Olsson, Linda - The tales of two women who shut themselves away from society and find friendship in each other. (okay, sounds a little lame, but it’s good).

Cowboy: The Legend of Colton H. Bryant Fuller, Alexandra –(non-fiction) As it turns out I love Fuller’s writing. Here is a story about a guy I would normally have zero interest in, and her attention to his life and what happens to him makes for a great book. Ed had some quibbles with this guy as a sympathetic character, and I guess he’s right, but it’s still a great story.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia Gilbert, Elizabeth – (non-fiction) I know lots of people who read this book and usually thay all hate a section, but love the rest of the book. They all hate different sections, mind you, so I guess it is a book with something for everyone.

Blankets Thompson, Craig – On the recommendation of a friend of one of Ed’s coworkers, I decided to dip a toe into a new genre - graphic novels. This was pretty good, but I haven’t pick up any more. I am now able to understand, though, what people are talking about when they discuss graphic novels and how they tell a story differently than other books. If you have any interest in checking out graphic novels here seems to be a good place to start.

Young Adult:

Sweethearts Zarr, Sara Here is a case where I read an author’s first book and I say to myself, hey, that was pretty good, I’ll bet the next one is even better. This is an excellent 2^nd book.

Chains Anderson, Laurie Halse – This just won an award for YA historical fiction. A far more accessible, female version of Octavian Nothing. Both are New England revolutionary slave fiction. They center on the oxymoron that all men are created equal except for black people. Very good.

Paper Towns Green, John

While the central female teenage character is a bit of a cliché, Green has interesting things to say about shallow lives. Also, the book begins and ends with great road trips.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Alexie, Sherman Won last year’s Printz Award (? I can’t remember which awards, and I’m not going to look it up). Excellent and funny and hard all at the some time.

Ghost Boy Lawrence, Iain – What happens when an ostracized albino teenager in the 1950’s joins a failing circus. By the way, he doesn’t join as a freak show feature.

1.20.09

... whew ...

Canned Food You Can Believe In

This morning, our family went out and about in southeast Portland, gathering cans for the Oregon Food Bank. This was not my idea. Or Christie's. Or Wrig's. We were invited by our neighbor who organized an Obama Service Event in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

So we served.



First, let me give you the narrative: The sun shone brightly - as it ought to on a day of national service - but it was nasty cold; we are in the midst of our annual two week stretch of bitter east wind. We gathered at a local elementary school with about 125 adults and kids, where we heard poetry and mumbled through a couple of folk songs. We bumped into our friends Abigail, Asher, and Ezra, and their friends Sara and Isaac. After we apologized for bumping into them, we joined forces, grit our teeth against the wind, and started knocking on doors.



It felt very much like a daytime version of Trick or Treat. The kids raced ahead, banging on doors, waiting a fraction of a second for people to not answer, then racing on ahead again. Lots of people weren't home (vacation? brunch? gathering cans for the food bank?) but we managed to gather two full bags of food (in addition to the bag of broth and beans we brought with us). The kids did the lion's share of the work. As soon as the door would open, Asher would shout out "Give us food!" Wrig, in her calm, quiet way, would say "We're ... um ... gathering cans for ... the Oregon Food Bank" and Asher would then chip in "So that the whole city can have food!" They were very persuasive and we received far more donations than rejections.



I'm trying to wrap my brain around the fact that my kid, who has trouble looking my colleagues in the eye when they say hello to her, fearlessly solicited two bags of groceries from total strangers. Go figure.






By the end of the day, the group of 125 or so adults and kids collected 125 or so bags of food. We filled a Subaru (of course) and a big ol' gas guzzling suburban with groceries. Not bad for a couple of hours work.



My parents - who constitute roughly 33% of the readership of this blog - have doubts about our newly elected fearless leader. Me too. I can only think of one elected official I've ever trusted (and she constitutes another 33% of our readership), but unlike Clinton - who only asked to feel my pain - and Bush - who asked me to go shopping - Obama has asked me to do better. My students, who are currently revising essays about society's obligation to the poor, have asked me to do better.



So today we served.

Some Sunshine

The sun has been showing it's face every afternoon all week. It is refreshing. I weeded earlier this week, and I've decided to plant some beets and carrots this weekend. My Gardening by the Moon Calendar tells me it is a good weekend to plant things that we grow for their roots. One can always hope that we packed all of winter into two weeks in December, and it'll be spring like from here on out. I like the gardening by the moon, because it gives me a to do date for my gardening. I utterly fail to have any clue about the theory, nor do I manage to follow up with fertilizing and other plant care except for mostly consistent watering, but my garden and I get along just fine.

We've been getting a few more visitors than usual after the YIR letter, and this year we didn't include the link for my Flickr site where most of the updating action really is, so here the link is. Christie's photographs.

At our House

If you lose at Dominoes you have a Domino Jail built around you.

But you can still have visitors.

