Refrigerator Magnets

Here's a picture of the magnets on the NNP refrigerator for "Show Us Your Magnets Monday" over at The Three R's.

No, I don't have any magnetic poetry. I've found that to really have fun with it, I need at least two sets and an unlimited amount of time within a certain parameter--I had a very good time making magnetic poems during one week when I was staying with friends.

Yes, I do have a magnet from Graceland. And Hawaii, London, Cambridge, Paris, Niagara Falls, New York city, South Carolina, Arkansas, Colorado, California, and Indianapolis (the Lord of the Rings exhibit). With any luck, I'll bring back a new magnet from our upcoming trip to Chicago to see the Harry Potter exhibit.

Hippos on Holiday

My family likes to go to the movie theater because we turn our cell phones off (well, Ron at least turns his on "vibrate") and get really immersed in the big screen in the dark. But aside from Harry Potter, there haven't been many movies we wanted to see this summer. We're mostly staying home with our Netflix movies and TV on DVD (we finished the seventh season of Scrubs and started in on the third season of Eureka). But it's just not the same as going to the theater. Last night I passed up watching an episode of The Office, which I've found I don't much like, in favor of reading a mystery I'm enjoying very much and will tell you about later this week (The Language of Bees). There's a certain implied snobbism in choosing a book over a tv show, but I think it's a bit subverted when the book is just a mystery novel--which is why I like this poem by Billy Collins:

Hippos on Holiday

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

You know, as a reviewer I think it's important to make some distinctions between good and bad. If you pick a movie--or a book--thinking it's going to be good, and you find that it's bad, you should say so. But I do think that some of the most recent furor over "honest" reviews as opposed to "positive" reviews can be boiled down to mean-spiritedness.

What is mean-spiritedness? It's being snotty. It's intimating that because you've noticed stuff in a book or movie that other people haven't, you must be more intelligent. It's doing all the stuff that your least favorite English teacher tried to do to you.

What happens if you bend over backwards to avoid mean-spiritedness? You sound wishy-washy and insipid, as if you like everything because you're incapable of making distinctions.

If you want to enjoy movies, or reading, or even blogging, I think it's a good idea to try to like them on their own terms. If you can't get any enjoyment out of them even when you've really, really tried, then say so. But don't go into a hippo movie with your face all scrunched up ready to be bored, expecting validation for your self-fulfilling prophecy. And don't be so cool and laid-back that you can't express any enthusiasm when you find it's a really good hippo movie.

Have you been able to immerse yourself in a book or movie this summer--been able to drink that enormous coke down with great pleasure and no thought for the morrow?

The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

I was ready for some frivolous summer reading, so when I saw The Shortest Distance Between Two Women by Kris Radish among the ARCs I was choosing from at the local College Bookstore, I thought it might be just the thing, a romance. The blurb on the back says "she's put a lot of distance between herself and Samuel, filling her life with work and family....so why does his voice still have the power to make her heart skip?" Well, the blurb is misleading. This novel isn't a romance. It's got more of a "strong woman finds herself" plot; the bit about Samuel is merely an impetus for the main character, Emma, to think about where her life went wrong.

I think maybe I'm not the target audience for this novel. I've been married for 27 years today, and even though I got married younger than any of my friends ("too young" my mother said), that still makes me too old to sympathize with a character who is still trying to find herself and it definitely makes me too bitter to admire the adolescent fervor of phrases like "their passion rising like a fine mist throughout the entire club."

A woman in her twenties or thirties, however, might like this story about a woman trying to define herself against her sisters and mother, even though the main character, Emma, is described as 43 (her mother tells her "I was forty-three once, too. I had dreams and longings and plans and that has everything to do with being female and nothing to do with the year I was born and the fact that I am your mother"). The saving grace of the prose is the interwoven humor. The mother goes on to say "Don't ever be sorry for how you feel. Some people don't feel. Some women--well, heavens, many women--give up feeling. They end up like those little doggie dolls people have in their back windows....that move when the car moves and not when they want to move." Since Emma isn't a mother, there's no real reason she has to go on putting the needs of others before her own--although she does say, at a low point for the humor, that "her biological time clock has ticked her off." I was amused by the fact that the chapter in which Emma and her entire family go to see her niece in a beauty pageant is entitled "Are you Little Miss Sunshine groupies or what?"

