Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen

Stormy Weather

by Carl Hiaasen

I began reading Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard about the same time and found them similar, perhaps products of the time period.  Both write about criminals and crime, but Carl Hiaasen's books are a good bit less violent and more plain fun. 

 
Sure, Elmore Leonard's books have been made into bigger movies, with a bigger budget I think, but I urge you to give Carl Hiaasen another look.  Stormy Weather is a favorite of mine.  It was the fourth book published by him back in 1995. 

 
Bonnie and Max Lamb are on their honeymoon in Florida when the news shows an inbound hurricane.  Max seems oddly excited about the weather to Bonnie and insists that they head south into the heart of the region that is being affected.

 
Edie Marsh has just given up on trying to bed, and then sue, a Kennedy heir.  She teams up with an old partner, Snapper, to fleece some people who have storm damage by pretending that a roof fell on her.  They pick the wrong person to try to con.

 
The absurd and the fantastic abound in Stormy Weather.  A one eyed man in a flowered shower cap has himself tied to a bridge before the storm hits by some young idiots out throwing empty beer cans in the wind.  He calls himself Skink and sees himself as an avenger of the wild in Florida.

 
Augustine is trying to chase down the wild monkeys and other illegally imported animals from his late uncle's wildlife farm after the storm when he meets Bonnie, whose husband Max has run off, chasing a monkey that stole his video camera.

 
Everyone seems a little storm addled in this wild ride and it makes for some fantastically fun reading.  If you haven't seen this one, give it a try.

 

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This is a novel written by two very well-known authors back in 1990 when Terry Pratchett was sort of kicking about and no one really knew who Neil Gaiman was yet.  The fact that it’s still in print tells you something.  They've both written a great deal since.  Pratchett is probably best known for his Discworld novels for adults but he's also written some wonderful ones for the middle grades and several other novels that have little to nothing to do with Discworld.  Gaiman is probably best known for his Sandman series but also Coraline and Anansi Boys.

Good Omens is a tongue in cheek book about the Apocalypse.  The dedication itself is rather interesting.  “The authors would like to join the demon Crowley in dedicating this book to the memory of G.K. Chesterton.  A man who knew what was going on.”   I first read a story by Chesterton, one of his Father Brown mysteries, when I was taking a detective fiction class in college.  I was immediately taken with his style and the character.  Apparently, Gaiman and Pratchett also appreciated him.

There is a large cast of characters including God and the voice of God, various angels and fallen angels, the four horsepersons of the apocalypse, humans, the antichrist and “a full chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans, and other rare and strange Creatures of the Last Days.” 

The book begins by asserting that any theories about when the world was created are incorrect, it having actually been created within a quarter of an hour of 9:00 am on Sunday the 21^st of October, 4004 B.C., which means that the Earth is a Libra.  Okay then.

The main problem of the story is that the Apocalypse is coming and, of course, someone has misplaced the antichrist, owing to a double switch by Satanist nuns.   “The babies looked similar both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.”

I don't want to say too much, though at over four hundred pages, I could probably say quite a bit and still not say too much, but I'll stop here just the same.  If you have someone on your gift giving list who enjoys fantasy novels, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are a fair bet, so why not start at the beginning and bring the two together?  I recommend this one.

Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark

Kitchen Privileges
by Mary Higgins Clark

I've always found memoirs by fiction writers fascinating, even when I'm not a fan of their fiction work.  There's something about their powers of description and storytelling that have been honed through fiction writing which make their memoirs particularly engaging. 

Several years ago my sister gave me a copy of Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark and I wasn't terribly interested because I didn't care for her mysteries, but I started reading the first few pages and was hooked.

Like most authors, Clark has led an interesting life in her own right.  (It seems most authors have held a variety of jobs in their life and draw on those varying experiences to put life into their writing.) 

Clark grew up during the Great Depression, a time when the neighborhood Good Humor man, felt lucky to lose his thumb and index finger up to the knuckle when the lid of the freezer smashed it because “it was a good accident... The company gave me forty-two dollars, and I was able to buy a winter coat for my wife.  She really needed one.”

