R.I.P., Borders

When I first moved to Detroit in 1987, I didn't have a car. If I couldn't walk to a place, I couldn't get to it, pretty basically. I managed to remedy the situation within my first six months, but at that point I didn't really have any idea where to go. So I asked around my fellow grad students. They all had one answer: Borders.

In those days there were only two branches of what was eventually going to be come the massive, and now defunct, Borders chain. There was the original stores in Ann Arbor, and the much-closer and smaller branch in Southfield, Michigan. Borders was my very first off-campus venture that winter. It was supposed to be a great bookstore, and I was a graduate student who collected any book that looked remotely interesting. More importantly, it was a straight shot from campus up a major artery, and I was pretty sure I could find it without getting lost.

Borders was magical then. It simply was the best bookstore in the world. I'd been to Scribner's and Barnes and Noble and other pretenders, and enjoyed them all, but Borders was magical. On my first visit I didn't emerge for four hours. I started to visit every Saturday morning, making a day of it—a bagel in my old clunker of a car on the way, a good three hours among the dense stacks of Borders, then a long lunch somewhere cheap with my find of the day.

Borders had everything, back then. In the days before Amazon or other online retailers, they offered a rich back catalogue of authors past and present. Every favorite author I had at the time was represented on their shelves. They carried books by E. F. Benson of which I'd never heard, and the kind of obscure British novelists that starred in the wettest of my grad school dreams. The place was like Disneyland, drenched in light from its tall windows. It even came complete with a fleet of helpful workers who could answer any questions I ever had. The test that Borders employees had to pass in order to gain employment there was tougher than my literature qualifying exams.

My parents both loved Borders, too. When they'd visited Detroit, the bookstore was the first place they wanted to visit. My dad usually found his patience tried in bookstores, but he could linger for hours in Borders' rich history section. My mother would accumulate a stack of books a couple of feet high, every visit, and walk out with two shopping bags full of volumes, each of which tucked with one of the store's endearing and ugly hand-drawn bookmarks. Together we drove, during one visit, to Ann Arbor and discovered the original store together, a two-story building in which we could all get lost for hours.

I loved Borders for years as they opened up branches throughout the Detroit area. The Ann Arbor branch was always a test balloon for experimental programs—they tried selling software for a few years, and then were the first store to sell CDs and videotapes, well before the others.

Apparently the experiment worked, because when even more branches began to open up in the area, they all had the video and CD sections. Shortly after that, the chain went national—and it changed.

When Borders expanded into a nation-wide chain, the depth of selection disappeared. The titles on the shelves homogenized. Instead of the quirky and unpredictable picks by the branch's booksellers, the end caps and tables were filled with paid placement. The amount of bookshelf space shrank; the amount of games and gifts and notecards and just plain old crap grew.

I became disenchanted with the chain early in the 2000s, roughly around the time I started getting published. I kept getting reports from irate friends who'd walk into Borders and find that none of my books were there—like it's my fault. I kept asking my agent and publisher to figure out what was going on, and it turned out that the woman who ordered juvenile titles was on maternity leave. Apparently the chain didn't delegate her duties to anyone else, or bother to have a backup. Now, Smooch had its own problems, but when one person goes AWOL for months and there's no one to order your books for an entire nationwide chain of stores, there's definitely some kind of problem going on.

It was soon after that I found Borders wasn't a destination any longer. It was the place I'd go when I had time to kill when a Barnes and Noble or independent bookstore wasn't around. I certainly wouldn't go for the book selection, which was spotty, or the CDs, which were hideously overpriced. I couldn't always count on the clerks, some of whom were enthusiastic and knowledgable, but others were so disgruntled or overworked or just plain ornery that they'd grunt and jerk their shoulders in the direction of the computer I was supposed to be using instead of bothering them as they restocked the magnetic poetry section.

I'm sad that Borders is no more. When its doors closed last week, I hadn't stepped foot into a branch in at least a year. Yet in my memories of when I first became acquainted with it, it was heaven itself—a golden, sun-drenched expanse of bookcases filled with interesting things to read and crowded with happy people anxious to discover something new

The New Frugality

To a certain extent, I enjoy watching certain food-related shows on television. I suppose I like the ones in which chefs are engaged in some kind of competition, whether it's to be Top Chef, or the Next Food Network Star. I'm really fond of Chopped, that show in which one of the Queer Eye guys gives the competitors identical picnic baskets containing impossible ingredients—an obscure fruit from Indonesia, a packet of beef jerky, a small twist of chocolate nonpareils, and a pound of rice crackers—and demands that they prepare within thirty minutes for the persnickety judges a delicious, piping hot gourmet entree.

I suppose what I like to see in my food television is the sight of perplexed chefs sweating in their food.

As much as I enjoy the seemingly endless parade of cocky chefs being publicly humiliated on the TV when they're unable in a quickfire competition to create the perfect amuse-bouche solely out of products found in a Krispy Kreme franchise, what I'm not particularly entranced by, of late, is the cult of the celebrity chef. The phenomenon is particularly odious on television, where any hotshot with a set of knives and a tattoo or three can bring his swagger in front of the camera. Bonus points if the chef in question wears douchebag hats and carries a skateboard in his late thirties.

