The last time my library of books sat on actual bookshelves was in July of 2010. That’s when I packed them away. I’ve not seen them since. Within a couple more months that year, I’d filled our old garage with cardboard boxes of DVDs and photos, of decorations and glassware. Anything that might distract or annoy a prospective homeowner who might want to purchase our house in Michigan went into boxes and into the ever-increasing stacks where the cars used to sit.
Over the course of 2010 and 2011, while Craig was living in Connecticut and I was living in Michigan and trying to keep our house on the market, those cardboard boxes in the garage multiplied month by month. I packed everything that wasn’t essential. Extra blankets and linens. Winter clothing, which I promptly had to unpack and replace with spring clothing as the weather got colder. Winter clothing again, when I had to dig out the warm weather stuff after the months became almost a year. I packed kitchen goods and cat toys, board games and wrapping paper, old treasures and things we’d just purchased. My weekly routine was to hit Home Depot, buy a crapload of cheap cardboard boxes, and then fill them with vacuum bags and clocks and candles and towels and Silpats and spoons and paper reams and extension cords and CDs and the gifts people had given us for Christmas and anniversaries that we never used but with which couldn’t bear to part.
If I wasn’t throwing away stuff—and I threw away a dumpster’s worth of crap we were well rid of, and another dumpster’s worth of stuff that I kind of wish I hadn’t—I packed it into a box, taped it up, and put it in the garage. When we’d moved to that house a little over a decade before, I’d started off with great enthusiasm creating boxes with very clear labels so thoroughly packed with information that they resembled the nutritional data on supermarket goods. (CHRISTMAS ANNUAL COOKBOOKS 1992-2002: 11 LBS. ALUMINUM FOIL/WAX PAPER/PARCHMENT PAPER/FOIL SQUARES/PLASTIC WRAP: 20% BY WEIGHT.)
My organizational zest dimmed very quickly, however, so that after I’d written the equivalent of a master’s thesis on the first few dozen boxes I packed, I was sick enough of the job that I would simply toss into a single carton an old afghan, a half-used bottle of soap bubbles, two winter hats, a weird plastic thing that had been sitting on the kitchen sill for two years because it had dropped off something and we didn’t know what yet we were afraid to throw it away, a broken umbrella, a waste basket, and a tangled skein of old Christmas tree lights and slap on the outside a label that read SEASONAL MISC.
Mystery Boxes, we ended up calling them when we got to the new house. We still had several of them, intact and as undisturbed as Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the crawl space of the house when we started the move to Connecticut. Ten years after they’d been packed, I threw out most of their contents.
I didn’t want any Mystery Boxes on this move. When I put my thousands of books into storage, I’d labeled them by subject matter if I could. If I couldn’t, I’d at least mark from what bookcase and which room they’d come. We’d digitized all our CDs years ago, but I spent three days alphabetizing them and putting the jewel cases into boxes with legends like VANCE’S CDS: BA-CL—just in case we had to find something specific, at some point. If I had to pack my family’s nineteenth-century linens in with a lampshade and a pack of tarot cards, instead of simply slapping the ASST. MISC label on it, I’d write out the crap that was inside. I was thorough, dammit.
Since we were being professionally moved, however, we let the movers do the bulk of the remaining job, the two days before the van left. What they packed tended to be those things I’d deemed necessary until the last minute. If anything, though, the movers tended to lean to my former organizational method. When we arrived in our new neighborhood, we had a dozen boxes marked KITCHEN, but no idea in which the plates or cutlery might be found. Items that we expected to be found in BASEMENT FRONT appeared in UPSTAIRS HALL CLOSET. There are several containers marked LIVING ROOM, but whether they contain books, or pillows, or area rugs, or all three, is a bit of a mystery. Though we rescued my favorite of the stained glass lampshades from its enclosure, intending to use it in our temporary living room, we never did find the base in any of the boxes marked LAMPSHADES/LAMPSTANDS, nor in any of those LIVING ROOM boxes. (I fully expect to find it eventually in SOFT FURNISHINGS/SPARE BEDROOM.)
The movers were extremely thorough in protecting every object with reams and reams of paper, however. I will give them credit for that. I remember well the entire afternoon and evening it took to excavate my kitchen spices from a strata in the middle of a four-and-a-half-foot-high KITCHEN box. It was such a lengthy task because the movers had mummified each spice in two—two!—sheets of of manila wrapping paper roughly a yard square each. Seriously. At first I’d thought I’d hit on a layer of wadded-up paper, and started to throw it all out. Then I realized that if I unscrewed each ball, rolled it out first lengthwise then widthwise, and dug around in the protective kernel within, I’d find a solitary shaker of adobo seasoning, or a teeny-tiny plastic container of cloves. I’m actually dreading the day—soon—when we finally move into our more permanent home and I dive once more into that Mystery Box and discover an ossified container of honey or an equally-petrified Pop-Tart. In their own individual bulky wrappings, of course.
The home that we were promised as part of the job package is finally (finally!) nearing its renovation, meaning we should be able to start moving those boxes once again to their final destination. Save for what we fished out for the kitchen, and save for the clothing we’ve been wearing the last nearly three years, everything we own is still in those boxes. It was impossible to fit the contents of a three-bedroom Colonial in the eight hundred square feet of the one-floor flat we’ve been calling ‘temporary’ since 2011. I haven’t seen their contents for nearly four years at this point.
