The Providence and Rhode Island Cookbook: Big Recipes from the Smallest State, by Linda Beaulieu

Well, I wasn't going to include cookbooks or gardening books, but then I realized that it might be handy to keep track, so here it goes.

Some nice recipes in this, I like the sound of the NiRoPe pasta.

American Dreamz

Re-watch.

So funny, so dead-on. Love this movie.

The Wrong Stuff, by Sharon Fiffer

Ok mystery. Took a little while to finish- not it's fault, but I kept leaving it in the car, so that says something too.

I liked the woodworking bits, obvs, but kind of wanted to smack the junk-picker/amateur investigator every times he went off about Bakelite and old hankies. Bleh.

Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild

My favorite book. I seriously cannot begin to estimate how many times I've read it- I would honestly think its in the hundreds. I love it each time. It still even makes me cry.
I read it again last night, and am so glad. I don't think I would be the person I am now (a reader, I guess) without Noel Streatfeild's books, and this was my first, the best, and I love it more that there are words to express.

You can imagine my excitement and fear, then, when I found out that the BBC was making a movie of it. I knew there had been a movie version before, but I kind of had the feeling it might not be that great. This one is. It is so well done. A few things were changed for the movie, but it was so well done, and when Posy danced oh man I'm crying again.

Getting the Girl, by Susan Juby

I really enjoy Susan Juby's YA books. Her teens are always interesting, funny, and read so real. This was another good one from her- Sherman is determined to find out who at his high school instigates social ostracisms, and the story is classic Juby- some parts laugh out loud, and the rest just damn good.

Cockatiels at Seven, by Donna Andrews

Another fun and funny mystery from Donna Andrews Meg Lanslow series.

I do like these.

40 Signs of Rain, By Kim Stanley Robinson

Kind of disappointing action-adventure sci-fi kind of thing. I like the idea of the League of Drowning Nations (countries affected by sea-level rise) setting up camp in DC but the whole thing left me a little dry. There are two sequels, but I don't think I'll read them.

Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling

Eh, ok sci-fi. 2013 and climate change has passed the tipping point. Heiress Jane Unger rescues her brother from a Mexican drug clinic and brings him with her to the troupe of storm chasers who are using high-tech gismos to track vast tornado outbreaks over the mostly abandoned Great Plains.
I expected to like this more.

Last Night At The Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan

Serious, small, and very sad but wonderfully done book.

It's the last night a Red Lobster franchise is open, and manager Manny wants everything to go right, despite a snowstorm.

This was a heartbreaker of a book. The relatioships between the co-workers were so beautifully expressed, and captured the bizarre-ness of working.

So, so well-done.

Violet on The Runway, by Melissa Walker

Fun YA. Gawky Violet is spotted and recruited by a modeling agent, moves to NYC, life changes. Fluffy YA but interesting, seems like it might even be slightly realistic. Fun read, looking forward to the follow-ups.

In Debt We Trust

Good but not great documentary about what was then the upcoming (and is now the present) economic implosion brought about by consumer debt and financial instruments based on hyperinflated housing values. It was definitely prescient, but at the same time, I felt like it covered much of the same ground (down to using the 1950's footage of Mr. Money!) as the somewhat better-put-together Maxed Out. It was good though, just not fresh to me right now. Maybe if I'd seen it first, it would have felt more powerful.

Revenge of the Wrought Iron Flamingos, by Donna Andrews

Oddly incoherent Meg Lanslow mystery. Still, fun, but I was so addled by the end I'm still not really sure why "who done it" done it. But anyway, her books are always kind of fun in that Caerphilly (Virginia not Wales) way, what with the kooky relatives and the iron-smithing and the hey hey.

27 Dresses

Cheesy.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary Pearson

This was so good. Wonderfully done, and not just for sci-fi people. There were some things ( her sexuality, for one) that I wish had been addressed that weren't, but maybe that was deliberate, to keep it more all-ages or to keep the 'debate' focused on the point. Loved the image of the butterfly. Plot holes you could drive a truck through, but it didn't even matter. If I had read this book as a young teen, I would have LOVED it. I even kind of loved it now.

The Compound, by S.A. Bodeen

I felt very let down by some of the gaping plot holes in what wasotherwise an interesting premise (basically Blast From The Past setnow). There were so many things that just made no sense at all. HighSchool for some *creepy* and disturbing plot points that even made meshudder, even as I realized that they wrecked the plot's coherence.

No End In Sight

Absolutely devastating, maddening, excellent movie.

This was so well done, and so incredibly disturbing. Rumsfeld...

