Missives from an Old Friend

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

Sue Townsend

Penguin

When I was a teenager, my parents let me spend summers up at the cottage. I have so many good memories of those years -- kissing my first boy, cruising with my cousin Chris in his white Chevy Cavalier, rollerskating to Electric Avenue at the arena, and spending late nights down by the water watching the stars and listening to the chattering of the raccoons.

The cottage was even fun on stormy days. If the bay was really rough, Mom would let us put our legs through the arm holes of a life jacket and bob up and down in the waves. She'd only call us in if we were turning blue from cold or if the lightning was getting too close. One such afternoon, she gave us the hook and offered to make hot chocolate so we could warm up. We settled ourselves in front of the television expecting to watch an old Elvis movie and instead, we saw an episode of the BBC's The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged, 13 and 3/4. I cried I laughed so hard and I was completely smitten with Adrian and Pandora for the rest of the summer.

Sadly, I don't think the Weapons of Mass Destruction stood up well against my memories of the programme or Townsend's first book. Adrian is still a git, Pandora is still a bitch, and Adrian's life, in general, is still a mess. The only thing that I did appreciate about the novel was Townsend's not-so-subtle political commentary. In this installment of the diaries, Adrian's son, Glenn, is shipped to Iraq and Townsend very poignantly deals with the loss of Glenn's best friend. That storyline aside, there wasn't much else to keep my interest. So much so, in fact, that I think my relationship with Adrian is over. This book gets two scuds out of five. Oh wait ... that was the last invasion, er, I mean war ...

Les Jeux sont faits

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart

Random House

I know, I know ... it's been awhile since I've posted anything. The only thing that I can say in my defense is that I haven't really been reading. And yes, before you loyal (and slightly odd) blog followers deluge me with emails and comments, I will admit that me not reading is a little bizarre. Don't panic -- it's not a sign of the Apocalypse or anything. I've just been busy. You know, working, vacationing, commuting to hell, er, I mean Ottawa. Takes a lot out of a girl.

So let's talk about Absurdistan. This novel was a sometimes biting, always over-the-top satire of twenty first century geo-politics. At the centre of the story is (anti) hero Misha Borisovich Vainberg, a grossly rich and obscenely overweight Russian hip-hop fop. Misha, who received a degree in multiculturalism from Accidental College in Middle America, has been exiled from his beloved United States (his father killed an Oklahoman) and he decides to travel to Absurdsvani to obtain a not-so-legitimate Belgian passport so he can become a citizen of the EU. While there, Absurdistan descends into an oil-fueled civil war (that only gets meager coverage by the international media) and our hero has to sort out the good guys from the bad guys.

While most reviewers have firmly positioned Shteyngart's work as a satiric exemplar worthy of Swift or Heller, I think it has more in common with French absurdist/existentialist plays. To my mind, the basic message of the text is that we live in a world where morality and truth do not (perhaps cannot) exist. Like Misha, however, we are responsible for our choices and must absurdly create morality even though we can never be sure of the implications of our actions. Three melancholic Sisyphus out of five.

Crazy Is as Crazy Does

Poppy Shakespeare

Clare Allan

Anchor Canada

Quite honestly, this was one of those novels that make you say WTF?! Set in a north London day hospital, Poppy Shakespeare tells the story of "N" -- a woman who grew up in the system and whose main ambition is to never be discharged. One day, a new girl arrives (Poppy Shakespeare) and asks for N's help to prove to the hospital administration that she is not mad. N agrees and comes up with a crazy plan to win Poppy's freedom.

Darkly and disturbingly funny, Allan's novel blurs the lines between sanity and lunacy. If you can read through the working-class London dialect, Allan's message sounds suspiciously like Plato and the Cave, although she might just be taking the piss out of us -- it's hard to tell. The novel also comes across as a subtle indictment of the British mental health system. One of the characters states "Reality's one thing. The truth quite another." I'm not sure if we readers are to apply that to Poppy's state of mind, the state of institutionalized healthcare in Britain, or take it as a Platonism that should be applied to every day life. Two dribblers out of five.

Memoirs of a Gaysha

Possible Side Effects

Augusten Burroughs

Picador

Honestly, how many memoirs can one fortysomething write? In Possible Side Effects, a book of short, but bitingly funny essays, Burroughs gives us yet another hilarious glimpse into some of the more, uh, interesting periods in his life. When I looked at this novel in the bookstore, I was a little worried that he wouldn't have anything new to say -- how could he top the stories he told in both Running with Scissors and Dry? As it turns out, my worries were not entirely unfounded.