Recollections of a huge extended family gathered around the table sharing stories and her Irish ancestry give the atmosphere.  She talks about being in love with her future husband (who lived on the next block) from age sixteen, though they wouldn't date for another five years.

Childhood asthma and frequently missed school taught Clark to be observant when she was home with her mother, hearing the stories as visitors came calling during the day.  A future writer couldn't help but be influenced by that kind of input.  Her father died when she was ten and her memories of him are warm and probably a little larger than life.  Her mother was unable to get a job so they rented rooms in their house.

Her mother was unstinting in her praise of Clark's writing from an early age, making her recite poems to guests and telling them she would be a great writer one day.  She admonishes others to be as encouraging to young people.  “When a child comes to you wanting to share something he or she has written or sketched, be generous with your praise.  If it's a written piece, don't talk about the spelling or the penmanship, look for the creativity and applaud it.  The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged.  Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.”

All of this is just the beginning of her story, told in the first twenty pages.  I highly recommend this book for the personal story and the history.  As I looked it over again to write this review, I felt myself drawn in all over again.  It would also make a fine gift for a writer, as it did for me.

Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

Today's Story Musing entry is guest written by Maryalice Little of the Southeast Steuben County Library.

Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

by Stephanie C. Hamel

The one thing that does not abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

   ----Harper Lee

What would you do if you were offered a large sum of money to allow hydro-fracking for natural gas on your recreational property, a sum significant enough that it could ease your own financial burden and appease your husband by easing some of his wage-earning stress, in a geographical area with a long history of mining and at a time when there was little, if any, public concern over possible environmental damage?

As described by the author, this “true story, written first in diary form and from notes taken during telephone conversations, reflects a developing knowledge of the natural gas industry and the legalities associated with land ownership and gas leasing.” 

Stephanie Hamel and her husband had bought her family’s “summer camp,” an old farm near Wellsboro, PA.  At the time, she and her husband lived 200 miles away, and the additional physical and financial demands of the property sometimes seemed burdensome, especially when she was finishing her PhD thesis and later staying home to raise their two young sons.  Still, they spent long weekends continuing to slowly repair and renovate the buildings as Stephanie’s father and brother had done before her. 

Late in August 2008, Stephanie’s peaceful balance tilted.  The family’s plan for an extended end-of-summer visit to the farm had to be cut short when Stephanie opened some previously-disregarded mail only to discover that her son’s school was to begin earlier than the previous year.  As the day ended, darkness was slow to descend as bright lights remained focused on a neighbor’s property, where the clanging noise of well-drilling had begun.  She recalled the ground-shaking, rumbling trucks passing their house the day before, spewing diesel fumes while transporting large pieces of equipment. The industrial noise of heavy grinding continued through the night.

The following day, Stephanie’s husband was called to return to their permanent home due to an unexpected work need.  He called her late that night to tell her that he had arrived home safely and to share the news that they had received a letter from a natural gas company offering a five year lease of the farm property with a $130,000 signing bonus to potentially drill 5,000 feet into the shale below. 

With degrees in chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and human exposure assessment and with a deep emotional attachment to the farm, and the added immediacy of her peaceful haven having been disrupted by a neighboring drilling operation in full swing, Stephanie’s response was vehemently negative.  But she reluctantly agreed to consult with their local attorney to see about the potential ramifications.  And so the fracking of the marriage begins.

Over the next nine months, Stephanie speaks with many people within and without the gas drilling industry and discovers that her decision making becomes even more complicated by the idea that a drilling company could drill down and then sideways from a neighboring property to obtain the gas from her property without her permission or  any compensation.  So why not just take the money while it was being offered, her husband argued?

I found the book to be an interesting read, as this is a very controversial and divisive issue in our own community.  Following Stephanie’s exploration of her options and the potential impacts on her family and to the environment helped me to understand views that are different from my own.  