Fuckers.

A Crude Awakening

Pretty great documentary about peak oil and our collective failure to address the coming crisis.

Amazing scenes of Lake Maracaibo and Baku, Ukraine, where abandoned oil rigs tilt into irredeemably poisoned land.

Radiant City

Interesting but ultimately disappointing documentary about suburbia's unsustainable and unpleasant nature, as seen in the vast tracts of mcmansions and so on popping up like so many poisonous mushrooms across american fields. Andrés Duany, James Howard Kunstler, etc appeared, but much of it was taken up with actors playing parts, which I found very offputting.

Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris

Oh this was amazing. its been a long time since I've read adult fiction that took my breath away and this absolutely did. It is so so hard to pull off 3rd person plural narration, and when someone just asked me what it was about, all I could say was 'working in an office in Chicago" but it was fine fine writing indeed.

Breathtakingly good.

Newes From The Dead, by Mary Hooper

This was a great read, but creepy as hell! Based on a true story, and all the more creepy and awful for that. Anne Green is hung as a killer, but she is not dead. Before the Oxford medical students disect her body, she returns to life and is hailed as a miracle- eeeeeeeeek!Really great YA- read it in one sitting! Amazing, and I loved the historical details and really got the shivers at the thought of it all.

Sweethearts, by Sara Zarr

Did not like this book one bit. Was it better than last year's abysmal Story of a Girl? Maybe. Does that make it good? No.

Suburban melodrama piled with pathos.

Revolting characters who blame their parents for everything.

Grow up Sara Zarr- you're writing for teens, but you are supposed to be an adult. Get over it.

The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Eck. NOWHERE near as good as the first one, Life As We Knew It. In fact, this was so bad, I wondered if the first was actually that good.

MAJOR dissapointment here for me. This was pretty awful.

And damn, is she just going to write the same story over and over from different points of view? Because while that may be interesting in theory, this really didn't cut it for me.

Flower Confidential, by Amy Stewart

This was a wonderful in depth look into an industry that I have a lot of interest in. When I worked with flowers, of course I saw that the roses came from Ecuador, or that the tulips came from Holland, but never thought about the impacts on local economy or ecology, about how bizarre it is that almost all the flowers that get sold in the world travel through Amsterdam, or had any idea what the auctions were like, or the commercial growers with grennhouses covering acres.

Oh, it was a good read, full of interesting details and images that have lingered- the descriptions of the arrangements available from the b. brooks florists made me drool - a very high-end alternative to FTD or Teleflora that I had never even heard of before reading this.

The book was a treat, and left me aching to be surrounded by buckets of flowers again and to have that ineffable smell of green in the air.

The Nannies, by Melody Mayer

Well, such a rip-off of Melissa de la Cruz's Au Pair series, but, well at least it was set on the west coast.

You know the drill- 3 girls from diffferent lifestyles, your exiled princess, girl from the barrio with a chance at a new start, and wholesome midwesterner with dreams all become friends wihle working as nannies.

Yup. So, not bad for all that- I would have liked it a LOT more if I hadn't already read it, set in the Hamptons and by a better writer.

Unbelievablle, by Sara Sheperd

I could hardly wait for this one, the last in the Pretty Little Liars series (I think!) and it was awesome. Read it in one go.

I don't know what about these that made them so delish- but they were like Gummie Bears- you know it's no good for you, but you just want to devour them.

Immunity, by Lori Andrews

Well, this didn't rock me.

Wildly improbable thriller (but aren't they all?) that smushed up the requisite stunningly beautiful and sexy female epidemiologist, the rugged renegade DEA agent, evil DHS guys, immune system reactions to man-made substances, Native Americans, civil rights, innocent children, etc etc into a slab of a book that for all those ingredients still felt flat. The ending was hurried and semi ridic, and well, overall, it just didn't grab me, and this kind of thing usually grabs me at least a bit. Oh well.

The House on First Street, by Julia Reed

Marie Antoinette-ish nonfic. Julia Reed's book gives a tantalizing taste of what pre-Katrina New Orleans must have been like for the very very wealthy and well connected. Her memories of champagne and oysters and divine decadance are lovely and all, but even she herself admits it's all a bit Marie Antoinette. Post-Katrina, her home-renovation saga really lost any flavor. In light of all those who died, and who have lost so much in the aftermath of the storm, Vogue writer Julia Reed's flagstone steps seem hideously selfish- although, I suppose in a way, at least she is working to preserve some historic architecture. Ugh. I don't know.