And you know, for the longest time I actually was able to keep in my head a catalog of what was there. I knew exactly what we’d deemed essential for day-to-day temporary living (potato masher, perpetual calendar, butane lighter) and what still lurked in those hundreds of cartons in storage (cheese grater, glass vases, old journals). If I’d packed the box myself, I knew exactly what was in them; when Craig needed a particular computer dongle, I’d produce it almost instantly from the correct carton in storage, where I’d wedged it inside a coffee mug, several Post-Its, and a cache of pens and paper clips (which had all sat on my home office desk together, thank you very much). For months and months I could perform that kind of miracle conjuring act.
Then—I don’t know when—all that information and muscle memory suddenly all vanished. Maybe I reached a point at which I no longer needed to remember where I’d possibly packed that box of envelopes. Maybe our computer situation became so streamlined that my brain no longer felt the need to keep a complete catalog of the ethernet cords we’d used at our old house. Maybe my brain was so overloaded that it could no longer keep track of Craig’s bowling ball. Whatever the cause, it just all vanished. Now, every box is a Mystery Box again.
The day rapidly approaches when we’ll be moving two doors down and expanding back into a three-bedroom home again. I’m finding myself baffled and a little overwhelmed by the vague memories of belongings that remain. We did used to have a large soup pot, didn’t we? Or is it one of the things we threw out? How about an olive tray? If we had one, why? Did I ever have any rain boots? That stained glass rose lampshade did have a base—didn’t it? What the hell is in those boxes that we haven’t found essential for four years, now?
We keep telling ourselves it’ll be like Christmas when we finally unpack. We toss off that little witticism and laugh lightly about it. But I have a sense of faint unease, even as I joke about it now. Our household is a pared-down version of itself compared to 2010, it’s true—but how it is we’ve managed to do without so many of our things for so long?
I picture us unsheathing each item, one by one, regarding them with puzzlement. They’ll be like quaint museum pieces. Perhaps they’ll have a recognizable function, but no relevance to the mess of debris and gadgets around which we now organize our life than a tin washing board, or a funerary relic. I worry that each object will carry the ache of familiarity, perhaps, but nothing approaching necessity.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Book Review Roundup
One of the things I’ve tended to do, during my adult reading life, is to balance the frivolous and the serious. No matter what I’m reading at the time (and I read a lot of books every year, including a bunch for which I don’t write reviews), I usually try to juggle one Very Serious Nonfiction Tome with the light-hearted fiction to which I am naturally drawn. It makes me feel better if I can look at my queue of books to read and see that there’s a Very Serious Nonfiction Tome to balance out the fact that I’m about to devote the next four weeks of my life re-reading an enormously long fantasy series in which love-crossed scientists on a future planetary settlement have genetically re-engineered giant kittens with wings and titanium claws so they can fight the ecological predators threatening Zeta Colony.
Remember the year I managed to get through thick histories of the Black Plague and biographies of Charles Dickens and the Brontës? Gosh, that was high-class stuff. If that was the apex of my commitment to feeding my brain a well-rounded diet, 2013 was the year in which I went out and bought it a giant tub of Cheez Doodles.
Apparently in 2013, when faced with the task of picking out the next Very Serious Nonfiction Tome, instead of choosing something to expand my horizons and lift my consciousness, I would spy a celebrity biography, snatch it off the shelves, and call it good. That’s why 2013 turned out to be the year in which I read about Tallulah Bankhead and Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse and Jennifer Saunders (sorry, Dawn French, but I haven’t been able to get through Dear Fatty at all) and Garry Marshall and Rita Moreno and Bruce Kimmel and the jaw-dropping experience that is Scotty Bowers’ autobiography.
In 2014 I need to make better brain food choices. God knows I’ll have to do something to counterbalance the Enid Blyton I’ve been inspired to re-read.
Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher (Lesbian Career Girl Series, #2)
by Monica Nolan
To carry off a pulp fiction parody requires both a mastery of period detail and a ear for the cadences of previous decades of—let's face it—often indifferently-written genre literature. Mabel Maney managed the feat admirably in her Nancy Clue trio of burlesques, which put a lesbian spin on familiar detective books for girls. In her Lesbian Career Girl series, Monica Nolan attempts the same sort of seemingly effortless feat.
Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher's Sapphic sexual content is little more than a few knowing smirks among various members of the all-female cast of characters, and longing glances over pre-dinner cocktails and late-night cups of cocoa. It's all about as erotic as reading a vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, but vastly more fun. Nolan's convincingly resurrects the career-girl romances of a vanished era, and even manages to cross-pollinate the genre with that of the boarding school mystery. It's all done with a conspiratorial, wink-wink nudge-nudge sense of humor and double-entendre that's nearly pitch-perfect.
The mystery itself, though, is a bit of a dud. I would've enjoyed the book as much (or even more) without it intruding every few pages on the campy good fun. I had no idea why a slightly dim instructor of peasant dance and rope-climbing, lesbian or otherwise, would have appointed herself amateur detective. Perhaps the girl investigator territory should be ceded to Mabel Maney and her Nancy Clue; Bobby Blanchard is stout-hearted and a dab hand with a field hockey stick, but no intellectual match for a crime-solving professional. The tears and trials of a career girl lesbian gym teacher would have been story enough.
Dark Cities Underground
by Lisa Goldstein
As a conspiracy theory, Lisa Goldstein's attempt to link Egyptian mythology to world subway systems, Victorian archaeology, children's fantasy literature, and thought control is a goldmine of weird tin-foil hat spooky good stuff. As a literary fantasy, however, Dark Cities Underground is a bit of a mess. Despite an engaging premise, her characters never really connect with each other or their audience; they already stuck in the very archetypal ruts they fear from their repeated visits to the underworld.
