*All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost...*

As many of you know, my life has changed dramatically in the last year.  I became a mommy, we moved to our first single family home (with a yard!), I bought a new (to me) car, and (soon) my job is moving out of state.  Last January when I realized all of these life events were going to happen in the next year and a half, I panicked.  Who wouldn't?  New home, new family member, new commute, new job?  Eek.  

Over the course of the year, though, we have been immensely fortunate.  We have the most incredible network of friends, family, and acquaintances.  Without all of the love and support that has coming pouring in over the last year, I  would still be in that state of panic.  Although things aren't totally settled yet (my job change will occur over the spring and summer), I think things are starting to feel more normal.  Still, sometimes I cannot believe how different my life is this December from last.  A few days ago I was taking my dogs for a quick stroll trough our new neighborhood while the baby napped, and felt a little like a ghost watching my own life.  Whose house is this?  Do I really live on this quiet deadend street?  Is this incredible little baby, who I love more than I ever could have imagined loving anyone, really mine to keep forever?  

Then, this morning JRR Tolkein's often quoted poem popped into my mind: "All that is gold does not glitter..." YES.  This should be tattooed on my forehead.  My life has been an incredible series of amazing accidents.  Many of my most happy events were accidental occurrences.  Some examples:  finding Salem, meeting my husband, my current employment.  Many times, though, events immediately preceding these occurrences, appear to have negativity associated with them.  I wouldn't have found MG if it weren't for a terrible breakup a few weeks earlier, I wouldn't have found my job if I didn't leave my preschool classroom in tears one day... You see?  These "gold" events did not immediately "glitter".  

The next line of this poem also describes my life this year.  Have you seen the movie "Wanderlust"? You know, the one about a chick who can't decide what to do with her life?  Should she pitch a movie to HBO? Maybe a jewelry maker? A children book illustrator? An ice-cream store owner? 

Yes.  That's me.  Exactly.  I've talked about owning a cupcake store, opening a book store, being a preschool teacher, teaching high school English, running an animal non-profit, getting another office job because it pays the bills...  My hobbies are endless - I'm not a pro at any of them, but every so often I like to knit, play guitar, paint with water colors, dance... I'm an endless wanderer.  And I love that.  So, with this next year, I'm going to continue being that endless wanderer, and remember that I'm not lost.  The gold will glitter when it's time, and maybe I will find my way eventually.  But, if I don't, that's ok, too, because I have all of you.  Thank you for all of your kindness and support this year.

Cheers to an amazing 2013, and hopes for an even better 2014.

Salem's Lot by Stephen King

Don't hate me.

I am not a Stephen King fan.  

I have read exactly 1.5 of his books and hated them both.   The first was Gerald's Game upon recommendation of my husband, back when he was just a boyfriend - almost ten years ago.  The second was Salem's Lot - a recent recommendation for a good October read.

I didn't finish Salem's Lot even though several of you said, "It's a great book!"and "Robyn! It's about VAMPIRES! You love vampire books!" ... (dot, dot, dot...).

King's stories are horror stories, as everyone knows, but the monsters in the stories aren't what is actually scary.  What is actually scary is how hateful and despicable everyone is in his books.  His characters make me sick to my stomach.  The people in his books aren't any better than the monsters he creates.  They should know better, but their actions prove they are terrible human beings. 

As I sit here staring out my office window, looking at the leaves falling from the trees that hover over my backyard, I keep thinking about the recent news about a teacher who was murdered by one of her students.  Why would I want to read a book about hateful people who purposefully hurt each other when I see enough of it in real life?  My quiet little city is impacted enough by murders and hatred (um, Salem Witch Trials anyone?).  Honestly, I don't want to read a book about people with no hope, with no compassion, with no... dreams.  

So, as much as I respect King for being a beloved horror writer, and as much as I love that he uses New England as the back drop for his books... and as much as I loved the movie Carrie as a teenager... I've given up on his books.  