Fortunately, my husband and I are in agreement about this issue, having been approached several times about signing a gas lease of our own property.   We have experienced the compromise of privacy that occurs with the presence of a pre-existing natural gas pipeline cutting across our property that hunters and four-wheelers erroneously consider to be public access.  

We have also experienced the impact of the installation of a construction disposal site, against the wishes of most of the neighboring land owners, that is one property away from ours: the influx of tractor trailers on an old dirt road at all times of the day and night, crawling uphill at a snail’s pace when heavily loaded and whizzing downhill when empty; then the welcomed widening and paving of the same road only to realize that it was still not usable for us because of the regularly occurring flat tires caused by cast-off debris left in the road.   Consequently, we now travel a different bumpy, dirt road to get to town.  But we accept that as a trade-off for the opportunity to live in my husband’s family home in what was, for many years, a place of predictable quiet and fresh, hilltop air.

I suspect that similar direct or collateral impacts pervade the fracking process.  All of these challenges beg bigger questions. Is it acceptable - and acceptable to whom, and in whose backyard - to allow the harvesting of non-renewable natural resources with or without monetary compensation to a landowner and with the risk of potential long-term damage to the greater environment?  Is it acceptable to favor (what appears to me to be) short-term gain over potential long-term loss?  But if the short term gain went directly to me, with the opportunity for favorable impact to the quality of certain parts of my life, would I answer these questions differently?  I would like to think not, but I admit to the presence of temptation.

Consider traveling the journey with Stephanie Hamel and find out what conclusion she drew and the impact of this fracking experience on her marriage.

Maryalice K. Little

A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor

A Christmas Blizzard: A Novel

by Garrison Keillor

This Christmas fable is a typical Garrison Keillor story, rambling with details of the far North United States, filled with minutiae. The absurd, the ludicrous and the ironic take center stage. It's Dicken's Scrooge updated with a uniquely Keillor humor.

James Sparrow has a strange but sometimes crippling fear of sticking his tongue on a frozen pump handle. He's not exactly afraid of doing it, but rather afraid the compulsion will make him stick his tongue to freezing metal.

A rich man from sales of an energy drink he didn't even invent, he just bought and marketed it, he has bought a Hawaiin estate and prefers to spend his winters there, free from the fear of frozen metal, but his wife adores Christmas and everything it brings in Chicago. She's on the board of directors of the ballet, the symphony and the theater.

Desperate to escape Christmas in Chicago for Hawaii, instead James ends up leaving his sick wife behind as he boards his private jet to go say good-bye to an uncle in Looseleaf, North Dakota who made his childhood bearable.

Once there, a terrible blizzard descends and he finds he can't bear going to see his dying uncle. James spends the night in an ice shack on the lake and is visited by many visions

As with any short fable the characters are not drawn in depth but rather more as archetypes. He's not cast as an evil man though, just one living his life without really living, running scared of frozen metal.

In checking out the book on Amazon.com, I was horrified to read the description and a review. Did anyone actually read this short book? The description doesn't remotely capture the story, saying it's a comic novel and he's going to see an ailing aunt but the power goes out. Heh? The review says James and his wife go to North Dakota, but it's only James who actually goes. At least they mention a dying uncle instead of an ailing aunt.

Oh well, if you're looking for a Christmas story that's a little out of the ordinary or you enjoy Garrison Keillor's monologues, this short book is for you. 

The Rope by Nevada Barr

The Rope

By Nevada Barr

Nevada Barr is one of those authors that I look forward to a new book from and, when I get one, I know that I will be up late into the night until I have finished the story. 

The main character and detective in this series is Anna Pigeon, a Native American park ranger in the U.S. National Park Service.  Anna has been in some life threatening situations and has the mental scars to prove it.  She is tough and resourceful.  Each book has taken us to a new national park as Anna has moved around in her work.  Her sister, Molly, is a psychologist and has been one of the mainstays in the stories.

Of course, as with any long running series, 17 and counting, some of the books haven’t been as strong as others but one of my coworkers, another Anna Pigeon fan, agreed that this book is a return to the gritty story telling of the Anna Pigeon mysteries.