The Diamond of Darkhold, by Jeanne Du Prau

Well, it was better than The Prophet of Yonwood.

Lina and Doon are such great characters that it's hard to knock a book about them, but...

Solar cells as society's only gift to the future?

I don't know.

What with the crashing banks, disastrous politics, global storming and the hey hey, maybe I'm just in a grim mood, but I sure hope that when our world comes down around our ears, we have a better plan for what we leave our underground-dwelling survivors when they emerge from the darkness.

Nancy Drew

This was a delightful surprise!

I was expecting it to be terrible, but it was really lovely. Nancy was still as perfect as could be, (I LOVED the woodshop scene!) but her character was presented so empathetically, it was obvious that she couldn't stop sleuthing if she tried, and even though it was a mite heavily done, the bit about the mother was actually a little tear-jerky.

Great job!

Not In The Flesh, by Ruth Rendell

Another wonderful Rendell. Again the issues of race, immigration, class status, PC-ness, women's rights, and age all swirl up into creating such a unique mood. Martha Grimes' books have a mood that comes close, sometimes, but not quite this dark.

The only quibble I ever have with Rendell is why her characters are all such bad drivers. Or, the ones who aren't terrible drivers are always described as being "skillful', like, (totally fake example) 'Lyn skilfully parked the car'. Why is it considered so impressive to get down the road without smashing into things? Is this an American thing, to take for granted that everyone can drive and had better be pretty good at it or we all die?

End In Tears, by Ruth Rendell

As always, a meticulously plotted out Wexford mystery from Rendell. What is there to say? The relationships between Wexford, Burden, Hannah, Dora, Sylvia, Sheila, these are such well written characters. So good.

House of Daughters, by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Really lovely book about three sisters trying to make their family champagne estate survive.

You could taste the bubbles, and oh, the food, and oh, the house! And there was a surprisingly meaty, well-told story behind all the deliciousness of it all.

Good read. I'll be looking for her other books!

Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, by Andrew Blechman

Wow. I just have to say wow, I had no idea.

This was fascinating. Andrew Blechman's New England neighbors announce their decision to move to The Villages, Florida- an age-segregated gated, golf-cart community, and he visits them to research both the insane tax loopholes available for developers and corporations in Florida like the Chapter 190, which has allowed developments as large, resource-draining, and isolated as The Villages, Disneyworld, and Seaside to be formed independently of state government and oversight, and the people who move to places where children are, necessarily, outlaws.

Amazing, fun, surprisingly dirty (!), and just gripping, this was an awesome quick read.

The Geography of Nowhere:The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler

Re-read.

Excellent book about American community planning, from the organic early cities to the (as envisioned) park-like suburbs to inner city project housing to gentrification. Kunstler's excellent writing and doom-like vibe really make even some of the drier issues (road widths, frontage limits, etc) really intriguing, and when he's on the juicy stuff, there's no putting it down.
I know I didn't even have a wrod to say about his novel- and it was one that I was so excited about for so long, but I've been thinking about it, and realized that there was a lot I just didn't like about it.
In his novel, women are relegated to almost an early 20th century level in society- well, they are pretty much living in a post energy-crisis/economic collapse agrarian near future America, and society has become in many ways feudal. Kunstler does, in fact, predict a return to a more feudalistic society in the deep South of America in his fantastic, addictive read-in-one-sitting The Long Emergency, but for New England, where the novel is based, he was more hopeful. It upset me while reading the novel, at least, and the kind of graphic violence in it wasn't my cup of tea either. (Seriously, Kunstler- I did NOT need that Catherine Wheel shit in my head!)
BUT. I can love the guy's non-fiction and entirely loathe his fiction, and I think that's ok.
So yeah.

Climbing the Stairs, by Padma Venkatraman

A very thoughtful YA book set in India during WWII and the Indian revolution against British colonial rule.

15 year old Vidya feels responsible when her father is injured at a protest, and the family must move in with relatives who despise them. Her brother Kitta is worried by the Japanese invasion of Burma and wants to join the British Army, although it was a British policeman who injured their father. A love interest named Raman offers Vidya a chance to escape to America with him, but her grandfather saves the day by offering to send her to college.

It was good, and interesting as an adult, but I think maybe not terrifically appealing to most teens.

Lost on Planet China, by J. Maarten Troost

This was fantastic travel writing! Funny, informative, and fascinating. Made me want more than ever to visit China.

Gossip Girl: The Carlyles, by Cecily von Ziegesar

Well, I hate to say it but I didn't LOVE this.

Baby, Avery, and Owen Carlyle have just moved to NYC from Nantucket, into Blair Waldorf's old apartment, and shenanigans ensue.

