The Secret Life of Bees--Sue Monk Kidd

When Genevieve loaned me this book, she prefaced it with a warning. "I really liked it, but it is an Oprah book. " Oh, indeedy--spirituality instead of religion, wise n' mystical black folks, an abused child, terrible secrets you guess in the first chapter, the search for a true home. All set in the Civil Rights era South. Spin the wheel, pick a theme, write it in, boys and girls. But it was a good read. Just captivating enough, but not life changing. An excellent vacation read. Kind of how I feel about O, the magazine.

Sue Monk Kidd (gotta love the ring of that) also features amputation as a plot point of her new book, so we'll be staying far away from that even with the warning of the poor reviews.

In return I am loaning Genevieve Beat Until Stiff by Claire M. Johnson. It's a mystery that Anthony Bourdain would have written if he were a female pastry chef whose drug of choice was Clomid. Mary Ryan's been drowning her depression over her infertility and the end of her marriage by developing a tremendous hate-on of everything and working too much for idiots. The plan works great until she finds one of the cooks dead in a laundry bag and feels the need to take the situation more seriously than anyone at the restaurant or the police wants. It's a rarity to find a mystery with such a flat out bitchy but likeable heroine. And involving food (typical crappy cozy subject) to boot!

Sport--Louise Fitzhugh

I remember thinking this book was hysterical as a kid. Really broad, verbal comedy. But after my quickie read through, I'm struck by the darkness and sadness of poor Sport, who has accepted his weird lot and only reacts when it's threatened by his mother's plan to kidnap him and imprison him in the Plaza (I told you it was funny!) to get ahold of his inheritance. I think that it was his flood of relief to hand over his ledgers to his new stepmother (who he has met a week before?!!) and to abandon at least some of the parenting of his father that got to me.

Right, So She Kills Off Helen...

And she does do it in such a way that I'd feel sad and sorry IF Helen hadn't spent her brief appearances in the previous 400 pages being smugly and cutely pregnant, which was irritating beyond believe. And the mystery was dead dull. although Havers was brillant, as usual. Good riddence, Lynley & Co!

With No One As Witness--Elizabeth George

No, Kerry! No fun reads until Friday! Bad Kerry!

Okay, I haven't actually read this but I'm willing to be on what happens. Media and reviews have been talking about how George has ruined the series, that something shocking happens, someone is dead. She must have killed off Havers, and not in any heroic sort of way, but in the way Havers herself would expect to die--beaten to death in her house by a burglar or a serial rapist.

Simon or Deborah? Who gives a rat's ass about the world's dreariest couple? Lynley? Eh. Helen? I'd miss her for the comic relief. Deb's dad the butler? Now, I would be shocked and miss him, but he's relatively minor overall.

So it's got to be good old Havers. Who doesn't love a woman who'd torture her parents with a shrine to their cowardice for 20 years? Who loses her temper, carries a grudge and a chip of granite on her shoulder, gets demoted, screws up and hates herself? Whose small triumphs are home ownership and her friendship with the little neighbor girl? Havers is one of the finest fictional characters ever.

BUT I CAN'T FIND OUT UNTIL NEXY WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Underground Man--Ross MacDonald

Ross MacDonald's work seems a little dated now, what with all the longhairs, surfers and druggies wandering around Los Angeles, but it's also classic like Chandler. In this installment, Lew Archer goes out one morning to feed the pigeons and gets all caught up in the neighbor's crap, including missing fathers, missing mothers, missing children and a wildfire up in the mountains. Turns out that if you bury a body as the fire approaches you can later go back, dig it up, and it will be untouched. Take that, CSI!

The Thirty-Nine Steps--John Buchan

I had a lot of hope for this novel, since I have seen and adorded the Hitchcock film version of the story (it's about the first movie where he got the thrilling plot/romance/humor combo down). And I read the sequel Greenmantle in 2002 and thought that it was amazing how well it had held up storywise and how timely it seemed. Alas, for a 126 page novel it is slow going and dull. Published in 1915, it shows its age. Lots of talk, no thrill. Two great lines though---"I knew something of the man, and he did several jobs for me. He was half crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest."* And "Then I got a corpse--you can always get a body in London if you know where to go for it."


*I want that on my tombstone!

American Libraries April 2005

If you're a total geek like me, who has considered a roadtrip of 18 hours to the far corner of Spencer, Iowa for no reason but to meet Dewey Readmore Books aka the Spencer Library Cat, you like the yearly issue of American Libraries where they display pics of all the coolest libraries built in the land over the last year. The best is the new one at Johns Hopkins, which is just overwhelming in its grandeur. It's like a cathedral!

I have fewer warm thoughts about the cover library, the PS 106 Robin Hood Library in Brooklyn. Love the fact it was carved out of a reclaimed attic space. Love the warm yellow and red color scheme. Hate the questions written on the walls. "Why do we have to go to war to have peace?" "Why can't we be free?" "Why is water wet?" It's that sort of mock philosophical "out of the mouths of babes" dumbing down that pissed me off as a kid, and still pisses me off as an adult. Let kids have some dignity. Let them ask questions and give honest answers. Don't portray them as deep little naifs the adults could learn so much from.

I didn't mean to abandon the blog!

It's just that in the last month I have

• written an important internal document that is usually my boss's duty
• written two papers (one on a series of articles on leadership concepts in libraries and one on Wikipedia)
• done a large budget analysis project
• realized I haven't done any reading for the second half of semester of my management class, and none of the sort of optional reading for my refernce class
• particpated in a wedding

It's not that I haven't been reading though.