I found it an interesting and effective choice that the book does not begin from Anna’s frame of reference, but rather from the National Park Service personnel who she was working with so that our first glimpse of her is through their recollections.  When we switch to Anna’s perspective, the view darkens considerably.

In this book, we are taken back to Anna’s first foray into park service, before she was a ranger.  At this point, Anna has lost her husband, Zach, fairly recently and is looking for a change to help escape her pain.  She goes out west to be a seasonal employee in the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area.  Clearly in mourning, her fellow employees are not surprised that Anna doesn’t stick around.  Most of her personal property is gone so they assume she went back to New York City and the theater life.  No one suspects that she is still in the state, let alone still in the park. 

The character of Anna Pigeon has always been marked by her resilience in enduring pain. This is a dark tale of our heroine being tested and forged in fire.  At the end, she gives voice to her decision to go into law enforcement, saying, “Women need to come to think of themselves not as victims but as dangerous.”  

A strong female character in the making, I highly recommend this book and the others in the series.

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Odd Thomas
By Dean Koontz

Just hearing the name Dean Koontz, you might assume this is a horror book, but Odd Thomas is one of those books that rather defies classification and instead falls into the simple category of  “a really good book.”

In describing himself, Odd Thomas says, “I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.”

“Oddy” as his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn calls him, is a humble and simple man.  He works as a short order cook at the Pico Mundo Grill and if he ever left there, he thinks he might go into tires.  Perhaps it’s because of the demands of the dead that he yearns for the simple life.  You see, Odd can’t talk with the dead, because they don’t talk for some reason, but they do communicate with him and he feels the compassionate need to help them, because he can. 

“I’m not the law.  I’m not vigilante justice.  I’m not vengeance personified.  I don’t really know what I am or why.  In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action.  A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.”

Odd doesn’t take matters into his own hands, he has no intention to hurt anyone, he’s almost like some kind of avenging angel sent to bring the guilty party to justice. 

The writing style is beautifully simple but colorful, humorous and sympathetic.  For example, “Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester.  He loves that cat.  In fact, if Terrible Chester were to use up his ninth life under the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that Little Ozzie’s big heart would not survive the loss.” 

Instead of simply saying that if the cat got run over by a truck, it would kill Odd Thomas’s friend, Koontz’s choice of metaphor illustrates it and is slightly funny while also showing Odd’s concern for his friend - beautifully done.

You may wonder about the name Odd, or assume that it’s a nickname, but you would be mistaken.  “According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error.”  Sometimes she claims they meant to name him Todd or sometimes even Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle, but his father points out that he doesn’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle.

Everything Odd is welcome here.  Even the fact that the ghost of Elvis hangs around is not disconcerting because it is offered in such an understated way.  Only three people in the world know of Odd Thomas’s ability to see and interact with the dead – his author friend Little Ozzie, his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn and his friend, the chief of police Wyatt Porter.  To everyone else, Odd Thomas is just… odd.  Once you know what he’s dealing though, he doesn’t seem so odd.  In fact, he seems downright amazingly sane and even for what he’s dealing with.

This novel introduced the world to Odd Thomas and tells his adventure of thwarting “Fungus Man” from creating a day of devastation in his hometown of Pico Mundo.  Thankfully, there are several more novels featuring Odd Thomas, including Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours and Odd Apocalypse plus two more in the works.  There’s also a three part novella titled Odd Interlude and several graphic novels, not to mention an Odd Thomas movie coming out in 2013. 

Oh, and the reading of the book on audio by David Aaron Baker is brilliant in its understated portrayal of Odd Thomas.  I have read each of these books by listening to them on audio because his Odd Thomas is so perfect that it actually adds to the book, as good readers can, instead of distracting you from the story.  Enjoy!

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver by Mark Shriver

A Good Man
Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
by Mark Shriver

I’ve heard the Shriver name, of course.  Who could miss it in this day and age?  But my knowledge of that time period is relegated to memorized facts and figures as a period I did not live through.  I’d never really paid very much attention to the various people in the Shriver and Kennedy families, but this book caught my attention.  The title immediately made me think of my godfather, who I felt truly embodied the term “a good man.”  I remember at my godfather’s funeral, talking with one of his daughters-in-law about what a kind man he was.  How do you get to be that kind?  I still don’t really know.  Is it something particular people are born with?  Is it something they learn?  I hope everyone has had the opportunity to known someone like that in their lifetime. 