And you know, my attitude with these people, whether they're some hopped-up nobody running a molecular gastronomy deconstructed pizza joint in the Bronx, or Gordon Effing-Eff-Effable-Eff-Eff Ramsey, is something along the lines of Listen, you're about the same to me as the slob at the IHOP griddle, so bitch, get in the damned kitchen and make me a stack of chocolate chip pancakes.

I just dislike the stink of the sanctimony of these people. I disliked it immensely when recently I read a chef autobiography of a particularly spiky and nasty woman who, three-quarters of the way in, ranted about how she didn't understand why the common people ate fast-food meals because she would rather go hungry than eat anything that wasn't made from locally-grown, in-season produce and free-range protein sources that weren't prepared with classical techniques at the hands of trained professionals. Like herself. For fifty dollars a course. Thinking about it only makes me want to go on one of my rants again. Hold me back, boys!

I'm not trying to malign all chefs, here. Just those who think that based on their profession, they're hotshots. To them and to their fellow foodies, consumption is a new religion. They've found a new (and admittedly, probably more delicious than mainstream Christianity) way to divide the faithful few from the great unwashed masses. Just like religious conservatives, they also use every opportunity to rub it in our faces.

I'm indulging in this rant simply to get around to a particularly irritating trend I've noticed floating around the blogosphere lately: frugal foodieism. Really frugal foodieism.

The essays start off innocently enough. The author and her husband (it's probably coincidence, but they're all written by women) find themselves in reduced circumstances. They've had to give up the flat in New York City and move to the cheaper suburbs, where there's not even a Le Pain Quotidien in the zip code. And what do they do when they get there? Do they haunt Whole Food Market and substitute flank steak for osso bucco?

No, what they apparently do is go scavaging in nature. They pick wild sorrel and dandelion greens for their salads, and scrape and dry obscure mushrooms found by roadside lay-bys. They harvest seaweed to season their brown rice. They use their high-speed internet connections and Macbooks in order to write genteelly about their poverty and to research which lichens are edible and can be used in a chic post-modern fusion of Japanese and classic French cookery.

It's freakin' irritating. Not only are they claiming the sanctimony of foodieism, but they get to experience a Thoreuvian rush of self-sufficiency from the land and a (probably false) sense of economy as well. It's like the trifecta of poncey cliquishness that makes me want to reach for a bag of taco-flavored Doritos and munch on them sullenly.

Listen. I know I do weird-ass stuff, like make my own jams from fresh fruit (peaches were a dollar a pound! I had to do something with them!), or bake my own bread, or make my own yogurt. But I don't bask in the self-righteousness of it all, after. I eat my good eats and move on.

If I ever start lovingly eyeing my neighbor's dandelion-covered lawn and licking my lips while I contemplate writing an article about The New Frugality, though? Please knock me cold with a box of Bisquick and bury me in the dumpster in the back of the IHOP, thank you very much.

Goodreads Roundup

Here's another set of books I've recently read, and the reviews I posted at Goodreads.


In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
by Erik Larson
(Four Stars)

In both the excellent Thunderstruck and The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson fashioned eminently readable and fascinating histories by intertwining two seemingly disparate narratives that, like magic, dovetailed at the climax—the twin tales of Marconi and the murderer Crippen, in the first, and the story of another murderer and the 1893 World's Fair, in the latter.

In In the Garden of Beasts Larson attempts to work the same magic with a story of innocents abroad in a time of ultimate danger and darkness: the stories of William E. Dodd, hapless U.S. ambassador to Germany during Adolf Hitler's ascendancy between the world wars, and of his daughter, Martha Dodd, a free-spirited girl adrift in a city of corruption, deceit, and political intrigue.

The result is fascinating and, like his previous works, both enticing and gripping stuff. Despite the atrocities of the era, however, ultimately the book is a little bit of a disappointment; the father and daughter's tales are not so disparate as the stuff of Larson's other works. Both Dodds are, in their own ways, equally branded and blinded by their own naivete, and neither seems to have made much of a mark on their landscape. They're helpless and ultimate passive flotsam in an unstoppable flood of evil . . . and honestly, how much investment can a reader really make in the end for the detritus that bobs along on the deluge?

I'm not even certain Larson himself much cares, for the stories peter out at the end without any real climax or resolution. Though the writer exquisitely and carefully documents everything that happens between the years of 1933 and 1934 in the Dodd household, the remainder of their five-year term in Germany is dismissed and glossed over in the book's final dozen pages, as if nothing interesting happened either to them or in Nazi Germany during those years. It's a disappointing conclusion.

The Dodds are a fascinating entry point to what should have been a truly remarkable look at a terrible era. Ultimately, however, they simply aren't the heroic protagonists he wishes them to be.


If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't)
by Betty White
(Three Stars)

To say that Betty White's latest book—I suppose we should call it that, as it's tough to deny that it got printed and appears on bookstore and library shelves—is a bit random and scattered, is an understatement. To imply it's a lot like listening to your aged grandmother ramble about the good old days when she's in a talkative mood, would be unkind. To suggest that it's not great literature, or even really readable. . . well, that's kind of missing the point.

