But Call Me Betsy

I'm reading this pretty goofy (but fun) book I got at the library called Dear Emma. I'm certain there's a tie-in to the Austen book, but I haven't read  Emma in a while, so I'm not keyed into the parallels. This book is a first-person account of life in college as told by Harriet, who writes an advice column for the school newspaper called "Dear Emma." She's in love with a guy from one of classes who has ghosted away and is now dating her co-worker at the library. I read half of it yesterday in a blink because it's entertaining. This morning, I was thinking about a recent column I wrote for Philadelphia Stories about MFA programs (to do or not to do), and then thinking it would be enjoyable to write a satire of MFA's though this must have been done to death. And then I also dismissed the idea out of hand because it wasn't potentially serious enough for a first published novel. It wonder if other people do this--reject a writing idea...

I'm reading this pretty goofy (but fun) book I got at the library called Dear Emma. I'm certain there's a tie-in to the Austen book, but I haven't read  Emma in a while, so I'm not keyed into the parallels. This book is a first-person account of life in college as told by Harriet, who writes an advice column for the school newspaper called "Dear Emma." She's in love with a guy from one of classes who has ghosted away and is now dating her co-worker at the library. I read half of it yesterday in a blink because it's entertaining. This morning, I was thinking about a recent column I wrote for Philadelphia Stories about MFA programs (to do or not to do), and then thinking it would be enjoyable to write a satire of MFA's though this must have been done to death. And then I also dismissed the idea out of hand because it wasn't potentially serious enough for a first published novel. It wonder if other people do this--reject a writing idea...

Finished a collection of short stories called Barbara the Slut by Lauren Holmes that was funny and engaging and not that deep. There were about 10 stories and maybe all of them were in first person and a few were told from the point of view of a teenager, but not in a cutified way. One story was told from the point of view of a dog. I skipped that one the first time around, but went back to it after I ran out of other stories. Nothing deep about them--I mean, for the title one, you didn't get all of this detail about why the teenager slept with all of these boys--except maybe because she had an autistic brother and over-educated and slightly clueless parents, but I liked that about it--that she was just a girl who didn't really know how to be around boys and thought she had to sleep with them. It reminded me that I don't have to try so hard to give back story or meaning to my stories. That there doesn't have to be some big reveal, but I just have to render it in a...

Reading Eggers'  Heroes of the Frontier a nd wondering why he didn't call it Heroines of the Frontier since the central character, the one whose head we're inside, is a woman--a former dentist who has a loose-bowled ex-husband and two children--one brave and reckless (the girl) and one introspective and protective (the boy). She's at a crossroads in her life and decides to rent a rickety RV and take her children to Alaska to visit her friend/rival, Samantha. I thought I wouldn't like the book that much because I've been mostly reading mysteries, but it is funny and unexpected and not too big for its own britches. I also was resistant to the male author borrowing the female experience to tell the story, but it would be something else completely if the main character were a single dad--you'd have to focus on the weirdness of that, and he would almost be saintified by society for raising two kids on his own--so, I guess Eggers needed her to be a woman. She...

Started a book the other day from the Princeton library's recommended reads and it was atrocious. So bad that I started to worry that I was suffering from some kind of sudden dementia because I couldn't follow the sentences. The cover explanation should have been enough for me not to pick it up. The story is set in Victorian England (I think? They have carriages and parasols, so that's my guess) and the characters include both vampires and werewolves. The two main characters have names I kept confusing--Rue and Widget or something. "Rue" was short for Prudence, but it took me like two chapters to figure that out.  Rue or Prue or Rudence (she was called many names) is a meta-natural, which means that if she touches the skin of a vampire or werewolf, she becomes that creature for a few hours, and zaps the individual's powers for a while. I can imagine the brainstorming that led to this idea. Let's see...I need to come up with a completely different thing...

Finished Jane Steele last night, the book about Jane Éyre as a serial killer governess, although that's an exaggerated description from the book jacket that's meant to cause you to pick it up. She's more like Jane Éyre as Batman--she only does away with those who are nefarious and deserving of death--rapists, child abductors, mass murderers.  The first-person narrator in the contemporary version does address the reader directly, but instead of stating, "dear Reader, I married him," she writes "dear reader, I murdered him." She's not a sociopath though; she feels guilt and hates herself for these mostly random or opportunistic slayings. It's hard not to compare it to another Victorian  Gothic retelling I read recently; Pride, Prejudice and Zombies , which weaved together real text from the Austen novel and sprinkled in zombies. Not enough zombies for me and the book didn't play that up enough somehow. It also had illustrations and I could...

Started reading The Girl on the Train last night and was caught by the totally familiar, depressing existence of the main girl, Rachel. She's in her early thirties, takes the train to London to work every day, and likes to imagine the lives of the people she passes as the train creeps by the apartments. She's mostly interested in one particular couple who seem to have an ideal life. She calls them Jess and Jason, and imagines that they are totally in love and problem free. She's also got a fairly serious drinking problem, brought on by her loneliness. Or maybe the loneliness is exacerbated by the drinking. In any case, the drinking has led her to lose her fiancé and she finds herself becoming more and more out of control with the her consumption, having moments where she blacks out and comes to with vomit on the floor and a cut on the back of her head with no recollection of what happened. Then, one day, she sees the woman kissing another man on her patio, and later the ...