I've read this book three or four times at this point, lured by the premise, and still I can't really figure out what happens in the book's muddled, confusing second half. Like most conspiracy theories, Goldstein's novel isn't rewarded by too close an examination, or applying even literary logic to its madcap multiple mythologies.
A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)
by Caroline Stevermer
The author has packed into a fin-de-siècle fantasy enough scenarios for multiple separate novels, in A College of Magics. There's a magical-teen coming of age story, a lyrical college novel, a grand tour of Europe adventure, and enough Balkan monarchy intrigue to fill out the plots of a couple of operettas. Thankfully the college and coming-of-age material carries the weaker mechanics of the unstable throne subterfuge—which almost seem as if they might have been relegated to separate volumes. Stevermer's conception of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe graced by magic is charming, however, and the novel's conclusion is an unexpected and lovely grace note.
A Scholar of Magics (A College of Magics, #2)
by Caroline Stevermer
It's a pity that I found A Scholar of Magics so slow-moving and unlikable, when I liked its predecessor, A College of Magics, so very much. Stevermer's scenes spark whenever two or more women dominate the action; it's clear that if she'd stuck to the nearly all-female cast of College, this sequel might have been as interesting. The book bogs down whenever the hero and heroine work together—and a more wooden romance couldn't be found in a coed lumberjack camp.
The Knitter's Life List: To Do, To Know, To Explore, To Make
by Gwen Steege
If you, as a knitter, are so completely devoid of imagination, initiative, drive, and the ability to make endlessly long simple craft-related bucket lists that include the following—
If you, as a knitter, are likely to blink, take pause, and wonder what the hell planet Gwen Steege is from when among her bland maxims she drops the following list items—
Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
by Charles Busch
It's a shame that Charles Busch, playwright and extraordinary channeler of glamorous Hollywood divas that never were, only wrote a single novel. Whores of Lost Atlantis is not even so much a work of fiction as a thinly-disguised autobiography of how Busch assembled the group of actors and improv artists who came to form Theatre in Limbo in the nineteen-eighties—the troupe that with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom became a wild Off-Off-Broadway success and propelled him into stardom.
On stage, Busch may be larger than life, but within the pages of his sole attempt at fiction, he's self-effacing, modest, and nothing at all like the outlandish divas he writes for himself. Though the (slightly) fictionalized version of the truth employs a (slightly) silly crime caper subplot to add some oomph to the proceedings, it's the least-convincing aspect of Busch's writing. What emerges is a sweet-natured tribute to a vanished era when any female impersonator with drive and moxie could become a downtown cult sensation.
Austenland
by Shannon Hale
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady with an inquisitive mind, a well-discerned taste, and both the means and disposition to follow her creative muse, after seating herself at the feast of fertile thought there is to be found in philosophy, in her histories, and in the great authors of literature throughout the centuries, may one day pen a novel of her own that illuminates where there is darkness, provides guidance where there are no pathways, and brings solace where there is little hope.
Readers, this is not that novel. For it is also a truth universally acknowledged that if the young lady in question confines her diet to multiple lazy viewings of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice DVDs, she's likely to poop out the stinking, steaming turd that is Austenland.
The Ogre Downstairs
by Diana Wynne Jones
This whimsical tale of a five-child blended family brought together by the mishaps that occur from a pair of mysterious chemistry sets was one of my favorite books when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I'm always relieved, when I revisit it periodically through the years, that it holds up well. Chemistry sets might not be as in vogue as they were in my youth, but the animus between the two families is recognizable to kids of any decade, as ultimately are the tricky negotiations that both adults and children alike need to make when accepting new people into their lives. Purely delightful.
The Family Tree
by Sheri S. Tepper
For those who find Sheri S. Tepper's authorial preoccupation with eco-feminist issues humorless, The Family Tree is likely to be a revelation. The twin stories intertwined here—one a kitchen-sink detective story set in the present day, and the other an exotic tale of multiple tribespeople on an adventure to save the world—both sparkle with a sly jocularity not seen since Tepper's earliest novels. The moment when the two stories converge is simply magical; the first time I read it, I sat up in my bed, dumbfounded at the neatness of it all.
Tepper is writing at the height of her powers in her fable on the connectedness of all living creatures. As an introduction to her themes and her incredible imaginative skills, The Family Tree is a good introduction to the author's novels, and a ripping good read on its own.
Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods
Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse
by Sheri S. Tepper
As might be intuited by their playful alliterative titles, Sheri S. Tepper's trilogy of Marianne books—Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, followed by Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse—are light-hearted caprices. Written early in her career, they're also the shortest of Tepper's output.
Yet they're not slight in imaginative content. Tepper's heroine becomes trapped in a series of alternate, fantasy universes, each with their own oddball and inexorable set of rules from which she must puzzle her way out. Imagination as a wild creative force, and specifically the concept of being trapped in worlds created by the imagination of others, is a conceit that Tepper explores again to deeper and more tragic effect in her later novel, Beauty. But in these short works Marianne's determination to prevail is charming and humorous . . . and sometimes her determination to reshape history in her favor is even a little frightening.
If the third book in the trilogy is a little less compelling than its predecessors, it's simply because the antagonist of the piece never appears until near the book's very end, and it's difficult to take him as much of a threat compared to the terrifying Madame of the first two entries. Still, all three books are among Tepper's most whimsical, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or two.
Fosse
by Sam Wasson
"How much time do I have?" asks Bob Fosse at the start of Sam Wasson's biography of the director and choreographer. Sixty years, as it turns out, as Wasson's chapter headings turn into a relentless countdown of the years--and later, minutes--left before his last, fatal heart attack. It's an effective device, for who among us is not a ticking timebomb with an uncertain expiration date?