Though I didn’t know much about the man, I had of course heard of the Peace Corps and many other of the organizations that he put in motion.  With this book, Mark Shriver takes on the journey to understand his father Robert Sargent Shriver, known as Sarge, and “what it takes to be not a great man but a good man.” 

“Most of all, I wanted to understand the riddle of his joy.  I knew that his uncanny, boundless joy had powered him every day of his life.  Where did it come from?  How did he sustain it, gracing so many of us along the way?”

Sarge’s life was not a charmed and easy one as part of a well-known family.  A couple truly formative events in Sarge’s life were the Great Depression and his service in World War II. 

Sarge’s father “was ruined financially and emotionally during the Great Depression.  In 1923, his father had moved the family from Westminster to Baltimore, where he went into banking, and then again, in 1929, to New York City to become a founding partner of a new investment bank.  The time could not have been worse.”  They lost everything and his father fell into a depression that he never recovered from.  Sarge lost his father in 1941. 

Like most men who lived through a war, it wasn’t something Sarge talked about often but Mark remembers hearing once about a battle on the South Dakota that must have haunted his father all his life, the memory of slipping on the blood of his friends and having to clean up pieces of them on the deck of the ship afterward. 

Sarge never shrank from duty, as when he was asked to plan President Kennedy’s funeral.  Perhaps the hardest part was telling his pregnant wife, who he loved deeply, that her brother had been shot and killed.

“We are all born into a web of relationships and circumstances, tragedies and opportunities.  As I was coming into this world, my family lived through parades in Ireland one day and a funeral procession soon after.”

Through all of this, Sarge’s faith sustained him.  “I had as my father a man who not only was faith-filled and disciplined but who also insisted, in large part because of his faith, on the grace and joy in life.” 

Even if you don’t believe in God, or the Christian God, I think it’s easy to respect a man who lived by the principles that he learned from his faith to serve and help others with kindness all his life.

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Sarge worked under the Johnson administration in true bipartisan fashion to head the war on poverty.  His New York Times obituary suggests the scope of his influence by the programs that came out of that office, including “Head Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor.”

“Yes, Dad had an ego – you have to have a strong ego to stand up and run for political office at any level in this county, let alone vice president or president… Dad really wasn’t a politician, at least not a modern-day version of an American politician, Republican or Democrat.  I don’t think he ever looked at his defeats and thought, I am not powerful anymore.  It didn’t take him thirty years or, really, any time to get over the losses, because that type of thinking never entered his mind.”

The author takes time to describe the scene and his own life, growing up part of the Kennedy clan, to put in context and show the effect his father had on his life.

“It took me until after his death to see it clearly: his faith demanded his hopefulness, and his hope underpinned his work.  He worked to give others the opportunity to hope – that was his abiding ambition.”

In the words of former President Clinton’s eulogy, “he really was as good as his family just told you, and maybe even a little better, and a whole generation of us understood what President Kennedy meant by looking at Sargent Shriver’s life.”

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

The Dark is Rising
By Susan Cooper

Every once in a while a book, maybe a book series, comes along that grips your imagination and fuels it.  A lot of times those series are written for young readers, in my experience.  I think of the The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling or Redwall by Brian Jacques… or The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.  If you haven’t discovered it yet, you have some good reading in store.

The Dark is Rising sequence has long been one of my all time favorite series of books and in particular, The Dark is Rising was my favorite book, perhaps because it was the first one I read.  (I did read them out of order but it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the series at all.)  I first picked them up as a teenager because a family I babysat for was reading them a chapter or two a night. It was something the whole family could enjoy. 

If you are going to read just one book, read The Dark is Rising.  It is an Arthurian legend and Welsh folk hero based story that holds something for anyone, no matter how old you are.  I think it’s a better book then the first and more interesting to older readers.