Hey, Wrig, Someday You Should Ask Me About That Time I Almost Got Us Killed

Alternate Title #1: When Book Burning is Okay
Alternate Title #2: Why We Should Never Hike Without Women

Prologue: What Our Wives Could Have Figured Out The Easy Way
Do not go on a 3.4 mile hike when it is 34 degrees outside.
Do not leave without sufficient cold weather gear (you know, like gloves).
Do not leave without good snack.
Do not leave lunch in the car (seriously, four guys in the group and we leave lunch in the car?)
Do not take the hike in reverse order than the book suggests.
Do not leave before reading everything the book says about the hike.
Do not pick a hike from the book that's already let you down twice.
Do not ignore the only girl in the group, particularly when she is blessed with her mommy's GPS genes.

Let the story begin:

About two minutes into our hike, we hit a fork in the road: one side goes up, the other goes down. Jeff and I think about it for less than a second: why end your hike with an uphill climb? Let's go down now and do the hike in reverse. Yes, indeed. Why end your hike with an uphill climb?

About thirty minutes into this hike, I had this thought, pretty much verbatim: This has got to be the best hike I've ever taken. It's so beautiful - the hills and trees are covered with snow, but the path is in great shape. It's so cold that the mud is frozen solid, so it's not slippery at all. I don't usually like Forest Park because the trails aren't well marked [emphasis added], but this path has been great so far. I can't wait to get home and blog about it.

And for a long time, I remained quite enamored of the hike. It was long, sure, but mostly level. If Wrig hadn't underbreakfasted and I hadn't underpacked our snack, I would have classified it as an easy hike. Yes, for a long time, it was a pretty easy hike.

At one point in our hike, at about the 267th switchback I believe, Wrig points at what looks like a frozen waterfall to me and says, "I think that might be our path." I reply, "No, that's an 'unmarked trail.' It looks steep and 'narrow' and has too many 'twists and turns.'" Jeff chips in: "Let's stay on the Wildwood Trail. It's clear and well marked."

About a mile later (all distances, except for the big ones at the end, are guesstimates), I begin to get a little nervous. We should have hit the Trillium Trail by now. Every time it looks like we're headed in the right direction, we switchback to what feels like the very wrong direction. About half a mile after that, Jeff and I exchange significant glances. I am not alone in my thinking. Unfortunately, we are alone in the middle of Forest Park, a very large place indeed, filled with not very clearly marked paths.

So here's the situation: It's about three in the afternoon on January 4th. It was 34 degrees or so when the hike begin just before noon. Nobody's eaten lunch. We've shared our apple (three ways) and finished off the dozen crackers we've brought. One of us doesn't have gloves. Nobody has snowpants. We have some water, but not much. To my knowledge, nobody has a flashlight or matches. It's going to be dark before long and shortly after that it's going to snow or - worse, rain (at least snow doesn't soak your clothes immediately). We do have a cell phone with intermittent reception, but what are we going to say? "Hi, we're lost ... somewhere ... in the middle of the largest urban park in America. Come get us!" That's didn't seem like a viable rescue strategy.

I was never actually afraid for our lives (that may be a greater reflection of my well honed ignorance than on our actual safety) but I was very afraid of having one of the shittiest hikes ever. Oh, and being late for work on the first day after Winter Break. And, even though Jeff and I did our damnedest to keep it a secret from the kids, I think Wrig at least had some idea.

Exactly(ish) 1.9 miles later, we find a sign that tells us we are, in fact, on the wrong path. It doesn't tell us how far we are from the right path becuase that would break Forest Park's "poorly marked path" rule. In fact, the area that would normally say "You are here" has been totally whited out. What looks to be the shortest, safest route out of the park has also been wiped clean so we don't know if it would actually take us out of the park. By triangulating the map in our hiking book with the map on the sign and our deepest fears and hopes, we decided that the best thing to do was to come back the way we came and "always bear left."

Our first opportunity to bear left? It was at what our beloved hiking books described as an "unmarked trail ... narrow ... with ... many twists and turns." It is the spot that my daugther identified (3.8 miles ago!) as the way home. God, I love that girl. It turns out our hike ended with a quarter mile hike ... um, uphill. It was by far the steepest part of the trail. Why end your hike with an uphill climb indeed.

Our kids are amazing. Five hours. 7.24 miles (according to Jeff's calculations this evening, from the warmth of home). No lunch. Minimal snack. Dumb, dumb Daddies. And yet they survived. They complained, yes, but mostly before we discovered we were lost. They were total troopers on the last 2.25 miles.

So. The book. The book that sends in search of an unmarked path in a forest filled with unmarked paths. The book that has accompanied us on three failed hikes. I'm not sure that today's debacle is entirely the book's fault but, if it's not a badly written book, it surely is a jinx. Wrig and I are understandably very angry at the book. I say burn it. Literally. I want to use it for kindling on our next camping trip. Wrig, who's nicer than me, says recycle it. Christie thinks we should donate it to some other future victim - I mean Goodwill.

What's your opinion?

To my Mother: the Weekend Getaway Report

Eleven months ago my folks gave Ed and I a weekend getaway for Christmas. The weekend after Thanksgiving we lined up the babysitting and cashed in.