Wasson's narrative--expertly researched, exhaustively documented--is as gritty and sometimes as knowingly vulgar as his subject. Its thoroughness, however, is somewhat undermined by a lack of any kind of post-mortem evaluation of Fosse's legacy. Of all his contemporaries, it's Fosse whose name is a household word, and whose style is inseparable from his name. Wasson, however, is so hellbent on ending his work with Fosse keeling over dead in the streets that his countdown gimmick undermines his subject's deeper significance. Fosse's influence didn't end the moment his heart stopped; for as long as he is emulated, imitated, and honored on stage, is as much time as he and his legacy have.
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
by Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders, half of the French and Saunders comedy team and creator of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series, is a deeply private person with a vast English reserve. Yes, it's difficult to believe that the woman who spent most of her Ab Fab screen time outrageously drunk and arse-over-knickers is truly shy to the point she's virtually unable to discuss her personal life in an autobiography—which by its very nature is a deeply personal document. Her reticence and hesitation to delve too deeply into her own personal history create a bit of an odd duck of a book, which while not particularly illuminating, is still a fun read.
Saunders is willing to share safe, talk-show friendly anecdotes about how she met Dawn French, the creation of several (but not all) of her comedy projects, her trips abroad. She's utterly unwilling to talk about her wooing of and subsequent marriage to Adrian Edmondson or to her recent three-year battle with breast cancer, as she's obviously more comfortable with light cocktail chatter in the guise of a memoir.
But that's okay. As she points out after an incident in which she confronts paparazzi who invade her family's privacy deep in the rural solitude where they've made a home, Saunders never chased the spotlight or angled for red-carpet appearances. She merely wished to be left alone to write and act, and create her much-loved comedies. Let's be grateful to those have given her imagination free reign for the last thirty years, even if her characters are infinitely more outrageous than their originator and her not-tell-much biography.
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
by Scotty Bowers
I have to confess that at several points during Scotty Bowers' sin-sational Hollywood tell-all, Full Service, I would forget that I was reading something allegedly from the non-fiction shelves. Instead I would flip the pages with wide eyes and think, "This satire on Tinseltown memoirs is hi-LAR-ious!" I can't quite think of another autobiography featuring such purple prose and such an unreliable narrator—or in which I've had to suspend, from front to back cover, such a great amount of disbelief. That is, at least, not since Patrick Dennis' devastating fictional parody on the same territory of the glamorous film world, Little Me.
According to Full Service the studios would all but empty of their big-name talent whenever Scotty Bowers' evening shift began at a little gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where he would pimp out (but not for money!) handsome young men and women to some of the hugest stars of Hollywood's golden age. "Oh, Kate, Spence, Judy, Tyrone, George, Cary, Rita," writes the author, mourning the past. One might think he was done, but no. ". . . Charles, Randolph, Edith, Vivien . . . where are you now?" These are but a few of the powerful for whom Bowers arranged sexual trysts with rent-boys and good-time girls (but for which he never received a nickel!), and for whom the well-endowed Bowers performed his 'swizzle-stick trick' when he would bartend private sex parties (at which, both he and no doubt his legal team are intent upon reminding you every fourth paragraph, he never ever EVER received any compensation. He did it out of the goodness of his heart! Honest! Swear to god!).
There's a certain breathless naiveté in Bowers' revelations. Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. During sex she would say sing-songy things in French!" (The sex was unpaid, of course.) Of the love of his life, Vivien Leigh, he plumbs into the depths of his soul to fish up this poetic apothegm: "She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual!" Second only to his affection for Leigh was Eddy. You know. Eddy. Eddy Windsor. His Royal Highness the Royal Duke of Windsor and former King of England, Edward VIII. Well. the gas station restrooms must've been sanitized to an inch of their lives when Eddy and Wallis Simpson showed up to avail themselves of Bowers' (free! donated!) pimping services. Bowers was so generous to the former monarch that he became Eddy's lover out of the goodness of his heart. For free. ("Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro!")
Pity those whom Bowers dislikes—though he really never disliked anyone, he's careful to emphasize, and/or wished to libel any of the hundred and hundreds of celebrities within his pages . . . all of whom are somewhat coincidentally dead and therefore unable to sue. Katharine Hepburn comes in for some of the worst treatment. A frequent consumer of Bowers' (free) services for female prostitutes, Bowers feels compelled, whenever her name is mentioned, to repeat that no one in Hollywood liked working with her, and that she had a bad skin problem. He liked her! Cross his heart! It was everyone else who hated that lousy bull dyke. And yeesh. That crocodile skin!
There are certain chapters in this gloriously naive autobiography that I would be happy never to read or think of again, such as the very long passages devoted to Charles Laughton's disinclination to good sexual hygiene, or to his fondness for a sandwich spread that resembles—yet definitely is not—Nutella. I also did not need to know that the designer of the original Barbie was into surprising young women while fondling himself in a casket. And I am afraid that the phrase 'doo-doo queens' is now permanently etched in my sorry memory.
I'll be honest. I really only believe about twenty percent of Full Service, and that portion consists of verifiable universals such as the notions that cars need gas that can be found at filling stations, or that there is a state named California and Hollywood is a city within its borders. The details of Bowers’ thirty-year career as Hollywood's most notorious (unpaid!) pimp, who cannot even fall asleep on a park bench without a movie star waking him up and employing him (as a volunteer!) for sex . . . well, like any unreliable narrator, I'm not sure I trust a word.