Re-reads?

I keep thinking about a few re-reads... One because I think I didn't like it, but several bookish friends whose recommendations I trust loved it so I must be mistaken... And one (a series) because it is awesome and I don't want to forget any details when the next book comes out (ahem... George...) It feels like such a commitment!  I am curious of others re-read...

Movie: "Oz the Great and Powerful"

As I've mentioned several times, my favorite movie growing up was The Wizard of Oz. Grampa Knights had it on laser disk, and we watched it practically every time we visited him.  He finally he put it on VHS for us.  I knew every line and sang my heart out with every song. I have no idea what it was about Oz that made me fall in love, but it did. We also watched Return to Oz, the very scary sequel, and loved it.  My family still references it in every day language ("Tie my feet together!")... and I think it, subconsciously, might helped contribute to a middle school obsession with the movie, The Craft.

When it was announced that Disney was creating a new version of this childhood favorite, Oz the Great and Powerful, I was quite excited.  Life got in the way, and I did not get to see it with my family in the Berkshires, but Mike and I did get it on Netflix and watched it.  Because so much time passed between when the movie came out and when I saw it, I had read lots of reviews.  In particular, I'd read that it was terrible - making a mockery of the wonderful female hero of The Wizard of Oz because of weak female leads and a wimpy love story plot.  I guess you could say that I was a little surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did.

I expected this to be a 2/5 stars movie, but it was more like.. a 2.5/5 stars movie.

James Franco did a great job portraying the wizard in his youth, and Michelle Williams made for an excellent Glinda (although it was very confusing when the Wizard kept calling Glinda "Wanda"... I thought there was another character!)  (Also confusing... the fact that the writers called Glinda the Good Witch of the South, like in the novels, instead of the North like in the movie!)  I also enjoyed the switch from black & white to "technicolor" in a similar fashion to the original.

Mila Kunis's Wicked Witch (sorry... spoiler there... she's the Wicked Witch, sorry...) was weak.   It killed me that she became the Wicked Witch out of jealousy ("Green with Envy..." so predictable) and that her character in that state was so CGI'd that she matched the background more than anything else.  I also found a plot mistake... which I'm pretty sure I've never done before!... and I kept getting distracted by it:

In the original Wizard of Oz, the field of poppies outside the Emerald City is put in place by the Wicked Witch in hopes of keeping Dorothy and friends from meeting the Wizard.  I can vividly remember her waving her hands over the magic ball:

Wicked Witch of the West: And now, my beauties, something with poison in it, I think. With poison in it, but attractive to the eye, and soothing to the smell.

Wicked Witch of the West: Poppies... Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Sleeeeep. Now they'll sleeeeep!

The writers really thought Oz fans wouldn't notice such a big mistake...?

So anyway, I liked the movie but it most definitely did not live up to the original, and it is difficult to not make a comparison.  I've only read the first of the original Oz books series, and maybe I'd have an easier time if I weren't so obsessed with the original.   Did you see it?  What did you think?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

So, every once in a while I step away from my usual favorite genres and read something recommended to me by my husband.  We have very different tastes in books, as I am sure many of you know, but I'm open to many kinds of experiences and love to read so I make the jump.

This month, I borrowed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close from him via the lend function on our Nooks.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is well out of my "usual."  It is about a boy, age 9 or so, who lost his father in the September 11 terrorist attacks.  He is autisitc, and is bullyed by the other children at school.  He knows they are bullying him but he does not know how to react or respond, and sometimes does not understand what they are picking on.  Like anyone who goes through such tragedy, he does not handle the death of his father well.  He spends his days searching for a missing lock to match a key he found hidden in his father's closet.  Along the way, he meets a number of people with the last name "Black" and learns a bit about himself and his family along the way. 