Just finished a book called Mayhem but Sarah Pinborough. It's a suspense novel set in Victorian England around the time that Jack the Riper and the Thames Torso Killer were at large, murdering and dismembering women. In real life, neither were ever caught, but this book focuses on Dr. Bond, a man who helped try to solve the murders. In the novel, he's plagued by an addiction to opium and laudanum, but you get the sense that his sleeplessness and need to numb are due to this evil force that has come to England and wrecked "mayhem" (see title) on the city. The book is interspersed with real newspaper articles from the time, describing the murders. I finished that book in about four days and then yesterday, I checked out the second book in the series, Murder , joking with the librarian that the other rewrote them out of order (mayhem and murder vs. murder and mayhem--she laughed politely but didn't teem to have a clue what I was saying). The second book also fea...

Somehow during my middle school, high school and undergrad education, I missed reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (I can't even write that name without thinking about the movie Young Frankenstein where Gene Hackman keeps correcting the pronunciation of his name, "It's Frankenstein!").  In fact, the only book I can remember easing in high school was Silas Marner by George Eliot (a female writer, by the way). I wrote a paper about it or put on a play about it, or something, and I remember that the little girl's name was Eppie, and she had sausage curls to color of gold. One of my first brushes with symbolism--the gold of her curls mirroring Silas' own love of gold. But I can't recall any other books we were required to read. I read a lot anyway, so I got my Bronte and Austen from the public library or as gifts from my mom or grandma ( Little Women , The Girl of the Limberlost ). We probably read Mark Twain's Huck and Tom and we may have read some...

My ability to hold on to a plot line beyond a month is severely limited, which is good and bad. The bad part is that I think I may have a brain tumor. The good part is that I can read books more than once, always with a sense of de ja vu, like I may have read it before. Some of the time, that's because I'm not reading with great attention, but with one eye on the dog and the other eye closing in tiredness (I read mostly at bedtime). But here's an update on what I've read recently, as far as I can remember it. All of these books came from the wonderful, amazing, fantabulous Princeton Public Library. If that library were a man (or a woman), I would gladly make out with it. 1.  Finders Keepers by Stephen King. This book includes characters from his last volume, Mr. Mercedes , which I also read but can't remember very well. According to Wikipedia, it's the second in a trilogy devoted to this town, these characters. Finders Keepers runs over a slightly familiar...

I read fiction almost every day. I don't read for that long; maybe 15 minutes before I turn out the light at night, but I read fast and in comes cases, I skim even faster, especially if the book is one I don't have a high interest in, but I still want to know how it comes out. You can pick a spot on a page and get a sense of where the scene is--okay, he's still talking to the sister, and then skip over the next few paragraphs until you find another scene change and orient yourself that way. I've raced through a few books this way--usually when the library return deadline is looming and I don't want to check it out again.   The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout. Not to be confused with the movie, The Fabulous Baker Boys . There are no pianos or torch singers in this book. This is a story of fractured siblings, twins and an older brother who has had God-like success as a lawyer. The twins, Sara and Bob are sad sacks; Sara is divorced with a kid whose in trou...

The old saying that "you can't judge a book by its cover," is simply not true, at least as it applies to actual book choosing. It's untrue not just for the reason you might think. I believe you can judge a bad book by its cover, or at least, you can judge whether or not you will be interested in the book. For example, I never pick up a book that has planets and spaceships on it. I also only infrequently pick up books with women in hoop skirts pressed against shirtless pirates. But you can also think a book will be good because you like the cover, and then find that you've been led astray. Most recently, this happened to me with a book that had an arresting image on the front and a promise of a mystery in the description on the back. The story itself was a disappointment. So, the premise is about this artist woman from the city who moves to a small town so that she can focus on her writing. She secures this amazing farmhouse with a giant barn. However, shortly a...

I read Lauren Burkett's The Shining Girls in about a week.Well, a year and a week, because first, I checked it out from the library and didn't finish it, and then I recently found a paperback version for sale at the same library for $2 and so bought it, Do you know about this book? Writer Tana French has endorsed the novel, but I don't necessarily trust her judgment anymore, not after reading The Secret Place , which was a really long literary version of Dawson's Creek without the intrigue or multidimensional characters. The Shining Girls does this odd thing where it straddles two to three genres at one time. It's an historical book about a serial killer who time travels to find and murder his victims, women he sees as" shining;" meaning that they are particularly vibrant and strong, not your typical victim. He doesn't just kill them, he dissembles them, pulling out their intestines and doing the killing slowly, because it turns him on.The her...