But I certainly had a good time reading about it, with my jaw dropped for the duration.
Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
From its inception, planners and architects intended Grand Central Terminal to become not merely a locus of commerce and industry on 42nd Street, but a testament both to the Beaux Arts ideal and to New York City as an emerging world center. Although Sam Roberts' Grand Central (written for the one hundredth anniversary of the Terminal's debut) is exhaustively researched, it's approachable enough for readers who don't happen to be up on their railroad barons. The book dwells extensively on the history of the New York Central and the New York and Harlem Railroads in the decades before the Terminal's construction, then takes readers through the building's glory days during the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters on its mid-century decline in fortunes, its salvation from destruction, and the renaissance of the the building during the last two decades give the narrative a satisfying arc and conclusion.
Roberts seems more interested in the social history of Grand Central Terminal rather than on its architecture; those searching for a more comprehensive account its builders and artists might be better served elsewhere. But in its chosen focus Grand Central offers up some interesting tidbits about how a single railroad terminal changed a nation—and even a the world—for good. When opened to the public, for example, the Terminal's unique use of sloping walkways led to the adaptation of the word 'ramp' in popular vocabulary—and the railroad system itself transformed the way the population synchronized and time zones.
Grand Central Terminal made a Midtown in Manhattan. This celebration of its glories—and its low points—makes for an engaging read.
The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden
Considering I was the child who spent hours banging at the basement paneling in my parents' house, hoping to find a hidden spring that would unlock a hitherto-undiscovered chamber, I would have adored Nina Bawden's The Secret Passage. A number of themes in this children's novel are old-fashioned enough that they wouldn't have been amiss in an E. Nesbit classic like The Railway Children—a trio of youths who've lost a parent, a forced relocation to somewhere exotic and strange, the titular secret passage, a number of adults who need the children's intervention to set things right, a lost child, and even a runaway princess of sorts.
Bawden's considerable skill turns all these somewhat hoary tropes on their head. The exotic location is dreary London, while the children's original home is an Africa to which they've become thoroughly acculturated. The secret passage itself isn't much of a secret; it's simply behind a door. The lost child isn't lost—at least not in the way the children think. And the princesse lointaine is one of the most unapologetically disagreeable brats in literature.
It's Bawden's playfulness with these vintage themes, and her willingness to be either humorous or sentimental in equal parts, that makes The Secret Passage a fun read . . . even for an adult like myself, who never quite got over the urge to rap on paneling, hoping to hear a hollow sound beyond.
Five Go Adventuring Again (Famous Five Series, #2)
by Enid Blyton
I have great difficulty making it through an Enid Blyton novel without developing an appetite for great quantities of treacle pudding and lashings of ginger beer.
The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences ... and Hysteria
by Simon Doonan
In his books of essays, Simon Doonan has proven he can be both tremendously humorous and touching. His determination to be iconoclastic and outré without being offensive or—heaven forbid—mean renders him into an eccentric little darling, a compact and lovable example of walking drollery free of spite.
Some of his essays in The Asylum are laugh-out-loud funny. But as always with Doonan's books, it's difficult to anticipate what one will be getting from chapter to chapter. He simply tells stories as they occur to him, without chronological organization or overall arcing narrative. The Asylum is nominally focused on the fashion industry, but so loosely that it gives Doonan leeway to ruminate on any of the odd people or experiences he's encountered in his lifetime. One can almost hear his husband in the background between chapters, saying, "Don't forget to tell them about Tom Ford seeing your toenail fungus!" or "Make sure to include about when you auditioned for The Devil Wears Prada!"
Throughout, Doonan manages to be just enough on the outside of the A-List to make the reader feel as if he or she is part of his circle. Although the overall scattershot effect is a little like listening to a garrulous old friend nattering away at a cocktail party, The Asylum—especially taken in small doses—is a rewarding read.
Remember the year I managed to get through thick histories of the Black Plague and biographies of Charles Dickens and the Brontës? Gosh, that was high-class stuff. If that was the apex of my commitment to feeding my brain a well-rounded diet, 2013 was the year in which I went out and bought it a giant tub of Cheez Doodles.
Apparently in 2013, when faced with the task of picking out the next Very Serious Nonfiction Tome, instead of choosing something to expand my horizons and lift my consciousness, I would spy a celebrity biography, snatch it off the shelves, and call it good. That’s why 2013 turned out to be the year in which I read about Tallulah Bankhead and Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse and Jennifer Saunders (sorry, Dawn French, but I haven’t been able to get through Dear Fatty at all) and Garry Marshall and Rita Moreno and Bruce Kimmel and the jaw-dropping experience that is Scotty Bowers’ autobiography.
In 2014 I need to make better brain food choices. God knows I’ll have to do something to counterbalance the Enid Blyton I’ve been inspired to re-read.
Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher (Lesbian Career Girl Series, #2)
by Monica Nolan
To carry off a pulp fiction parody requires both a mastery of period detail and a ear for the cadences of previous decades of—let's face it—often indifferently-written genre literature. Mabel Maney managed the feat admirably in her Nancy Clue trio of burlesques, which put a lesbian spin on familiar detective books for girls. In her Lesbian Career Girl series, Monica Nolan attempts the same sort of seemingly effortless feat.
Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher's Sapphic sexual content is little more than a few knowing smirks among various members of the all-female cast of characters, and longing glances over pre-dinner cocktails and late-night cups of cocoa. It's all about as erotic as reading a vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, but vastly more fun. Nolan's convincingly resurrects the career-girl romances of a vanished era, and even manages to cross-pollinate the genre with that of the boarding school mystery. It's all done with a conspiratorial, wink-wink nudge-nudge sense of humor and double-entendre that's nearly pitch-perfect.