I was able to complete this slight little tome in an hour. White's oddball collection of mini-essays reads more like a handful of dictated and unedited blog entries than any kind of memoir. She discusses her health (which is great for her age—she tries to maintain her weight, you know, and all those stairs in her home really keep her exercised!), her guest appearance on Saturday Night Live (it was fun!), and her pets (she had a lot!), and . . . oh damn, I've gone and given away the entire plot of the book. Whoopsie.

The photos of White throughout her long career really glue the whole thing together. They show a smiling, sweet and classy entertainer from her high school years to her dotage, and it's for those that I give the book three stars.

A Queer History of the United States
by Michael Bronski
(Three Stars)

A Queer History of the United States takes the Schoolhouse Rock approach to surveying queer culture in America. It's fast-moving, it hits all the expected high and low points, it's affirming, and it never explores its subject beyond cartoon depth. All it really lacks is a catchy tune.

Though the book alleges to cover a period of time spanning from before 1492 to the present, its pre-colonial and colonial history is at best sketchy—in fact, just about anything before the turn of the twentieth century is simply a quick run-down of the usual literary and political suspects (Walt Whitman might've been gay, y'all!). And by 'the present', Bronski means 1990, the year at which he unapologetically cuts off his narrative.

Bronski's gallop through several hundred years of history certainly covers a lot of territory, and for that it may be worth reading. Anyone expecting analysis or a critical eye may be disappointed to find that the read is a bit like attending a cocktail party and hearing all the expected names dropped, but not being able after to remember if anything interesting about them was said.


Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America
by Jonathan Dixon
(Three Stars)

Whether Tom Brown's Schooldays or the Harry Potter series, I'm a sucker for books in which a neophyte goes to school for the first time, endures its rigors and harsh realities, and emerges a better person after learning some hard-earned truths about himself and the limits of endurance. Ultimately the success of the story depends on the hero's transformation by graduation. While Jonathan Dixon's memoir of his education at the Culinary Institute of America follows the skeleton of the old schoolboy tale archetype, his overall character fails to improve, much less impress.

It's difficult to have such a sad sack as the focal point of a memoir. Dixon is a self-admitted slacker who wasted away his twenties and gambled his and his girlfriend's well-beings and limited resources in order to achieve a career change in his late thirties. (Throughout the book, he's morbidly sensitive about his age, to the point that his readers are embarrassed for his continual apologies for having lived longer than Methuselah. Dude, you're in your thirties. Not your seventies. Even if you were? Get the hell over it.) He's mopey, he's glum, he's continually worried and—let's be frank—obviously not the best student. And at book's end, sad to say, any confidence or mastery he may have achieved as a result of matriculating are squandered when he faces the future with the same aimless apathy as he's spent the rest of his allegedly advanced years.

It's a pity, because a great deal of his experiences at the CIA are interesting to outsiders: the rigid curriculum, the tyrannical and eccentric instructors, the obstacles to be overcome and the rigorous hoops to be jumped. The CIA has such a methodical and well-thought-out course structure, however, that it seems pretty obvious that any of the insights of which Dixon writes aren't his, but the school's—the exact realizations the institute wants its students to make at exact points in their training. Nor does it help that many of Dixon's class descriptions sound as if he's summarized his saved syllabi. The other students in the memoir are not much more than cyphers or personality tics who vanish quickly, like anything expendable. The instructors are a bit more fleshed out, but for most Dixon has precious little affection, and imparts a sense that he's settling some personal scores and grinding a few paring knives (if not axes) by giving himself the last word.

The book cured me of any vague wonderings I may have had of wishing for an alternative life path that might have involved the CIA, certainly. I'm just fortunate that, unlike Dixon, I never applied on whim and attended solely for the purpose of being able to host and cook for slightly snobbier dinner parties.

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir
by Dick Van Dyke
(Two Stars)

Dick Van Dyke's celebrity memoir, spanning his career of sixty years, goes down like mayonnaise on white bread--unobjectionable, but hardly interesting. Everything passes by without much impact or examination. His work on the groundbreaking The Dick Van Dyke Show was fun. Mary Tyler Moore was a sweet gal. Walt Disney was a heck of a guy. Martin Luther King Jr. sure was swell.

It's a little odd that the most emotionally-resonant scene in the book (moreso than either his divorce or the death of a beloved granddaughter, even) involves his relationship with Dinky, a trained chimp for the movie Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N. But hey, it's Hollywood, where every monkey gets a shot at the big time.


The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
(Four Stars)

Sarah Vowell's account of the puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is anything but a typical romp through early American history. She's got her own axe to grind, here—the ways in which modern-day politicians have appropriated (and in some instances, perverted) puritan idealism into something probably not what the small band of colonists had in mind. But along the way in this rambling narrative, which jumps crazily from political landscapes past and present to Vowell's own history, she manages to make very clear how deeply engrained many of the puritan ideals have become in the national dialogue.

The book's short. Whether or not one finds it readable would depend, I think, partly on how closely one's political agenda aligns with Vowell's, and partly on how much one can tolerate the current generation of self-referential hipster NPR commentators.


Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
by Julie Andrews Edwards
(Four Stars)

I confess that in the early pages of Julie Andrews Edwards' memoirs I began to fear I might be overwhelmed in trying to keep straight the names of all her aunts, dogs, and cousins. There seem, in my weary memory, to have been about a dozen of each. More electrifying, however, is the story that unfolds of the three men vying to be the star's father—her mother's first husband, whom she thought of as her dad, the alcoholic artist of a second husband whom Julie supplanted as a headliner on his own tour, and the man later revealed to have been her biological progenitor. Julie's mom kind of got around, basically.

The memoir really gathers steam when Julie's career takes off—which happened at about the same age that most of us hadn't yet finished sixth grade. The narrative of her rise to fame from vaudeville to London revues and pantomimes to the New York stage is fascinating, and the star manages to relate it with characteristic modesty and good humor. In a curious twist, I found myself actually rooting for her to get parts in Camelot and Mary Poppins and worrying that she wouldn't—even though I knew exactly how it would turn out. If that's not a sign of a well-told tale, I don't know what is.

The book concludes at roughly the time of the star's first meetings with Walt Disney: the perfect point at which to whet my appetite for a second volume.


The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
by Wendy McClure
(Three Stars)

McClure's account of her lifelong obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder-penned Little House series culminates in a rambling journey through the nation's countryside, visiting all of the childhood homesteads Wilder mentioned in her popular books. McClure's off-kilter and occasionally profane individuality contrasts humorously with the heterodoxy of the many other Wilder enthusiasts she encounters along the way, resulting in an engaging and quick read.

However, the narrative is as meandering and out-of-step as the route McClure takes to her heroine's homesteads. It's ultimately about as pointless, too, as McClure really has no idea why she feels compelled to make the literary pilgrimage, or what she expects from each stop along the way.

That's a pity.

McClure nails her own dilemma fairly early on in the book: she wants to immerse herself in 'Laura World', as she calls it, in order to get a sense of its so-called realness—despite the fact that she's fully aware that the Little House series was written as fiction, is classified as fiction in bookstores and on library shelves, and took on a fictional second life as a television series in the nineteen-seventies. Her visits to the homesteads, amusing and blog-like as the recounting may be, all conclude with her missing and yearning for a certain lacking something—something upon which she is unable to put a finger.

McClure may glibly assert, as she does in her visit to the Almanzo Wilder childhood home, that something is as simple as pancakes. It's not. It's merely that spark of wonder and imagination she experienced upon reading the books in childhood. Attempting to chase that particular quality over the dusty back roads of Kansas and Missouri is hopeless; one would be as likely to book a modern-day bus tour of the principal sights of Narnia. It's a sense of looking within, and reconciling a childhood delight of reading and imagining with modern-day realities, that this particular book lacks. Watching the adult McClure trade in that delight for a long-range, expensive obsession may result in a glib and often funny memoir, but it's ultimately an empty experience for author and reader alike.

Closing

Greetings from my new home of Stepford, Connecticut, where all of us homemakers are happy as clams as long as we’re oiled regularly and plugged in to charge at night!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have several days of sheer drudgery to write about, first.

I was in a bad mood, a week ago Tuesday. Well, not bad. I wasn’t snappy, or crabby, or taking out my frustrations on the nearest available husband who’d come home the day before. I was just drawn thin, and very tired. Ever since the house had sold in April, I’d been on a rampage—packing up crap that needed to be packed, ruthlessly throwing out anything that it even vaguely pained me to think about transporting across the country, donating anything that was reusable to the Salvation Army or some other charitable cause. Any charitable cause that would take the crap. They could’ve been representing the most evangelical Christians or Satan’s Minions or the freakin’ Lollipop Guild for all I cared. So long as they were willing to take a single metal table leg, a bunch of old towels, and a pair of 30-year-old duck boots, I was good to go.

Craig had arrived home from Connecticut, very late Sunday night. He was pretty helpful about pretending to help with my mania, and smiled cheerfully and ambled around while I yelled out things like, The file cabinet has to go to the curb!, or, I can’t tell you what to do! Just pick up stuff! GET IT TO THE CURB!, or, Oh my god, where the effity eff did all those CANDLES come from?! TAKE THEM TO THE CURB! But he was downstairs in the basement when the doorbell rang. I answered it carrying the unlikely combination of a bathmat, a fluorescent light tube, and a tub of Clorox bathroom wipes.

A short, ferret-faced man stood outside. His hands were on his hips, and he stared at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to come up with a snappy greeting, so I just raised my left eyebrow and waited. I honestly thought he was going to solicit me for spare pop bottles, which is what they did with alarming frequency in my old neighborhood. (Who is drinking that many carbonated beverages?)

But no, instead he huffed out, “I am the agent for the other side, and I demand to know your intentions!”

My eyebrow remained raised for another few moments while I processed that one. At first I thought he was playing secret agents, the way some kids play cops and robbers. But that made no sense. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Are you the owner? Cause look. I needa know what the hell is going on here,” he growled, hands still on his hips. I flipped the lock on the screen door. Because, you know, a flimsy little metal latch and a thin layer of plastic screening is the best protection from crazy people lunging at you. ”What are your intentions?”

Only then did it really occur to me that this guy was the real estate agent for the couple buying our house. Mind you, he hadn’t introduced himself to me by name. He hadn’t given me a business card, which would have been nice. He’d just marched up and told me what he needa know. “Well,” I said, in that tone I fly in directly from the Arctic Circle when I’m affronted. “Tomorrow we are closing. Thursday, the movers come to pack our belongings. Friday, they move us out.”