The story opens on Midwinter’s Eve, the longest night of the year and the evening before Will Stanton’s 11^th birthday.  The animals are acting strange around Will, there’s a tramp hanging around and an unexpected blizzard blows in, giving Will the heavy snow he’s always wanted to see.  It all serves to set the stage for the beginning of Will’s awakening as an Old One.

“In the midst of all the din and flurry, he had suddenly had a strange feeling stronger than any he had ever known; he had been aware that someone was trying to tell him something, something that had missed him because he could not understand the words.  Not words exactly; it had been like a kind of silent shout.”

When Will wakes in the morning, everyone else is asleep and he can’t rouse a single person in his large family. 

“There was a total silence as deep and blanketing as the timeless snow; the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.”

But in his awakening as an Old One, Will realizes that this is not as alarming as it might be under normal circumstances.  He dresses and sets off in the deep snow, beginning his quest though he doesn’t even yet know that he will be seeking the six magical Signs that will one day be integral in driving back the Dark.

Every once in a while I pull out this book and re-read it, falling under the spell it weaves, of an epic quest and an innocent child who awakens to the terrible beauty and sadness of life. 

No matter your age, this book will take you on a journey that will inspire you.

Artist’s Journal Workshop by Cathy Johnson

Artist’s Journal Workshop

creating your life in words and pictures
with insights from 27 artists
By Cathy Johnson

Now this would make a great Christmas present.  Hey, and she’s even offering autographed copies, a favorite gift of mine.  Of course, I highly encourage you to take a look at it through your local library, before you buy it.

Don’t think of this as a journal that only someone who is a trained artist would make, but as a journal to express the artistic part of yourself.

“People sometimes tell me their lives are too boring or uneventful to journal.  I’m not buying it.  They say there’s nothing to draw that’s not mundane.  But seeing and capturing such things in the pages of a journal rescues them from the mundane.”

I’ve always said everyone has a story to tell.  I encourage people to journal.  I’ve often heard people say they can’t write or they can’t draw, even though I know they made it through school so they must be able to put words on paper, and most people have at least doodled in the margins of paper while they talked on the phone. 

If you don’t enjoy these things, that is certainly valid, but what people usually mean is that they can’t create with the level of sophistication that they see coming from professionals.  Maybe it will be more representational than a direct picture, but you can draw.  You did when you were in kindergarten, right?  You can learn techniques and improve but just drawing will help you improve too.  If you are interested in this, don't let your current level of skill and knowledge deter you.  You will find your own mode of expression.

“This book will show you how to keep your own artist’s journal.  As you celebrate the moments of your life, you’ll discover your own way of capturing them on paper, whether you choose to do simple gesture sketches in less than thirty seconds or to design a complex page with borders, textures, layers or text.”

The author explores such basic questions as “What do you want from your journal?” and “What will go into your journal?”  It might seem art was intended to be shared but she suggests that even whether or not you share the journal is totally up to you.  She explores materials and supplies, like the many different types of pens and pencils, watercolor pencils, simple ballpoint pens.

She does stress that you should put name and contact info inside.  She says many friends have lost a journal and they usually get it back because they did that.

Looking at her images might be intimidating for those of us who are not artistically trained.  Let them serve as an inspiration instead.  What she’s showing you is much later in your journey, perhaps, but it’s also her journey, not yours. 

She encourages you to simply try things - try color, try ink, try collage. 

“For the first ten years or so that I kept an artist’s journal, I worked almost exclusively in black or brown with a pencil or technical pen.  For nature observations, studies and research, the pens worked beautifully – nice crisp details!”    Then she added colored pencils and built up to exploring all sorts of mediums in her journal.

This book provides just the right amount of art instruction as well as the inspiration to create an artist’s journal.  She provides instructions on how to do quick gesture sketches and even how to elaborate on things later, as well as different topics to journal about – nature, travel, dreams and your flights of fancy, challenges that you face in life, and/or your spiritual journal.