The events of the novel revolve around a big and purportedly hilarious family reunion, complete with badly-behaved in-laws, rebellious teenagers, and mothers who organize the food and entertainment. What the family members do when they get to the reunion is supposed to provide the climax for the novel, the pause they need because, as one of them points out, "it was easy to get so caught up in your own life that it was hard to see anything else." The climax fell flat for me, though, partly because only an blooming idiot could have failed to see it coming, and partly because Emma's family strikes me as peculiarly mercenary, auctioning off even the rights to join a family wedding party.

Gardening lovers will enjoy the many descriptions of Emma's garden. This one is my favorite: "red hot pokers are gloriously showy....they multiply because they like themselves so much, Emma thinks, and she is also beyond certain that they are always saying 'The more the merrier. Let's take over this whole damn yard.' And they would if Emma did not thin them out..." The black-eyed susans in her garden also have a lot of personality.

Overall, though, reading this novel was like attending someone else's family reunion, at least for me. I don't have sisters, I'm mostly over that "oh God I'm becoming my mother" stage, and I don't think it's terribly funny or original to hear that someone in a fictional family "went on a sweet rampage and took all the music players, cell phones, and other electronic junk from the teenagers so they would actually talk to each other and the rest of us." Wait, maybe I'm not too old--maybe Emma is supposed to be like the motivational poster available from Despair.com--the one with the sinking ship that says "it could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

This novel will be available August 18, so if you feel the need for a warning about the way your life is going, rush right out. And if you are still worried you're going to turn into your mother? Maybe you do need to read this novel in an effort to forget what Oscar Wilde says: "all women become like their mothers."

The Best of Necromancy Never Pays

I got the idea for a "best of" post from Sophisticated Dorkiness, who points out that it's nice to provide new readers with a selection of the posts you like best, so that when folks new to your blog are visiting, you can show them something besides just what you've been posting that week.

To explain the name of the blog, I always have an abridged version of my first-ever post up on my sidebar ("Just say no to necromancy").

My recent post Record explains a bit about why I blog, and how the reasons I blog have evolved over the past year and a half since I started writing Necromancy Never Pays.

Here's an older post that tells you a little about me and what kinds of books I like, Interview with the Non-Necromancer.

This is a list of poems I think every educated person should know; many of them are available online.


To display the eclectic nature of the blog, here is a sampler of some of the various kinds of reviews I write:

--This review of a science fiction novel, Old Man's War by John Scalzi is one of my more amusing ones, mostly because of the subject matter.

--Here's a pre-Christmas post in which I talk about what's going on in my life and relate it to a poem, "Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is," by one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens.

--Look at this review of some non-fiction books about food, focusing mostly on Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

--This is a review of one of my favorite political novels, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley. Unfortunately, it's not yet outdated.

--Here's one in a series of cooperative reviews done "by the chapter" on an adventure through literary novels that I think is worth examining in detail, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

--I like this review of a young adult novel about zombies by Daniel Waters, entitled Generation Dead, because the author did, and also because I compare the main character to Huck Finn.

--Here's my idiosyncratic review of an anticipated literary novel (Francine Prose's Goldengrove) that ended up being only a tear-jerker, at least for me. Other literary types may say I'm not being sensitive to nuance and stuff.

--Here's my review of a motherhood memoir that tickled my fancy, Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother.

--I shouldn't forget at least one review of a mystery or chicklit novel. Here's one from the latter category, my review of Fifty is Not A Four-Letter Word.