“Well, how’m I supposeda know that?” he barked. “No one told me.”

“Our agent has known our plans for weeks,” I said. “We made the moving arrangements the week after we got the offer from your clients.”

“Well I didn’t know.”

“Did you call our agent?” I asked, deadly calm.

“No.”

“Perhaps, sir, if you had,” I said, “we could have avoided this unseemly confrontation.” If you ever need to judge my level of upset, just listen to how I’m speaking. If I drop my usual mush-mouth routine and suddenly sound like Mr. Darcy addressing the Bennet sisters as if they were dancing a quadrille on his very last nerve, I’m likely seething.

“My clients wanteda close on the twenty-fifth!” he growled at me. “And they thought you were gonna be out on the first.”

“We never made any plans to close on the twenty-fifth,” I told him. “The purchase agreement has always stated that closing would be on the first, and that we would have three days after to vacate. My agent could have told you that at any point.”

“Well are you planning to pay the per diem?!”

I was pretty sure that the per diem had been written into the agreement, but I wasn’t going to commit to anything on my sketchy memory and then find out the whole thing had been a gotcha! setup. “If that’s what the agreement says.”

“Is that what the agreement says?”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to know when closing is, or how long the agreement says we have to vacate, or whether there’s a per diem,” I said. My hackles were thoroughly ruffled, by now. I mean, hadn’t he been the one who’d actually drawn up the agreement on behalf of his clients? “I advise you consult the agreement in order to find out its exact terms.”

“So what are your intentions, then?” he wanted to know.

I thought we’d covered that bit by now. “Please contact my agent if you have further questions.”

“Look, I’m just trying to look out for my clients here.”

“Please contact my agent if you have further questions,” I repeated.

Then I shut the door in his face. And watched as he huffed off to his car to call our agent. Which is what he really should’ve done in the first place.

I’m not really one of those people who thrives on confrontation; it makes my nerves jangle for hours after. Days, even. Heck, it’s been a week and I’m still not shaking it off. Though I was aware I’d stood up for myself pretty well in this case—though I still wasn’t exactly sure for what I was standing up or why I’d had to do it—I still have the automatic instinct that not rolling over and being the politest sweetest most helpful young feller is wrong and ungrateful, and as if I’m letting someone down, somehow.

But I had trash to accumulate, and stuff to wipe with Clorox, so I went about my business and it was only fifteen minutes later, when Craig emerged from the basement after pretending to do something or another, that I thought to get indignant and tell him a story that began, “You will never believe . . . !”

At the closing the next morning the hairs on my neck were still raised enough that I seriously considered demanding that I not be seated in the presence of that man, but he wasn’t even there, to start. Only the couple buying the house were present, and they were both as cute as a couple of extremely cute buttons, so it was difficult to maintain my usual icy hauteur (even though they kind of freaked me out a little by introducing themselves to me with the words, “WE READ YOUR BLOG!” and I was all like, oh crap, which one, the boring one, or the secret documents I prepare for Wikileaks?).

Their agent arrived about a half-hour late, after just about everything was signed, and played Angry Birds at the other end of the table on his phone the entire time. Only once did he speak up, and that was when the buyer was insisting that she’d gotten some kind of mortgage payment insurance that didn’t seem to be reflected in the papers. The mortgage person went through all the documents, looking for anything that might verify her claim, and wasn’t finding anything. The agent spoke up. “She just doesn’t understand what she’s talking about,” he said, in the most condescending tone imaginable, to the mortgage woman. “Don’t worry about it.”

And I was like, dang, if he’d been my agent and spoken about me like that, I’d have fired him on the spot. The mortgage woman, to her credit, got up from the table and made a couple of phone calls, only to come back and announced that the buyer had indeed been correct about having that particular kind of insurance, but it simply wasn’t reflected in the paperwork. The agent didn’t apologize. But secretly, I was all, BOOM! In yo’ FACE, Angry Birds loser!

Because dude. Would it really have killed you to have given me a card when you introduced yourself?

The Goodreads Roundup

I've lately been taking advantage of my local library's ebook loans. I like the convenience of the ebooks, and the freeness of the library. Yet browsing the selection of offerings that Overdrive provides is not the most optimal of processes, to be honest; you'd think that a library would be more on top of providing its patrons ways of investigating what books they have to lend electronically.

Oh, it's simple enough to investigate what they have by flipping through a list of books by topic. Adding a book to your checkout list, however, is a multi-click process that, when you're done, takes you back to the library's main page. So if you were originally ten pages deep in the biography section, well, that's tough luck. You'll have to navigate back to where you left off, if you remember.

The selection at my local library is pretty horrid, too. I'd be in luck if I liked vampire novels (I don't), or very long young adult Harry Potter knockoff series. So usually I have to make do with what I find in the biographies or nonfiction areas, with the occasional novel tossed my way.