The mystery itself, though, is a bit of a dud. I would've enjoyed the book as much (or even more) without it intruding every few pages on the campy good fun. I had no idea why a slightly dim instructor of peasant dance and rope-climbing, lesbian or otherwise, would have appointed herself amateur detective. Perhaps the girl investigator territory should be ceded to Mabel Maney and her Nancy Clue; Bobby Blanchard is stout-hearted and a dab hand with a field hockey stick, but no intellectual match for a crime-solving professional. The tears and trials of a career girl lesbian gym teacher would have been story enough.
Dark Cities Underground
by Lisa Goldstein
As a conspiracy theory, Lisa Goldstein's attempt to link Egyptian mythology to world subway systems, Victorian archaeology, children's fantasy literature, and thought control is a goldmine of weird tin-foil hat spooky good stuff. As a literary fantasy, however, Dark Cities Underground is a bit of a mess. Despite an engaging premise, her characters never really connect with each other or their audience; they already stuck in the very archetypal ruts they fear from their repeated visits to the underworld.
I've read this book three or four times at this point, lured by the premise, and still I can't really figure out what happens in the book's muddled, confusing second half. Like most conspiracy theories, Goldstein's novel isn't rewarded by too close an examination, or applying even literary logic to its madcap multiple mythologies.
A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)
by Caroline Stevermer
The author has packed into a fin-de-siècle fantasy enough scenarios for multiple separate novels, in A College of Magics. There's a magical-teen coming of age story, a lyrical college novel, a grand tour of Europe adventure, and enough Balkan monarchy intrigue to fill out the plots of a couple of operettas. Thankfully the college and coming-of-age material carries the weaker mechanics of the unstable throne subterfuge—which almost seem as if they might have been relegated to separate volumes. Stevermer's conception of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe graced by magic is charming, however, and the novel's conclusion is an unexpected and lovely grace note.
A Scholar of Magics (A College of Magics, #2)
by Caroline Stevermer
It's a pity that I found A Scholar of Magics so slow-moving and unlikable, when I liked its predecessor, A College of Magics, so very much. Stevermer's scenes spark whenever two or more women dominate the action; it's clear that if she'd stuck to the nearly all-female cast of College, this sequel might have been as interesting. The book bogs down whenever the hero and heroine work together—and a more wooden romance couldn't be found in a coed lumberjack camp.
The Knitter's Life List: To Do, To Know, To Explore, To Make
by Gwen Steege
If you, as a knitter, are so completely devoid of imagination, initiative, drive, and the ability to make endlessly long simple craft-related bucket lists that include the following—
"Try knitting on a bus!"—then very likely this book could be for you. If you are a knitter who actually has a couple of brain cells in that noggin of yours sparking around somewhere, however, you likely do not need the author's inane suggestions.
"Try knitting in a car!"
"Knit a scarf!"
"Knit a sweater!"
"Knit a pair of socks!"
"Visit a yarn store!"
"Collect all your needles in one place!"
If you, as a knitter, are likely to blink, take pause, and wonder what the hell planet Gwen Steege is from when among her bland maxims she drops the following list items—
"Watch the film version of Cabaret!"—then you can join me in tossing this book (which is apparently intended for desperate suckers who need a holiday gift for feeble-minded relatives who enjoy knitting) into the compost heap in which it so richly belongs.
"Visit Estonia!"
Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
by Charles Busch
It's a shame that Charles Busch, playwright and extraordinary channeler of glamorous Hollywood divas that never were, only wrote a single novel. Whores of Lost Atlantis is not even so much a work of fiction as a thinly-disguised autobiography of how Busch assembled the group of actors and improv artists who came to form Theatre in Limbo in the nineteen-eighties—the troupe that with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom became a wild Off-Off-Broadway success and propelled him into stardom.
On stage, Busch may be larger than life, but within the pages of his sole attempt at fiction, he's self-effacing, modest, and nothing at all like the outlandish divas he writes for himself. Though the (slightly) fictionalized version of the truth employs a (slightly) silly crime caper subplot to add some oomph to the proceedings, it's the least-convincing aspect of Busch's writing. What emerges is a sweet-natured tribute to a vanished era when any female impersonator with drive and moxie could become a downtown cult sensation.
Austenland
by Shannon Hale
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady with an inquisitive mind, a well-discerned taste, and both the means and disposition to follow her creative muse, after seating herself at the feast of fertile thought there is to be found in philosophy, in her histories, and in the great authors of literature throughout the centuries, may one day pen a novel of her own that illuminates where there is darkness, provides guidance where there are no pathways, and brings solace where there is little hope.
Readers, this is not that novel. For it is also a truth universally acknowledged that if the young lady in question confines her diet to multiple lazy viewings of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice DVDs, she's likely to poop out the stinking, steaming turd that is Austenland.
The Ogre Downstairs
by Diana Wynne Jones
This whimsical tale of a five-child blended family brought together by the mishaps that occur from a pair of mysterious chemistry sets was one of my favorite books when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I'm always relieved, when I revisit it periodically through the years, that it holds up well. Chemistry sets might not be as in vogue as they were in my youth, but the animus between the two families is recognizable to kids of any decade, as ultimately are the tricky negotiations that both adults and children alike need to make when accepting new people into their lives. Purely delightful.