Making time may be the hardest part of any journaling endeavor but it can be done, trust me.  Whether you have some creative energy that is burning to get out or a spark that needs to be carefully tended to bring it back to life, you can do this.  Make time for yourself.

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

Sh*t My Dad Says
By Justin Halpern

I was browsing the shelves one day in the humor section, looking for a pick me up, when I found Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern and took it to lunch.  I’m not sure that was a safe thing to do because laughing and eating often end in choking, but I did it and I enjoyed the book thoroughly. 

As the title suggests, the book is not for the easily offended.  His Dad absolutely uses language constantly that is bound to offend some people, but it’s also incredibly funny.

“For as long as I’ve known him, my father has been a blunt individual.  When I was little, I mostly felt terrified of him, so I couldn’t appreciate that I was dealing with the least passive-aggressive human being on the planet.”

Of course, the idea that his father is simply blunt is a gross understatement but the fact that he is remarkably non passive-aggressive is a good way to think of it.  His father says what is on his mind, good or bad.  He gets it out and then it’s over.

If you want to check out some of his Dad’s latest and greatest one liners, Tumblr makes them available at http://shitmydadsays.tumblr.com/ or they are on Twitter at http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays. 

“On My First Day of Kindergarten – You thought it was hard?  If Kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.”

While most of what you see online is in the form of one liners, his book, short though it is as 158 pages, takes the one liners into the short story length and has a bit more poignancy to it like the time his father helped teach another boy baseball, or the time he goes nuts because Justin doesn’t show up to help him with a project.  When Justin finally shows up, his Dad yells at him then hugs him and says, “I can’t wait till you have some kid and you got to worry about what happens to him.  You never stop worrying about your children.  It sucks.”

There are some truly hilarious stories too, like the time his father thought there was a burglar in the kitchen, got his gun and army crawled to the kitchen (naked) but it was only Justin’s aunt getting a midnight snack. 

Don’t worry, there are also some of his best one-liners at the end of each chapter.

“On Aging – Mom and I saw a great movie last night… No, I don’t remember the name.  It was about a guy or, no, wait, fuck.  Getting old sucks.”

It reminds me of Maxine from Hallmark Greetings or Walter from Jeff Dunham’s stand up comedy.  If you enjoy either of them, you’ll enjoy this book.  I sure did.

The Right Attitude to Rain ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The Right Attitude to Rain
By Alexander McCall Smith

You may know Alexander McCall Smith better as the mystery writer of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series but The Isabel Dalhousie Series also has some sort of mystery to the books, though it is often more of a puzzle than a mystery in the traditional sense. 

Isabel Dalhousie is a moral philosopher by profession and the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She lives in Edinburgh and her thoughts are often taken up with the moral questions of everyday life. 

In this latest installment, Isabel’s cousin, Mimi, and her husband, Joe, come for a visit from Texas. 

Mimi and Joe also know someone else visiting from Texas, Tom and his fiancé, Angie.  Tom invites them all to a house party, but there’s something not quite right about Tom and Angie.  Is Angie a gold digger?  Is she more dangerous than that?  Is that uncharitable of Isabel?  It preys on her mind.

As a moral philosopher, Isabel is often concerned with the right and wrong of situations and behavior.  When she first sees Tom and Angie, she reacts quite strongly to them.

“She found herself disliking them, this man and woman standing beside their expensive car, because of their arrogance.  She looked down into her coffee cup, and then up again.  No, she thought.  This is wrong.  You should not dislike people you do not know.”

The Right Attitude to Rain introduces a romantic element to the series.  Isabel has become quite enamored of Jaime, Cat’s ex, but he is 14 years younger than herself and she just can’t accept the idea.  Then she takes him to help inspect a flat she is considering purchasing for her housekeeper, Grace, as retirement security.  The owner takes a liking to the two of them, and offers to sell the flat for ten thousand less than the asking price.  She wants to help the couple out.  But they aren’t a couple and it would be dishonest to accept the flat under such misapprehension.  But it does start Isabel thinking, why not?  Why not her and Jamie?  Grace points out the obvious.  Cat probably won’t like it. 