I don't know- the characters didn't interest me, and there just wasn't the sense of reality that somehow (improbably) made the original series so addictive and just damn good. I'm sure I'll read the sequels, but it just didn't grab me.

Cheater, by Michael Laser

Wow, I really didn't think that this book had a lot going for it. The characters seemed very unrealistic to me, from the Vice Principal straight out of Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller to the absurd and two dimensional Cara. I also was kind of put off by what I read as if not actually homophobic, the really insulting idea that Karl (and everybody else) decided Lizette was a lesbian because she didn't wear makeup and tight clothes like Cara. Blaine (? That's not a name, that's a major appliance!) was also so 2D and unreal - ugh!Also, the great mysterious project unveiled in the last scene? Um, I think you can get it from SkyMall. Mostly though, the book was morally ambigious, absurd plotwise, insulting to women, and demeaning to teens in that it denies them any complexity or depth at all.

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, by Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne

Yet another book about the lolita-ization of girlhood, and how parents and teachers (and librarians?) can help counteract the societal pressures.

A bit blah, but I think I've overloaded on this topic.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

Fantastic, intelligent, feminist YA.

I loved this book. So much better than Dramarama, but even in Dramarama, I could see a thoughtfulness in the narrator that really shone through here. The setting was perfect too, all the details were dead on, and the whole thing rang true.

Talent, by Zoey Dean

Pretty awful YA, but fun except for one thing. I didn't like Zoey Dean's A-List series, but mainly because I thought they were so weak compared to Gossip Girl. I HATED How To Teach Filthy Rich Girls, because it was stupid as a slug.

This had a good premise, 3 Beverly Hills girls, one a surfer, one a wanna-be pop star like her diva mom, and one the daughter of a power agent, who has no talent of her own- unless it's the skill to spot talent?

Anyway, Mac, the agent's daughter, spots Iowa tourist Emily gazing her way around, and decides that Emily has star quality, and finagles her way around until Emily agrees to audition for a part in a movie that Mac's mother is casting. All well and good.

The part that bothered me, is that Mac's arch-enemy, Coco's popstar rival, and the girl whose best friend steals the surfer girls boyfriend, the total bitch of the series, is called Ruby Goldman. It's the only ethnic name in the book. Make of that what you will.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, by Mark Bauerlein

This was intense!

I read it all in one horrified sitting, and can't get it out of my head.

Now, sure- I know (as Bauerlein admits right off the bat) that every age has had it's elders (god, I guess at 33 I'm an elder? I don't know) looking at it's youth, and saying what a pack of idiots they seem, but Bauerlein comes at this armed with an almost overwhelming array of studies that seem to point pretty damn conclusively to one tragic fact- that the high school graduates of today have learned less, comparatively, than high school graduates of previous generations, and by a lot. Also, high drop out rates skew those numbers further, and test scores of young Americans have plummeted over the past 15 years in comparison with other developed nations. Add to that rapid drops in college students being judged ready for college work, and even more disturbing drops in students majoring in maths, physics, or engineering, and we're looking at Idiocracy, man.

Oh so many tidbits and statistics pounded it home, with a passion and an eloquence that was really impressive.

One of the most interesting aspects for me, was the impact of a large vocabulary upon entering kindergarten, and the incidence of "rare words" on television and in print. I'll just give this one bit:

"One criterion researchers use is the rate of "rare words" in spoken and written discourse. They define "rare words" as words that do not rank in the top 10,000 in terms of frequency of usage. With the rare word scale, researchers can examine various media for the number of rare words per thousand, as well as the median-word ranking for each medium as a whole....

Rank of median word Rare words per 1000

• newspapers 1690 68.3
• adult books 1058 52.7
• comic books 867 53.5
• children's books 578 16.3
• prime-time adult tv 490 22.7
• prime-time children tv 543 20.2
• Sesame Street 413 2.0"

All very interesting, no? And add to this that the kids today, our so-called Digital generation spend so much of their time online- for some reason, this seems to fill folks with all sorts of giddy hope that these kids are going to learn things online. Well, I have seen teens online for hours- hour after hour of gorgeous sunny day, and they can't tear themselves away for the stupidest junk available online. It's pathetic. They can't spell, they can't type, they are not learning how to program or design games, they are learning to buy and shop and that it's cute to misspell things and in general being misled in every possible way by the only adults who are looking at them in an interested fashion, the marketers.