Overall, the premise of this book was interesting, and I really liked Oskar, the boy.   The story was sad - so many individuals impacted by sadness and death all around them.  Is that really what life is about?   Thelesson Oskar learns, that having a mission in life is so important, even if it is as trivial as searching for a lock you know you will not find, provides a deeper level to this indicating that although death surrounds us, we have to keep on living and finding ways to make our lives meaningful.

I was easily distracted, though, by the change in point-of-view as well as the running together of quotes.  I wondered at first if the author did this purposefully because of the young boy's autism - was he trying to put the reader "in the head" of Oskar?  Once he switched to the letter format of Oskar's grandparents, though, I knew it was a stylistic choice by the author.  Instead of letting myself get lost in the story, I kept reminding myself to slow down and pay attention to who was speaking and to whom he was speaking - it was quite distracting.  I found the letters throughout the book to be distracting as well.  They added to the story and we never would have quite understood the family dynamic without their points of view, but without a "Dear so-and-so" or a "Love, (name)" at the beginning and end of each, it would take me a few moments to understand who was speaking.  Was the author trying to say something by doing that?  Was he trying to get me to see something I am not seeing?  Let me know if you see something I don't...

One other confession... Whenever I read a book electronically and there are photographs, it reminds me of an exercise I had in a creative writing course during undergrad where we took a mismash of photos and had to write a story that brought them together.  I felt the same about Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children .  I prefer to use my own imagination instead of having the author inject his or her own images for me to use.  The only exception would be for art work - Alice in Wonderland or anything by Dr. Suess are of course forgiven.

Do You Think Batman Ever Gets Lonely?

I was wondering today - Do you think Batman ever gets lonely?

I mean, he has Alfred right?  And Robin... and more lovers than I can count... never mind all the attention he gets from Joker, Cat Woman, and all the rest.  But what I'm getting at really, is the man behind the mask:  Does Bruce Wayne ever sit down, surrounded by beautiful women, his butler by his side, drinking champagne,  and think to himself, "Wow.  Who am I?"

One would have to imagine that he does.  He lost his parents when he was very young and most of his acquaintances don't know that he is Batman.  When he sits down at dinner and (in the unlikely scenario where) someone he has never met says to him, "What do you do for a living?" he can't say "I save nice people like you from one of any underground living psychopaths who want to kill you." When asked, "What do you do in your spare time?" he can't say "I dress like a bat."  Instead, he has to talk about Wayne Enterprises and all the money his parents left to him upon their murders.  He falsifies his real self in order to protect the identity of the hero he is.

But we're all like that a little bit, right?  Sure, we're not using an unknowing Lucius Fox to modify old military equipment into bat gear... but we all have a different persona we share with those on the "inside" than everyone else.   I'm sure you can imagine a few points in time when you had to hide your true feelings in order to protect those around you.  Of course in Bruce's case it's because he wants those he loves to not be attacked by the scum in Gotham, but maybe in your case it was to save someone's feelings, or to not let on just how worried you were about something.

Maybe that's why it's so easy to believe in Batman;  It's so easy to believe that a grown man who had a difficult childhood could spend his evenings wearing a cape and a bat mask saving citizens of Gotham from the criminals because we can relate, in a way, to his self-consciousness about who he really is.

"CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody,"

I sat here with every intention of writing something meaningful about the recent Marathon Bombings, and for some reason every time I look at the screen I go blank.  I have nothing left to say that hasn't already been said.  Am I angry?  Yes.  Was I scared?  Hell yes.  Do I feel sad that this 19 year old kid ruined his life by becoming one of the most hated men in modern America?  Yes.  

I don't want to get into discussions with each of you about why the actions of these two young men should or shouldn't impact how we feel about "those people..."

I don't want to argue about nationalism and patriotism and its importance or unimportance in our schools and homes...

I definitely don't want to talk about how some people feel this child - 19 is a child - should have been left to die a horrific lonely death in a boat in some suburban back-yard and how stupid I think that is.

I just want to heal.

I want to wake up tomorrow and not remember that last week I left work early twice frightened (once because of the bombing and once because down the street the courthouse was evacuated for a bomb scare).