 “…she’s going to be furious… the reason we know Cat would feel that way is that people are human.  That’s something you need to write about in that Review of yours.”

In fact, Cat doesn’t like it, even though she has taken up with someone else.  She is very jealous and even calls Isabel taking up with Jaime “disgusting.”

The story has a lot to do with change, both how far Isabel has come and how much she changes just in this book.  At the beginning of the book, she notes the changes since her marriage ended.

“… now she would see through John Liamor; and she had changed in other respects too.  She had become more forgiving, more understanding of human weaknesses than she had been in her twenties.  And love, too, had become more important to her...”

I read this some time ago but picked up the book on CD because I needed something to entertain me on my long commute; and I always find these books thought provoking and yet relaxing.  It is read with a pleasant Scottish accent which does not detract from the ability to understand what is being said and lends a much stronger feeling of Edinburgh.  It is well worth the listen, or the read, and if you find you like it, there is more available.  The Right Attitude to Rain is the third book but there are now eight books in the series with the ninth, The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, due out in October 2012.

A Strange Sort of Being by Bambi Lobdell

A Strange Sort of Being:
The Transgender Life of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell, 1829-1912
By Bambi Lobdell
        
Bambi Lobdell was at a loss as to what to research and write about for her dissertation when she was given a copy of an ancestor’s writings about her own life.  Her name was Lucy Ann Lobdell, but she didn’t live out her life under that name, later taking the name of Joseph Israel Lobdell and spending the rest of her life as a man.

“I see Joe as a transgender pioneer, one who bravely lived life as authentically as possible, even though it brought him harassment, ridicule and incarceration, and I feel it necessary to present Lobdell’s life from that perspective,” the author says in introducing her topic.

Lucy Ann Lobdell was born in 1829 and grew up in Albany County, New York, then moved with her family to Long Eddy.  She was pressed into marriage but her husband left her soon after.  The family looked the other way when Lucy wore men’s clothes while she did farm chores, worked in her father’s mill and went hunting.  She became known as the Female Hunter of Delaware County due to her prowess. 

Eventually she left home to earn money as a singing teacher, clothed as a man because, she explained in her writings, no one would pay a woman as much as they did a man.  First she went to Pennsylvania and then west. 

Though the information becomes more scarce about her life out west, it is clear that she was engaged to be married to a woman when she was found out and driven out of town.  She returned home, too depressed to work, and ended up in the poor house. 

There she met Marie Louise Perry and presumably fell in love.  They escaped the poor house together and Lucy become Joe permanently.  They were married in 1862.  They lived off the land in the woods until her brother helped her get the widow’s pension from her first marriage, her husband having died in the civil war, and she bought a house for herself and Marie. 

An understanding of the thinking at the time by the psychological community can help to explain the persecution that Lobdell underwent.  “Before the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no concept of homosexuality as an identity that described a type of person.”

Further, two women desiring each other made no sense at all to the psychological community.  “Since sexual desire was read as an active behavior, and active behaviors were gendered as masculine, it was believed only men possessed sexual urges.  Women were believed to have no sexual desire and simply passively received male advances and pleased men for the sake of having families.”

In the author’s research, she found that stories of Lobdell suggest she was a lesbian or a “passing woman” trying to further her earning ability through wearing men’s clothes.  The author’s research brought her to a different conclusion. 

"While others tell stories that present Lobdell either as an insane woman or a beleaguered lesbian, Lobdell’s own story about sex and gender is that he is a heterosexual man.”

It is a fascinating story of a brave person living their most authentic life.  It is a heartbreaking and tragic story as well.  Lobdell’s brother tricked him on a visit and had him forcibly institutionalized, where Lobdell spent the last decades of life, a prisoner.  False obituaries and reports ensured that Marie Louise Perry never knew what really happened to her husband. 

“Lobdell’s persistence in living as a man only brought him poverty and a lack of employment opportunities, a marginalized life outside of society, and persecution and incarceration by legal and psychiatric authorities.”