We headed to Yachats on the coast and paid way more for the bed and breakfast than we normally would.


The view from the room:


After poking around at the rocks on the beach our first evening, we headed into town for dinner. One of the reasons we like Yachats is that they have a great restaurant with organic, healthy food scattered about a menu that includes fried food. Yum.

Breakfast at the B&B was also fantastic, with a bunch of fresh fruit and ramekins of scrambled and baked eggs. Oh, and good coffee is always a winner. We stuffed ourselves and went out for a hike on the St Perpetua trail in the Suislaw National Forest at Cape Perpetua.



We hiked in and out of fog until we made it to the top of the hill (mountain, cape, bluff, promontory?). Then the sun burned through and we could see from where we started the hike.

Can you see the little visitor's center there in the bottom left? It was a good hike. I'd love to say it was great to break out of little kid pace and really hit my own stride, but last summer Wrigley really did better on the Black Butte hike than I did. At least I never complained or asked Ed to tell me a story.

At the top of the trail is a CCC shelter. If I remember what the sign said correctly, 5 men brought all the stones up and built over several winter months. Yikes! The lead guy on the project said it wasn't hard, it just took patience.





Before we left, Wrigley made hugs for us to take with. They went on our hike and to lunch (which was also in Yachats, at a place less organic, but still very yummy).



After lunch we hit the coastal areas of Cape Perpetua. We've been here before with Wrigley (who was a wee toddler, but already discovered that she loved clambering over rocks). The waves here crash against basalt rock and create caves and caves whose roofs fall in and become wild inlets with names like Devils Churn and Spouting Horn. The hiking trail is called Restless Waters.






Two more views of the coastal capes. One from the top,


and one from the bottom


We had dinner in Florence, the next town south of Yachats, at yet another fantastic restaurant, one highly recommended by the B&B hostess. The drive was a bit harrowing, managing the Highway 101 curves in some pretty good fog. We drove past and saw the light of the Heceta Head Lighthouse. We're planning a yurting trip near there in a couple of weeks, so we'll get to explore that with Wrigley (we also decided to go back to Cape Perpetua then to see a Giant Sitka Spruce and Devil's Churn with her. The Sitka is 15 feet in diameter!).

Sunday morning was eggs benedict with smoked salmon, and I read in those adirondack chairs while Ed wrote. Since we were visiting the Oregon Coast and it was winter, Ed and I had planned on being stuck indoors - playing games, working, reading and watching stormy seas. We didn't get much of a chance to do those things this time around. The weather on Sunday was warmer and nicer than it had been on either of our two coast trips this August!

After a slow morning getting going, we headed back to Portland, planning to hike on a trail a few miles inland. After driving 7 miles up a one lane forest road, we discovered that the second forest road we were to take was closed. By the looks of things it had been closed for a while.


The actual trailhead was to start a mile and a half away. We explored a little ways down the one-time road, and then decided we didn't want to spend a mile and a half each way on this pseudo trail.





After half an hour we hopped back in the car and headed the long 7 miles back down the forest road. The hiking book we found this hike in was over ten years old. We've decided to retire it.

At the bottom of the hill and after the forest service road (did I mention that the road was partially paved, but mostly gravel), we started to hear a Funny Noise coming from the wheel well. Can't be good if I'm capitalizing it. We pulled over to the side of the road and examined all around the tires. I hate when my car makes Funny Noises. Especially when there is no Big Stick to explain it. We were hoping to clear away something, but no luck. We drove on and then, luckily after driving fast enough, the Noise stopped. Hooray.

Not so fast....

Another 50 miles along and the Funny Noise became a Big Screeching Scraping Noise that seemed to get worse when I turned the wheel. We had just passed up lunch in itty bitty town number 8 with it's a not-fantastic restaurant, and we were about 15 miles out of the next town which might have two not-fantastic restaurants and a closed on Sunday auto shop.

Really, it has been so long since I had any car trouble, I barely know what to do. Well, we wandered about town (tire squealing all the way) and happened upon an Napa Auto Parts that was open and that had an employee-who-knows-a-guy. The Guy works in his shop 7 days a week even though he isn't open 7 days a week, and surely he'd take a look at our Big Screeching Scraping Noise. Sure enough, the Guy jacked up our front end, took off the tire, banged around a bit and eventually knocked loose a well polished pebble that looked suspiciously like Forest Service road "paving" gravel. All with the assistance of one 4.5 year old helper. We took the pebble home and put into a jar where hopefully it will never have any other troublesome friends.

Whew! Back on the road again we had a decidedly not-fantastic fast food lunch at 3 o'clock, waded through some good heavy traffic (oh that's right, it's Thanksgiving day weekend), and were home finally at 5, 6 hours after leaving the coast.

Back at home we got the report. Wrigley is tired of Mac and Cheese and Marble was not pleased with our having left. She threw up about 5 times and didn't use the litter box at least once. Not a very friendly hostess, to say the least.

Outside and In