The Family Tree
by Sheri S. Tepper
For those who find Sheri S. Tepper's authorial preoccupation with eco-feminist issues humorless, The Family Tree is likely to be a revelation. The twin stories intertwined here—one a kitchen-sink detective story set in the present day, and the other an exotic tale of multiple tribespeople on an adventure to save the world—both sparkle with a sly jocularity not seen since Tepper's earliest novels. The moment when the two stories converge is simply magical; the first time I read it, I sat up in my bed, dumbfounded at the neatness of it all.
Tepper is writing at the height of her powers in her fable on the connectedness of all living creatures. As an introduction to her themes and her incredible imaginative skills, The Family Tree is a good introduction to the author's novels, and a ripping good read on its own.
Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods
Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse
by Sheri S. Tepper
As might be intuited by their playful alliterative titles, Sheri S. Tepper's trilogy of Marianne books—Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, followed by Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse—are light-hearted caprices. Written early in her career, they're also the shortest of Tepper's output.
Yet they're not slight in imaginative content. Tepper's heroine becomes trapped in a series of alternate, fantasy universes, each with their own oddball and inexorable set of rules from which she must puzzle her way out. Imagination as a wild creative force, and specifically the concept of being trapped in worlds created by the imagination of others, is a conceit that Tepper explores again to deeper and more tragic effect in her later novel, Beauty. But in these short works Marianne's determination to prevail is charming and humorous . . . and sometimes her determination to reshape history in her favor is even a little frightening.
If the third book in the trilogy is a little less compelling than its predecessors, it's simply because the antagonist of the piece never appears until near the book's very end, and it's difficult to take him as much of a threat compared to the terrifying Madame of the first two entries. Still, all three books are among Tepper's most whimsical, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or two.
Fosse
by Sam Wasson
"How much time do I have?" asks Bob Fosse at the start of Sam Wasson's biography of the director and choreographer. Sixty years, as it turns out, as Wasson's chapter headings turn into a relentless countdown of the years--and later, minutes--left before his last, fatal heart attack. It's an effective device, for who among us is not a ticking timebomb with an uncertain expiration date?
Wasson's narrative--expertly researched, exhaustively documented--is as gritty and sometimes as knowingly vulgar as his subject. Its thoroughness, however, is somewhat undermined by a lack of any kind of post-mortem evaluation of Fosse's legacy. Of all his contemporaries, it's Fosse whose name is a household word, and whose style is inseparable from his name. Wasson, however, is so hellbent on ending his work with Fosse keeling over dead in the streets that his countdown gimmick undermines his subject's deeper significance. Fosse's influence didn't end the moment his heart stopped; for as long as he is emulated, imitated, and honored on stage, is as much time as he and his legacy have.
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
by Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders, half of the French and Saunders comedy team and creator of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series, is a deeply private person with a vast English reserve. Yes, it's difficult to believe that the woman who spent most of her Ab Fab screen time outrageously drunk and arse-over-knickers is truly shy to the point she's virtually unable to discuss her personal life in an autobiography—which by its very nature is a deeply personal document. Her reticence and hesitation to delve too deeply into her own personal history create a bit of an odd duck of a book, which while not particularly illuminating, is still a fun read.
Saunders is willing to share safe, talk-show friendly anecdotes about how she met Dawn French, the creation of several (but not all) of her comedy projects, her trips abroad. She's utterly unwilling to talk about her wooing of and subsequent marriage to Adrian Edmondson or to her recent three-year battle with breast cancer, as she's obviously more comfortable with light cocktail chatter in the guise of a memoir.
But that's okay. As she points out after an incident in which she confronts paparazzi who invade her family's privacy deep in the rural solitude where they've made a home, Saunders never chased the spotlight or angled for red-carpet appearances. She merely wished to be left alone to write and act, and create her much-loved comedies. Let's be grateful to those have given her imagination free reign for the last thirty years, even if her characters are infinitely more outrageous than their originator and her not-tell-much biography.
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
by Scotty Bowers
I have to confess that at several points during Scotty Bowers' sin-sational Hollywood tell-all, Full Service, I would forget that I was reading something allegedly from the non-fiction shelves. Instead I would flip the pages with wide eyes and think, "This satire on Tinseltown memoirs is hi-LAR-ious!" I can't quite think of another autobiography featuring such purple prose and such an unreliable narrator—or in which I've had to suspend, from front to back cover, such a great amount of disbelief. That is, at least, not since Patrick Dennis' devastating fictional parody on the same territory of the glamorous film world, Little Me.
According to Full Service the studios would all but empty of their big-name talent whenever Scotty Bowers' evening shift began at a little gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where he would pimp out (but not for money!) handsome young men and women to some of the hugest stars of Hollywood's golden age. "Oh, Kate, Spence, Judy, Tyrone, George, Cary, Rita," writes the author, mourning the past. One might think he was done, but no. ". . . Charles, Randolph, Edith, Vivien . . . where are you now?" These are but a few of the powerful for whom Bowers arranged sexual trysts with rent-boys and good-time girls (but for which he never received a nickel!), and for whom the well-endowed Bowers performed his 'swizzle-stick trick' when he would bartend private sex parties (at which, both he and no doubt his legal team are intent upon reminding you every fourth paragraph, he never ever EVER received any compensation. He did it out of the goodness of his heart! Honest! Swear to god!).
There's a certain breathless naiveté in Bowers' revelations. Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. During sex she would say sing-songy things in French!" (The sex was unpaid, of course.) Of the love of his life, Vivien Leigh, he plumbs into the depths of his soul to fish up this poetic apothegm: "She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual!" Second only to his affection for Leigh was Eddy. You know. Eddy. Eddy Windsor. His Royal Highness the Royal Duke of Windsor and former King of England, Edward VIII. Well. the gas station restrooms must've been sanitized to an inch of their lives when Eddy and Wallis Simpson showed up to avail themselves of Bowers' (free! donated!) pimping services. Bowers was so generous to the former monarch that he became Eddy's lover out of the goodness of his heart. For free. ("Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro!")