My biggest complaint—or perhaps it's the source of a lot of excitement, it's difficult to tell—is the delivery method. I've never once been able to download a book immediately. Even for the most obscure titles I've been placed on a waiting list. I never know exactly when I might be notified that my book's ready for checkout. All I can do is wait, and then one morning I'll fire up my email client and receive a notice to rush! rush! rush! and download my book as quickly as I can before the privilege is taken away from me. I leap into action, and then watch the countdown timer slowly start to tick away on my two weeks to finish the darned thing.

For someone whose library experience has typically been walking in and coming away with an armful of books right there and then (maybe not always my first choice, but definitely there's some immediate gratification involved), it's a disappointment not to know exactly when I'll be getting my choices. Worse was when I got three of them, which I'd requested at various times over the course of maybe four months, all within three days. One of them was an extra-large tome that I didn't even get a portion of the way through before my time ran out. And who knows when I'll get it again?

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my Goodreads reviews of some of my recent reads, for those of you who aren't on Goodreads.

Water for Elephantw

by Sara Gruen

2 out of 5 stars

Everything I Learned in Water for Elephants: A Book Report by V. Briceland

1. Growing old sucks.

2. Men who are mean to elephants and women, but mostly elephants, deserve their grisly deaths.

3. A pageant of cardboard characters is totally okay as long as someone gets thrown off a moving train every 20-30 pages.

The End.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

4 out of 5 stars

Short and eminently readable, Brown's account of his race to discover the solar system's tenth planet—and the subsequent change of heart that led him to recommend that neither it nor Pluto be considered planets at all—has two distinct plusses. First, he makes a lot of difficult material extremely approachable for non-astronomists. Second, it contains a ripping cast of villains, from evil internet chat room folk to disreputable scientists scheming to steal the work of others . . . and more importantly, Brown faces off against the two great antagonists of all astronomers, the too-slow passage of time and light itself.

If Brown tends to go a little overboard for my tastes in his passages devoted to his daughter, it's still refreshing to see a man of science who's even more passionate about his parenting. Otherwise, the work is an informative, quick, and fun read that's suited for just about anyone who's gazed at the sky and wondered what else could be out there.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

2 out of 5 stars

Toward the end of Hamilton's interminable chef memoir, she admits to having a certain sense of Gallic superiority to the rest of the world. Hoo boy, is that an understatement. While Hamilton's recollections of her unconventional childhood and rise to celebrity as the owner of Prune offer up a credible pastiche of MFA-style literary writing, the author's personality is so off-putting that I found the book nearly unreadable.

When Hamilton is talking about cooking, or about the restaurant industry and its quirks, she's very nearly engaging--that is, if one can overlook her arty tendency to switch between first-person-past and second-person-present-tense narrative on the turn of a very thinly-sliced wafer of pancetta.

Hamilton's narrative style rests on the piling-on of rich layers of detail, however, yet throughout long passages of the book I found myself distrusting the accuracy of those details. I raised an eyebrow, for example, when she described driving down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, across 8 Mile Road into downtown Detroit--a nice shout-out to one of Detroit's more infamous landmarks, but a geographically-dubious route into the city. And it's outright disingenuous of her to spout foodie nonsense about how her childhood once-a-week dessert was a single square of really good imported chocolate or a lightly-sweetened slice of buttered bread, when she's mentioned, only a few pages before, gorging on Tastykakes. If one can't trust the details, what, exactly, can one relate to in a memoir like this?

Certainly not the thorn-skinned author, herself. A similar tone of superiority mars a good deal of the narrative. Hamilton dislikes children and their preference for French fries and macaroni and cheese over that single square of really good chocolate, or any of the more exotic fares she serves in Prune; she's dismissive of their parents and indeed, of anyone who will eat less-than-gourmet fare instead of skipping a meal altogether. She spends a large portion of the book secretly mocking and sniggering at her graduate school comrades only to turn around and justify the behavior by accusing them of condescending to her. And the meandering last third of her book turns on the cold fury she experiences, and the subsequent two-week silent treatment she gives to her (long-suffering) husband when he mentions that he'd like to buy a new iPhone.

There really is some minutiae that probably should be left out of a memoir, apparently.

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

by Karen Abbott

3 out of 5 stars

Gypsy Rose Lee's rise to fame rested upon a strip-tease act in which she removed very little and left her audience hanging. Karen Abbott's biography of the forceful personality manages to do very much the same.

Half straightforward biography and half social history of the rise and fall of the American burlesque theater, Abbott uneasily alternates between a historian's documentary approach to her subjects and third-person present-tense narrations of Lee's thoughts and inner turmoils. She further muddies the waters by jumping backward and forward in time, between Lee's successful career after the events narrated in the musical and movie Gypsy, and the actual events that went into the heavily fictionalized and sanitized account of Lee's upbringing. Toss in the alternate narrative of the Minsky brothers and the burlesque stages of New York City, and it's a confusing, if amiable, mess.

What's disappointing about the book is that it promises to expose many of the scandals involving Lee and her domineering, force-of-nature mother. It does not. It hints heavily at murders, mob involvement, and family betrayal, but never makes good on the promise to explain any of them—not well, at any rate. Like Lee's act itself, Abbott teases at the evidence, then backs away, leaving readers uncertain how much (if anything) they might actually have glimpsed.