I want to be sure to teach my little baby who isn't born yet that there is more meaning to showing love in times of stress and fear than hatred.

I want all of us who came together to show respect for the first responders to stay together and not separate ourselves over politics or religion or why the grass is green.

You might be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with fiction?"  Everything.

In so many of the books we read it is easy to tell who are the "good" guys and who are the "bad" guys... There is a protagonist and an antagonist.   Sometimes the protagonist wins, sometimes the antagonist does and we hate him all the more.  Real life isn't that simple.

We are all "good" and we are all "evil".  It's easy to say "they" are bad people and "we" are the good ones, but what does that mean really?  We don't know yet why this young man thought he was making a good decision to bomb our city, and we may never know if he dies in the hospital or if he simply doesn't wish to tell investigators.   In his eyes, it is likely that he sees the American public is the "bad" guys and his family (and whoever else was helping him...) as the "good" guys.   Instead of separating ourselves into categories we should find ways of coming together and learning from each other.  If someone felt less like an outsider, perhaps he would be less inclined to bomb a busy city street.

This month my book club chose V for Vendetta as a comic book to read.  Of course this decision was made before this horrible tragedy, but I am having a difficult time reading it.   For those unfamiliar, the story is about a person in disguise who is frustrated with his overpowering government who hurts its people.  He takes action by bombing the parliament building and killing the evil leaders.  Our main character, "V", is a "good" guy taking action to make the world a better place.  Each time I sit down to read I get distracted by the Marathon Bomber and how he probably honestly thought he was the "good" guy.  It makes me feel sick.

That's all for now on this I suppose.  Our lives will never be the same, but I hope we make choices that continue to show the rest of the world what a compassionate nation we are instead of continuing down the lines of hatred.

#bostonstrong
#bostonproud

#95: The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

Before there was Twilight, there were hundreds of vampire tales that caught the attention of readers.   Books like The Vampire Chronicles by Ann Rice, reminded us that vampires were evil creatures who preyed on humankind. Of course, the most famous of these tales in modern history is Dracula by Bram Stoker. Stoker told us how cruel and unscrupulous vampires were:  He told us they thrived on human blood, lived in the dark, crawled up walls over castles, and stole our beautiful women through slow, painful transformation to vampire forms themselves.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova used Stoker's well-known description of vampire lore and created a modern story of a young woman and her father.  Kostova explains, "Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history" (Jane Sullivan, "Dracula and the Human Factor", The Age (3 June 2006).   With this in mind, Kostova created this novel.   Told from multiple perspectives, that of a professor named Paul, his un-named daughter, and Paul's mentor, the story weaves together various lives intercepted by the history of Vlad the Impaler, Stoker's inspiration for his fictional Dracula (for those not familiar, here is a brief History Channel bio).

Most of the story takes the form of letters and oral histories, but the main narrator is a young, unnamed daughter of a college professor.   It is never completely clear if this narrator is unbiased, or reliable; she is sharing with us, the reader, stories told to her over time and to which she is emotionally invested.  Still, the tale is true to the grotesqueness of Stoker's story.  There is mystery and murder, it isn't clear who is helping Paul (spoiler!) learn more about the death of his mentor, Bartholomew Rossi
and who is trying to prevent him from solving this mystery.  While reading the details, it can be difficult to decipher what is really happening, and what is speculation of the character who is telling the story at the time.  It's an interesting mix of potentially unreliable narrators and hyperbolic storytelling.

I read this book a few years ago - I believe I found it while browsing in Borders Books - and thought of it recently when my sister, parents, and I were emailing about our Irish family history on St. Patrick's Day.  I loved how, in The Historian, the reader isn't really sure if what is being told to us has really happened - are vampires really real? - and I think a lot of that happens with family histories.  We know so little about what our great-great-great grandparents were like, and have to speculate and put the pieces together.  My family is really lucky because my father has a passion for ancestry and can find out all sorts of details.  It's tempting to write it all down, like the narrator in The Historian, and elaborate on all the little details until we have a historical account of family vampires.  What can you find Old Man?