--And here's a review of a good post-apocolyptic satire, Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.

The Summer Day

This has felt like the year without a summer, to me. It's been too cold and rainy to go swimming on each of the three days we had a long enough uninterrupted span of time to do it. Both my kids will be at the high school this fall, so they had to schedule a summer gym class and now we're on to band and soccer practice before school starts (way too early) on August 21.

Part of the reason our schedule has been so relentless is that Walker, who is 13, is having "growing pains," and it's affected his soccer game and therefore our lives. I took him to see a sports medicine doctor in June, who prescribed physical therapy. Yesterday the initial course was finished, but we had to schedule another, because his pain when he runs has persisted, despite exercises and stretching. The physical therapist thinks that his patellar tendonitis (bones grow first and then muscles, ligaments and tendons have to catch up, so the tendon that goes over the kneecap can get over-stretched and irritated) has improved, but now he has pain right where the ligaments and tendons attach to the kneecap, which means the growth plates can be affected. That sounds scary to me, but so does telling a 13-year-old boy that he can't play sports for the next few years.

Doctors and therapists say he can play, but that it would be good for him to rest the knee for "a month or so." He's done that for several months since the pain started to affect his ability to run last April, and it hasn't yet made the inflammation go away. Also he's not likely to stop growing anytime soon (we're a tall family, and he's at the very start of the typical male growth pattern). So what can we do? Last night he went to the first of daily 3-hour practices for the high school soccer team, of which he will be the youngest member. At the end, everyone had to run a mile, except for Walker, who was allowed to run only 1/4 of a mile "so he wouldn't tear anything in his knee," the team captain said to him. He came home in pain, had aspirin and three applications of ice, and got up limping stiffly this morning.

So you see why I'm scheduling hour-long therapy appointments for him until school starts, despite the way it makes the rest of the summer all about driving around town and showing up for appointments on time.

I'm paying attention to where everyone has to be when during the day and wondering what else I should have done during the night, like the speaker in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Having no chance to be "idle and blessed," I'm still second-guessing "what I have been doing all day." Don't most mothers? Isn't it almost too much sometimes to have to plan not only what you're going to do with your own "wild and precious life," but also how much you can allow others to do with theirs and still keep them safe and whole to decide for themselves later?

The Somnambulist

The Somnambulist, by Jonathan Barnes, is a book I wouldn't have picked out myself, although not one I expected to dislike. It was loaned to me by a friend who said that in it, necromancy doesn't pay. So there was the hook.

It's a neo-Victorian novel, and almost every reviewer has noted the similarity of its opening paragraph to actual Victorian-era mystery/horror novels, in which it is important to establish the credibility of the narrator in order to present ensuing implausible events as true. But on the second page, the narrator admits that he will lie in the course of the narration of events and asks "how will you distinguish truth from fiction?" Well, it would help if you cared enough to sort it all out, which I didn't, by the end.

The novel is populated with a vast assortment of eccentric characters. The main characters are Mr. Moon, a magician/detective with a mysterious past never explained, and his assistant, the somnambulist, who never sleepwalks or speaks, and who is enormous and bald, drinks lots of milk, and doesn't bleed or die when stabbed. Other eccentric characters include the albino Skimpole and the scarred Dedlock, who work for the government Directorate, a Mr. Cribb who keeps giving Moon advice and claims to live backwards in time, a cheerful constable named Merryweather, a criminal called Barabbas who gives Moon advice, Moon's housekeeper Miss Grossmith and her boyfriend, Moon's sister Charlotte, who can't be near him for too long or "bad things happen" (making me think of the movie Hancock), two assassins named Boon and Hawker who like to dress and talk like British schoolboys, a group of spies who like to dress as Chinamen, various deformed men and women who display their deformities for a living, a group of pantisocrats, who dream of a Coleridge-inspired Utopia, and the Archivist in charge of the Stacks, a mysterious source of information available to all the major characters.