American Rose is highly readable, but that seems to be more a function of Gypsy Rose Lee's outsized personality than Abbott's leap-frogging narrative. And that's a shame, because instead of a nation or even a strip-tease artist laid bare, I felt like a spectator in the front row of the Minsky's Republic after one of Lee's specialty numbers—highly entertained, but aware that the artist had done little but rearrange the draperies.

Lips Unsealed: A Memoir

by Belinda Carlisle

3 out of 5 stars

When it comes to celebrity memoirs, I can't think of any I've read that have quite as many eye-popping drug-related revelations as Carlisle's tell-all. In fact, I'm not sure how any of them are going to top Carlisle's confession about taking a large opium ball as a suppository. And I'm not sure I'm really want to find out.

Carlisle's memoir is a fairly absorbing read about her outsider childhood and adolescence and the founding, flare-ups, and eventual reconciliations between the Go-Go's, mostly set against a background of drug and alcohol abuse that continued for the vast majority of Carlisle's career. Her frank confessions of repeatedly lying in public and to the press about having kicked her habit while still hitting the hard stuff, however, leaves the reader unsettled and uncertain about the reliability of this particular narrator. And that's a shame, because like the best of the Go-Go's output, I want this particular song to end with a jangling major chord.

The Murder of King Tut

by James Patterson & Martin Dugard

1 out of 5 stars and I wish it could've been less than that

I have never read any of Mr. Patterson's other books, and therefore can't state with certainty that they're all written as if for developmentally-challenged seventh graders. But this one certainly made me feel as if I were reading while riding on the short bus.

Mr. Patterson's begins his investigation into the death of everyone's favorite ancient boy king with a prologue reminding readers (in all capital letters) that the role of the historian is never to embellish, but only to illuminate fact. He then follows up his decree with dozens of chapters filled with made-up dialogue and awkward, imagined sex scenes.

As for the mystery itself, well, apparently this book need be the only last word on the cause of Tutankhamen's death. His solution must be correct because, as Mr. Patterson reminds us in a late chapter, Time Magazine called him "the man who can't miss!" It's tough to beat so sound and circular a logic.

Neutron Star Fred

My younger cat, Fred, is not so imposing to look at. She’s not one of those cats that can swagger into the room and raise eyebrows with her sheer bulk. Nor is she one of those particularly muscular felines that gives the impression of wearing the tabby equivalent of football shoulder pads. No, she’s really an unassuming cat of ordinary proportions. Quite compact, actually. On the tiny side.

But holy crap. What Fred doesn’t have in volume, she makes up in mass. She’s not fat. She’s dense. Fred is the freakin’ neutron star of cats. A teaspoon of Fred weighs more than all of the solar system’s inner planetary system together.

She’s not a delicate cat, either. She doesn’t pad softly into a room; she chooses a spot from the floor above or below, gives herself a good running start, and then thunders through the house until she skids to stop in front of me, leaving visible smoking skid marks where her paws have been. Nights, she won’t simply hop onto the bed to sleep with me. She’ll wait until the moment I’ve completely gone underneath and am breathing slowly and heavily, and then she’ll pound up the stairs, catapult herself up into a broad arc, then land so heavily on the mattress that she throws me, the sheets, and the pillows high into the air—giving me a minor heart attack in the process.

Fred’s a sweetheart. But Jesus, is she ever heavy.

Lately she’s been extra-snuggly at night, forsaking her usual spot at the foot of the bed for the warmer climes in the curves of my body. True to form, though, she doesn’t inch up and nestle in a spot next to my slumbering chest, or sweetly nestle in the nook created by the back of my legs. No, she announces her intention by standing, shuffling up to my face and staring in it, tickling it with her whiskers until I groggily awake and pet her. And then she’ll stalk over to the place immediately next to my body at which she intends to sleep, pause, and topple over, throwing her entire considerable weight on that one spot.

Seriously, it’s like being in the wrong place when someone tips a cow. I’ve got actual bruises.

It’s still mostly cool enough in Michigan that she seeks me out for warmth during the daytime. It’s comforting to have a cat on my lap while I’m working, and she’s a fairly considerate lapmate who will either slumber quietly or lay still while she watches the squirrels through the back door of the den. After a while, though, the pressure of her body will start to put my arm to sleep. “Fred,” I’ll say. “I kind of need you to move.”

At the sound of her name, she’ll up up at me, squinch her eyes, and chirrup. She still has a little kitten voice, a high-pitched, girlish way of mewing that turn the hardest heart into marshmallow. “Sweetie,” I’ll tell her. “Please move.”

Again, she’ll meow sweetly, and lay her head upon my forearm. “I can’t feel my fingers,” I’ll complain, and she’ll roll onto her back and invite me to blow on her furry tummy. Or, if I attempt to shift her onto the blanket next to me, she’ll let out a series of squeaky protests so pathetic and sad that recordings of them would prompt the ASPCA to write me up on charges of animal cruelty.

She’s not a kitten anymore, though. And I need to feel the nerve endings in my fingertips, thank you.

The Sweet Smell of Addiction

I’d like to talk for a moment about candles. Ordinary, everyday candles. Because right now, I hate ‘em.