We don't often go to the movies, and when we do, I almost always get to pick what we see and Dan goes along for the ride. The last few times, I've chosen movies that are too long and ultimately dissatisfying. The one before Gone Girl was the Tom Cruise blockbuster where he keeps having to live the day over and over, an action packed version of Groundhog Day , minus any attempts at humor or logic. We didn't hate that one--but it was another in a long line of what I call dick flicks, where the cast includes hundreds of men and two women. In this case, the two women neatly fell into the mother/whore dichotomy. One was the mommy of the evil doer and the other was a lovable prostitute. There may have been a third who was a little stronger--the main ninja trainer or whomever, but ends up not being quite as smart or wily as TC, and I think he gets to save her in the end. There's this thing called the Bechdel Test developed by a woman comic where the movie isn't totall...

It's not written in second person, not really--what I mean to say is that the first person narrator spends most of the novel in direct address to a man who is stalking her. With sentences like, "You were waiting for me at the bus stop. Seeing you made my stomach turn over, like a fish was dying in it. You smiled, your perfect teeth reminding me of a wolf from a fairy tale story that ended badly." I made those passages up, but you get the gist. I only read about fifty pages before giving up.  Look, I know it's fiction and we should maintain our willing suspension of disbelief, but I was annoyed that the woman didn't consider going to the police to report her stalker until well into the harassment. And when she did, the police were like, Has he hurt you? Threatened you? No. Then there's nothing we can do. That may be true, I don't know. But it's still annoying to read a book where the suspense created isn't because of an interesting story with comp...

Just finished reading Tana French's The Likeness , the second literary detective novel featuring Cassie Maddox, a weary detective in Dublin. The first was In the Woods --I have no recollection of the plot, as I read it a few years back and the details have since fled my brain. Something about some missing kids, and she and her partner Rob end up finding one of them, but there's a bleak ending. Most of this I recall because it's referenced in the second novel. In any case, this plot centers around a girl who is found stabbed to death near an old mansion outside of the city. The twist is that she's a doppleganger for Cassie, and she happens to be using Cassie's old undercover identity. It sounds a bit on the soap opera side, you know, like when an evil twin suddenly surfaces and wrecks havoc on things, but it doesn't read that way. Cassie, who has transferred out of the undercover life and into the numbing hell of domestic violence, is persuaded to go back ...

I had a hard time getting through this book,  The Church of Dead Girls , by Stephen Dobyns. Not because I was disinterested or the writing was bad or the story wasn't compelling. It was because keeping the characters and their various relationships straight was exhausting. To be fair, the book is about the people of a small town who begin to mistrust each other, and so you can't have like four town members. At least the author didn't do that thing where he named the characters similarly--there wasn't a Todd and a Ted or an Alice and an Anne; everyone had a somewhat distinct identity and role, and yet...There was a reporter named Franklin, whom I kept confusing with the cop, Ryan. Franklin and Ryan. Are those names too similar sounding? It took me half the book to keep them straight. Add to this that they share a common bond of this dead woman named Janice, though I still can't be sure if Janice was Ryan's sister, or his ex-wife or Franklin's girlfriend or ...

Intentional? It's Joyce Carol Oates, so you must consider there may be some forethought. I have an on again/off again relationship with JCO. First of all, it's unacceptable that she teaches at Princeton, I am in Princeton often, and yet I have never seen her. I imagine that in person she is even frailer and more praying mantis like than one imagines. I feel like she would wear a brown overcoat and a plum colored hat, for some reason. I imagine that she might often cover up her hair because (I am also imagining this) she doesn't like how frizzy and unmanageable it is. I only think this because her characters often have frizzy hair, especially the ones you're meant to dislike somewhat. I think she has an arresting look, but it's the kind of attractiveness that maybe was never appreciated? Sometimes, I like her writing a lot, and sometimes, I feel like it's a parody of Southern Gothic writing, as she usually has sentences that read something like, "Daddy d...

I don't know why it is over the last couple of years that I've forsaken most novels about love and family and coming-of-age for the one where ten girls are murdered and one troubled detective tries to solve the case while also struggling with her own demons. I've never really written any genre work around police investigations or crime. The closest I've come is that noir story for Philadelphia Noir . And yet I'm now reading almost only books that are Edgar Award winners or, more often than not, regular mysteries and detective stories that don't spend so much time nursing relationships. Escape, is that what these books are? Anyway, I skimmed one the other day by Lisa Scottoline, a book my mom checked out from the Plainsboro Library and said was a page turner. She liked it okay, but said it wasn't the greatest, so I started it and was immediately suspicious of the set-up, and forced her to tell me if I 'd guessed the plot of the book within twenty page...

I'm reading this nonsense book by Jack Handey (the guy from SNL who writes the "Deep Thoughts" pieces as in "just as bees will swarm about their nest to protect their honey, so will I swarm about my basket to protect my chocolate eggs). Okay, that wasn't very funny, but sometimes, they are. His book is called The Stench of Honolulu and it's just goofy, making fun of the hard boiled detective genre and having a joke of some kind in every paragraph. It reminds me that writing is supposed to fun, not painful. Or that you can write to make yourself laugh, which I can do sometimes.  Here's an excerpt from the book( 3 paragraphs melded together): When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what's in it for me? I had been dating this woman and we were really being in love. I can't remember her name right now, but she's great. I knew Don would ask me again....