Bauerlein makes the sad but true point that adults who wish to influence the future can't pretend that all this MySpace/Gaia crap will let them absorb computer skills, let alone language and maths skills that will not only allow these kids to get a job, but might help our country survive.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker

Interesting but not groundbreaking book on consumerism as identity creation. I think James Twitchell covers this area better, but still, a tasty read anyway. In fact, Walker spent quite a lot of time quoting Twitchell and Paco Underhill, which I guess is inevitable when crossing such well travelled territory.

Walker did delve a little more into some kind of underground/pseudounderground consumer niches, like the sneaker freaks, etc, and the influence these subgroups have is pretty incredible. Still, it was nothing I hadn't read or known before. I guess I wouldn't really pass it on to a friend who I thought would be interested in this stuff- I would, however, recommend Twitchell's Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury and his Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism without hesitation.

Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power of Advertising, by Jean Kilbourne

Another solid and interesting book by Kilbourne on the way women are represented in media. Solid, not thrilling.

In fact, in this book, at least, I felt a little frustrated with her insistence on bringing her own experiences and addictions into it- while much of the media and advertising she discusses is obviously damaging, I can't help but feel that the men and boys targeted by these same companies are in many ways equally vulnerable to ugly manipulation.

When an ad for vodka (or perfume, or shoes or handbags or whatever) shows a man behaving aggressivley towards a woman (and there are many bizarre examples of that she highlights in the book), it's not just the woman who might get a weird idea about that image- especially as these ads are usually in women's magazines, so a guy flippping through it would be doubly hard pressed to understand what was going on. If it's scary and not cool, why is it in a Gucci ad, a guy might think, am I supposed to act that way? I'm just saying, it's not just women who are affected by fubar messages in media.

Real World, by Natsuo Kirino

This was intense, disturbing, and wonderful.

Four Japanese high school girls become involved in a murder, and their lives are never the same.

I am not sure if this was aimed at adults or teens, but I think it has equal appeal to both- to teens who might be fascinated with the murder and with the descriptions of Japanese high school life, so different from America and to adults who just appreciate a hell of a good book.

The story is told in a rotation of voices, each unique and intense, and by the devastating end, I was reeling.

Audrey, Wait by Robin Benway

Really fun YA!

I can't help but think that this whole book was inspired by that song Delilah by the Plain White T's, but that's pretty great.

Audrey Cuttler breaks up with her boyfriend Evan, and as she's walking down the stairs, she hears him call Audrey, wait! but she keeps on going.

His band is playing later that night, and their friend of a friend of a friend finally lured an A&R guy to one of their shows, where they play their new song, Audrey Wait!

Of course, Evan and the band are promptly signed to a major label, and The Song goes into heavy rotation on radio stations around the country. Audrey's newfound notoriety gets her all access passes at great shows, but then she is constantly hounded for interviews. After a badly judged parking lot hookup with the lead singer of another band (which gets videoed and leaked onto YouTube), Audrey is in magazines as indie rock's new muse, and it gets crazier from there.

The whole thing was well done, funny, and the music mentioned throughout the book was so good, I want to listen to Robin Benway's playlist. It was straight from Deliliah, though, because I remember when Delilah was the inescapable song in 2006, reporters drudged up the girl who had inspired it, and she seemed so uncomfortable with the attention.

Dramarama, by E. Lockhart

Fun, quick YA.

Sarah decides to reinvent herself at a summer theater program as Sadye, along with her long-closeted best friend, Demi, who takes the opportunity to come out as gay.

In a competitive atmosphere, Demi shines, but Sadye begins to realize that loving theater doesn't mean that you have the talent to make it in the business.

It was really good, though, and the love for theater was so solid through the book it made me want to listen to cast recordings, and although I can't help but think bloody Disney is responsible for all of this through High School Musical, it's pretty cool to see the theater geeks as the cool kids in a book.

A Certain Chemistry, by Mil Millington

Ok book, not nearly as well done or as funny as Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

In fact, this kind of had God as a narrator of bits, and that annoyed the hell out of me, and the story was kind of depressing.

Tom is a ghostwriter, happily living in Edinburgh with his girlfriend Sara, when he is given the job of ghosting an autobiography for nighttime soap star Georgina Nye.

Tom falls for Georgina, writes his best book ever, giving Georgina political and feminist arguments that she can't discuss on the book-tour talk shows, etc, and fucks up his relationship with Sara.

Yup.

It really was kind of a bummer.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington

Hands down, one of the funniest books i have ever read. This was a re-read, actually, but still, I was at that point where loud laughs were just erupting form me as I read. Pel and Ursula are fantastic. Love this book.