Yes, I know the candle has a noble history and that countless generations of honeybees have given up their wax so that civilization may progress to a higher plane. Yes, I’m aware that the exalted candle was burning brightly while Shakespeare quilled his greatest tragedies, and that it was candles that kept hope alive during the darkest nights of the black plague.

Whatever.

Why am I so waxophobic, you wonder? Why am I advocating candlemaker-bashing? Well, it’s because someone in this house—not I—apparently has a bad candle habit, and it’s slipped unnoticed until now.

While our house was up for sale, the one thing I kept hearing from people who had no idea of what to say about about selling a house but wanted to indicate that they were savvy watchers of HGTV was, “Oh, bake some cookies before each showing!” Well, people. I don’t really care what you’ve heard on your curbside appeal shows. When your house is up on the market for almost eight months, there are only so many cookies one can bake. Seriously. I had forty-five showings during the month of March. Do I really need to bake four dozen batches of cookies?

Do I look like a Keebler elf?

“Oh,” they’d say, when I would balk. “You don’t have to bake an entire batch. Just buy some of that pre-cut cookie dough and bake one or two!” No, people. One or two cookies doesn’t even make enough of a smell to cover up the scent of a hamster pellet. You go out and buy some pre-cut cookie dough and put it . . . well, I’m too much of a gentleman to tell you what to do with it.

But you know. I got the general message. Prospective buyers like to walk into a clean-smelling house. I might not want to bake dozens of batches of cookies (and don’t tell me I could merely throw them out. That’s insanity. Do you know how many starving Africans my parents told me there are?), but I don’t want to walk into a house reeking of kitty litter and last night’s stir-fried curry noodles, either.

So I compromised. It occurred to me that over the years, my husband has picked up a scented candle or two. Well. We’re not able to pass a candle store without stopping in, really. Yankee Candle franchises tend to get really excited when they see him approaching. Like a connoisseur, he’ll investigate the new scents and delicately sniff, then consider, and then pronounce his verdict like a wine critic. “Earthy, with a citrus zest.” Or, “The resemblance of this waxen version of candy corn lies mainly in its appearance, yet not in its too-heavy overtones of vanilla without the leavening of dairy.” Something like that. Then, clutching his purchases beneath his arms, we’ll finally be able to exit the joint.

At some point during the eight months, I thought to myself, “Hey, candles are smelly. How about instead of baking, I light a few of those suckers?” We’ve always kept our candles in an inaccessible cupboard behind the baby grand, but I managed to wrench open one of the drawers and pull out a couple—a buttercream-scented pillar for the first floor and a cinnamon-scented jar for the basement, where there’s less air circulation. A couple of hours before each showing, I’d light the candles, let them release their scents, and then right before I left during the showings, I’d cap the candles and disappear, confident in a sweet-smelling house.

Well, it must’ve worked. After months and months, the house finally sold a couple of weeks ago. The buyers intend to close on June 1; we’re supposed to be out of here within a few days after that. My last couple of weeks have been a flurry of meeting with moving companies and trying to clean out the crap that I don’t particularly want to take with us—like old electronics boxes, or books I no longer want, or the odd little drawers of ephemera that I don’t want to be paying a moving company vast amounts of dollars an hour to pack for me.

And then I got to the candle cupboard.

It would seem, to put it mildly, that my husband might have more of a problem than I thought. He’s concealed it well, these many years. The real addicts always do. I’m not even sure he’s aware he has a problem.

Yet, when I opened those two drawers and pulled ajar the doors to the cupboard, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of scented wax tumbled out. It honestly was a bit like a Looney Tunes short in which Elmer Fudd opens Bugs Bunny’s closest and is instantly crushed by its contents. Complete with whistling tweety birds around my cracked cranium.

And oh my god, the smell. Between the vanillas and the cranberries and the fresh pines and the sweet fruits and the almond mocha bean clean linen pineapple cilantro pomegranate mango madness, my nostrils shorted out. Basically it smelled like Lisa Frank had cut a really enormous fart in there.

That wasn’t the full extent of it. There were boxes and boxes of candlesticks. It would seem as if every time we went to a post-Christmas sale or pre-school sale at Eddie Bauer or Ikea or Bed Bath & Beyond, my other half would see candles on sale and think them a good deal. “Oh,” he’d say. “Look at these boxes of twenty-four white candlesticks! Only five dollars! Let’s buy four of them!” Then he’d toss them into the cupboard and not think about them again. Do that several times a year for the thirteen years we’ve been living here, and folks, that’s a hell of a lot of candles.

Obviously, I could throw away the three candles out of that enormous stash that had actually been used. I could probably with a clear conscience get rid of the ones that had yellowed, or had gone lop-sided from melting in the summer heat. But that still left an awful lot of freakin’ candles. Since then I’ve been giving them away to whomever will take them. Hey, friends—thanks for driving me to karaoke! Let me leave you some candles in your back seat as a token of my appreciation! Hey, other friend! Listen, are you interested in taking some of my spare liquor off my hands before my move? I’ll throw in some candles! Listen, neighbors—have you thought about your lighting contingency plans in case of worldwide dystopia?

Once I’m reunited with my husband, however, something has to be done. I’m having a candle intervention. I’m sending him to whatever is the candle addict’s equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Yankee Candle might take a heavy hit in their next quarter’s earnings, but I can live with that.