Packing Things Away

While packing things to put in storage while we prepare to move to a larger home, the most difficult part is storing my books.  I remember the stories.  I remember bits and pieces of those other parts of my life - some recent, some so, so long ago.  Three times my husband reminded me to put them in the storage bins... I selected a few favorites and "hid" them on my dresser.  Then he reminded me to put those away, too.  I did... except the ten or so now hidden in the basket next to the bed that usually contains the books I am currently reading.

Why is to so hard to put these pieces of paper away?

#40: Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman

I always try to stay away from those things that are built up to mounds of hype.  It is always a great pleasure to find them later in life when everyone is no longer chattering about those things, so I can enjoy them on my own without exponentially built-up expectations.

That is what happened with the writing of Neil Gaiman. A few years ago, everyone on the train I was taking read American Gods.  I began it and, I suppose because of the hype, could not finish.  I was quite disappointed with the chronology; I was confused.  I kept having to go back and re-read pages because I couldn't believe what I had just read.  Fortunately, I re-began it in my quest to read the top 100 fantasy novels and was thrilled.  Because of my love for this novel, I have begun reading as many of his books as possible.  Here, we'll talk about Neverwhere, number 40 on my list.

Neverwhere reminded me a little of "The Wizard of Oz" (movie).  The main character, Richard, a boring ol' chap, finds himself caught in a world between the worlds after saving the life of a young woman named Door, who he finds bleeding in the street.  In this strange land, called Under London, he finds a floating market and an underground home of an angel.  Along with new acquaintances, he has to pass certain tests with the hope to save Under London and get back home.  The story is fraught with mysteries and puzzles to solve.  Oh, and I just love when authors use names as a way to tell the reader something about the character.  Here, the name Door is an obvious representation of that character's ability to open things.  Little secrets, even when so obvious, make me wonder what else I might miss and keep me quite engaged.

Gaiman's ability to take boring young male characters on adventures is spot-on.  All three of his novels I have read (Anansi Boys is the other, and I'll review that soon!) use the same premise (boring guy meets some crazy person, goes on an adventure, saves the world - you know, the usual) but not to the point of feeling formulaic.  The characters are different guys, with different interests.

This novel first began as a television show in London and was not highly regarded. There is a comic book, and soon a radio version of the work to be released as well.  It is especially interesting, while reading this novel, to imagine the book having not been written first.  As Gaiman wrote the story, he would have had to imagine the characters in a similar sense to the television portrayal.  It'd be interesting to know whether people who enjoy the television show enjoyed the book.

What a clever, modern author Gaiman is.  Incorporating his writing into television shows, radio shows, and comic books (Sandman is amazing, more on that later).  He must have no fear of being irrelevant too soon.  Reading his Tweets daily keeps him, as an author, in my mind, and makes me curious about reading more of his work.  I'm excited for his newest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane to be released here in the United States in 14 weeks, 1 day, 9 hours, 13 minutes from right now.

Here's an excerpt from the Neverwhere television show in case you're interested; this part takes place early in the novel so no surprises will be ruined if you decide to pick up this book.

Baby G

Anyone reading knows I'm pop-culture-ly obsessed with fairy tales - the books I read and the television I enjoy are mostly fantasy or fairy tale related.  If only at trivia night there was a category in this subject so I could share my knowledge with someone.

Well, soon there will be.  Little Baby G is on his or her way to meet us.  In about 6 months (early September) we'll have a little baby with whom I'll (hopefully) be able to share my passion these stories. Honestly I can't believe it.  A little munchkin who may have interest in princesses (Grimm's or Disney's, whatever)?  A little monster who might want to know more about why Jack climbed a beanstalk?  This is unreal.

PSA: Carl Sagan