Pity those whom Bowers dislikes—though he really never disliked anyone, he's careful to emphasize, and/or wished to libel any of the hundred and hundreds of celebrities within his pages . . . all of whom are somewhat coincidentally dead and therefore unable to sue. Katharine Hepburn comes in for some of the worst treatment. A frequent consumer of Bowers' (free) services for female prostitutes, Bowers feels compelled, whenever her name is mentioned, to repeat that no one in Hollywood liked working with her, and that she had a bad skin problem. He liked her! Cross his heart! It was everyone else who hated that lousy bull dyke. And yeesh. That crocodile skin!
There are certain chapters in this gloriously naive autobiography that I would be happy never to read or think of again, such as the very long passages devoted to Charles Laughton's disinclination to good sexual hygiene, or to his fondness for a sandwich spread that resembles—yet definitely is not—Nutella. I also did not need to know that the designer of the original Barbie was into surprising young women while fondling himself in a casket. And I am afraid that the phrase 'doo-doo queens' is now permanently etched in my sorry memory.
I'll be honest. I really only believe about twenty percent of Full Service, and that portion consists of verifiable universals such as the notions that cars need gas that can be found at filling stations, or that there is a state named California and Hollywood is a city within its borders. The details of Bowers’ thirty-year career as Hollywood's most notorious (unpaid!) pimp, who cannot even fall asleep on a park bench without a movie star waking him up and employing him (as a volunteer!) for sex . . . well, like any unreliable narrator, I'm not sure I trust a word.
But I certainly had a good time reading about it, with my jaw dropped for the duration.
Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
From its inception, planners and architects intended Grand Central Terminal to become not merely a locus of commerce and industry on 42nd Street, but a testament both to the Beaux Arts ideal and to New York City as an emerging world center. Although Sam Roberts' Grand Central (written for the one hundredth anniversary of the Terminal's debut) is exhaustively researched, it's approachable enough for readers who don't happen to be up on their railroad barons. The book dwells extensively on the history of the New York Central and the New York and Harlem Railroads in the decades before the Terminal's construction, then takes readers through the building's glory days during the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters on its mid-century decline in fortunes, its salvation from destruction, and the renaissance of the the building during the last two decades give the narrative a satisfying arc and conclusion.
Roberts seems more interested in the social history of Grand Central Terminal rather than on its architecture; those searching for a more comprehensive account its builders and artists might be better served elsewhere. But in its chosen focus Grand Central offers up some interesting tidbits about how a single railroad terminal changed a nation—and even a the world—for good. When opened to the public, for example, the Terminal's unique use of sloping walkways led to the adaptation of the word 'ramp' in popular vocabulary—and the railroad system itself transformed the way the population synchronized and time zones.
Grand Central Terminal made a Midtown in Manhattan. This celebration of its glories—and its low points—makes for an engaging read.
The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden
Considering I was the child who spent hours banging at the basement paneling in my parents' house, hoping to find a hidden spring that would unlock a hitherto-undiscovered chamber, I would have adored Nina Bawden's The Secret Passage. A number of themes in this children's novel are old-fashioned enough that they wouldn't have been amiss in an E. Nesbit classic like The Railway Children—a trio of youths who've lost a parent, a forced relocation to somewhere exotic and strange, the titular secret passage, a number of adults who need the children's intervention to set things right, a lost child, and even a runaway princess of sorts.
Bawden's considerable skill turns all these somewhat hoary tropes on their head. The exotic location is dreary London, while the children's original home is an Africa to which they've become thoroughly acculturated. The secret passage itself isn't much of a secret; it's simply behind a door. The lost child isn't lost—at least not in the way the children think. And the princesse lointaine is one of the most unapologetically disagreeable brats in literature.
It's Bawden's playfulness with these vintage themes, and her willingness to be either humorous or sentimental in equal parts, that makes The Secret Passage a fun read . . . even for an adult like myself, who never quite got over the urge to rap on paneling, hoping to hear a hollow sound beyond.
Five Go Adventuring Again (Famous Five Series, #2)
by Enid Blyton
I have great difficulty making it through an Enid Blyton novel without developing an appetite for great quantities of treacle pudding and lashings of ginger beer.
The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences ... and Hysteria
by Simon Doonan
In his books of essays, Simon Doonan has proven he can be both tremendously humorous and touching. His determination to be iconoclastic and outré without being offensive or—heaven forbid—mean renders him into an eccentric little darling, a compact and lovable example of walking drollery free of spite.
Some of his essays in The Asylum are laugh-out-loud funny. But as always with Doonan's books, it's difficult to anticipate what one will be getting from chapter to chapter. He simply tells stories as they occur to him, without chronological organization or overall arcing narrative. The Asylum is nominally focused on the fashion industry, but so loosely that it gives Doonan leeway to ruminate on any of the odd people or experiences he's encountered in his lifetime. One can almost hear his husband in the background between chapters, saying, "Don't forget to tell them about Tom Ford seeing your toenail fungus!" or "Make sure to include about when you auditioned for The Devil Wears Prada!"
Throughout, Doonan manages to be just enough on the outside of the A-List to make the reader feel as if he or she is part of his circle. Although the overall scattershot effect is a little like listening to a garrulous old friend nattering away at a cocktail party, The Asylum—especially taken in small doses—is a rewarding read.
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