My major complaint about this novel is that not enough is explained. It begins with a man being enticed into a room at the top of a tower by a beautiful woman who promises him sex for money. When he gets to the top, he finds a gorgeous bedchamber and a feast with champagne. The woman begins to undress, and then the man's mother appears and a horrible figure bursts in through the window and pushes him to his death. Of all these elements, only the horrible figure is explained at all (he turns out to be one of the deformed people, hired for the task).

The part about Samuel Taylor Coleridge being preserved in some kind of steampunk apparatus and then reanimated is briefly amusing, until he begins to lose body parts and spew green poisonous liquid. His climactic battle with the somnambulist doesn't have any particular point, except that the somnambulist is clearly the only person who can stop him, once his creator has figured out that necromancy doesn't pay. The unreliable narrator--who at this point has been revealed as the necromancer--says that the somnambulist "worked steadily, certain that the city was in danger, knowing it was his duty to protect it," but I saw no reason why he would feel such a duty. There's some muddled metaphor about sleepers and dreamers and the Moon, culminating with Moon dreaming of the somnambulist, but I didn't find it particularly illuminating or interesting, particularly as the title character's relation to sleep-walking (either literal or metaphorical) is never clarified.

I found the most horrifying characters in the novel, the assassins Boon and Hawker, to be the most fun. When they come to kill someone, he sees that they are
"grown men, one burly, the other slight, both clad in flannel shorts, their legs knobbly and ridiculous.
'Morning,' said Boon.
'What ho,' said Hawker.
'Awfully sorry to bother you so early.'
'Couldn't be helped.'
'I'm afraid we're something of a deus ex machina.'
'Don't chatter on in Latin, old man. You know it's all Greek to me.'
Boon chortled dutifully. 'Hawker's got a wizard new penknife. Corkscrews and bottle-openers and a how-do-ye-do to get stones out of horses' hooves. Would you like to see it?'"
The reader is horrified by the offer, as the penknife has just been used to kill another character.

If there were more of that kind of fun in the novel, it would be different (perhaps more like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, to which it has often been compared). And if there were more of the Sherlock Holmes-type mystery, with each clue having some significance, it would be different. If the unreliability of the narrator revealed more, as Huck Finn continually does, this would be a different--and better--novel. Ultimately, though, I found it to be a little of this and a little of that all mixed together in what turns out to be a murky brew. It probably won't hurt you to drink it down--it's not that potent--but it's not a recipe you'd want to try a second time.

There is a newly-published sequel, The Domino Men, but even if it explains some of the many mysteries left unsolved in this one, Barnes has already lost me as a reader.

Seven Books I Wouldn't Normally Read

If I read seven books I wouldn't normally read, does that mean they may be books I won't read normally (in small bits with a cat on my lap)?

Looking at the blog of someone who entered the Stieg Larsson book giveaway (the blog is entitled You Weren't So Jumpy in the Old Days, Steve), I discovered a contest on Shelf Monkey about reading seven books that you would normally not read, amusingly corresponding to the seven stages of grief. This is better than my "read one book you think you'll disagree with this summer" idea! So I'm subsuming my little idea into his bigger one. Here are the stages of the challenge, as its author describes it:

Shock (one review)
Denial (two reviews)
Bargaining (three reviews)
Guilt (four reviews)
Anger (five reviews)
Depression (six reviews)
Acceptance (seven reviews)

By the end, those who have finished this grueling course will find themselves spiritually cleaner, and emotionally more well-rounded. And you'll be able to proudly hold your head up and say, "Yes, I have read Dan Brown, thank you, and this is why he sucks!"

Personally, I like Dan Brown, especially for something like airplane reading. I figure that among the other advantages of joining this challenge is the possibility of discussing why we pick out the kinds of books we usually read.

By the way, I'm excited by the number of people who have entered the giveaway. I'm choosing to believe that each one of you is at least an occasional lurker, and it's good to know your names.