Possible Side Effects seems to be very much about Augusten the writer of today, versus Augusten the abused child, or Augusten the raging alcoholic. Stories about his dogs or the holidays that he takes with his partner might be interesting someday, but right now, they don't have a lot of resonance with me. Maybe I'm not the target audience for some of these anecdotes -- I don't know. Burroughs does seem to understand that people, regardless of our melting pot mentality, still sort themselves into buckets and it could just be that I can't totally identify with the bucket that is GWM.

Having said all that, this book is still worth picking up. The essay entitled "Moving Violations" had me laughing so hard that people were staring. Never in a million years would I have thought that the phrase "the positive power of porn" would enter my head. No kidding -- reading this chapter has completely altered the course of my life. I'd tell you more, but that would spoil the surprise. Two quirks out of five.

Cryin' -- But Not Over You

Long for This World
Michael Byers
Mariner Books

For those of you who know me personally, you can attest to the fact that I rarely cry. When I was a little girl, my inconsolable moments were usually as a result of extreme frustration -- I shed many a tear over "not getting" long division in grade three and not being able to master a free-hip-to-handstand on the uneven parallel bars. Who'd have guessed that being eight could be so traumatic?

As a adult, I'm still not much of a crier. True, I do have weepy moments when I get hormonal, but unlike some family members, I am not predisposed to crying while watching sappy Tim Horton's commercials. You can imagine my horror (and that of the gentleman sitting beside me) when I burst into tears on an airplane this past week.

Why the drama? Long for this World is a story about an incredibly bright and funny young man, William Durbin. William has a rare disease, and his geneticist, Henry Moss, is on the cusp of finding a cure for the patient he has grown to love. It wasn't the fact that William died that did me in -- his prognosis was never good and his passing wasn't a surprise. Instead, it was the denouement signalled by his death that was so hard. I was not ready to give up the characters that I met in this book. If it is possible to fall in love with a fictional family, I think that's what happened to me this past week. Byers' characters are flawed, human, and ever so lovingly drawn. I did not want to say goodbye. Four shooting stars out of five.

Notes from a Posthumous Land

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Vintage

For whatever reason, I think I have been struck by a severe case of performance anxiety. I have been working on this post for a couple of days now and nothing I write seems good enough to keep. I wouldn't call it writer's block exactly -- I just know that there is a thought in my head trying to articulate itself on the page and somewhere, something is getting lost in the process.

A brilliant example of post-apocalyptic fiction, The Road chronicles the journey of an unnamed father and son as they travel through a catastrophe-ravaged world that offers nothing save ash on the wind. Pushing a shopping cart down the interstate, the rag-clad duo scavenge for whatever they can find while trying their best to avoid bands of menacing survivors, or as the young boy calls them, "bad guys."

At first glance, there is little hope in this novel. A pistol with two bullets is all that really stands between the travelers and an uncomfortable death. Why, then, I asked myself, do they go on? What could possibly be the purpose? The cynic in me says that the need to persevere is instinctual -- no different from the way in which a horse or a cow will turn its back to a blast of freezing prairie air. The critics seem to think that McCarthy's implicit message is that it is the love that the man bears for his child that is the wellspring of hope. I'm not really happy with either of those answers. If I look inside myself, I think I've traveled The Road from time to time (I'm pretty sure I was on it this week, in fact) and it was neither love nor hope that kept me going. It was the fundamentally naive belief that things will get better. Maybe I'm not so different from that cow in the wind.

You Don't Send a Gentleman to Catch Vermin

Ratcatcher

James McGee

Harper

When I checked out online reviews of Ratcatcher, I wasn't surprised to learn that women and men seemed to be divided about the relative merits of this book. In general, guys indicated that they didn't particularly enjoy the novel and felt that it was a weak example of the thriller/mystery genre. Female readers, on the other hand, offered praise for both the storyline and the uber-manly charms of the brooding (and, uh, hot) protagonist, Matthew Hawkwood. Why the difference? I'm just guessing, but I suspect it's because this wasn't really a thriller -- it was a Regency romance in disguise.

What's a Regency romance, you ask? Well, it is a novel set in England between the years 1811 - 1820. While the romantic plots revolve around marriages of convenience, compromised honour, and attraction between virginal maids and reckless rakes, the back stories often involve the intrigues of the British monarchy and aristocracy, the ongoing war against Napoleon, and, in some cases, the daring exploits of men such as the Bow Street Runners. Enter our mysterious hero -- former captain in the British military, man of brooding good looks, and quite the player with the ladies ... you can see why it was easy for me to draw my conclusion.

Ratcatcher is probably not a book that would appeal to most men. To be candid, I read the bulk of it by candlelight while lounging in the tub with a glass of white wine. Hawkwood was a good companion for a night, but I'm not sure that I will be asking him back. One Prinny out of five.

Delusional? Who, Me? ...

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

Houghton Mifflin

This probably wasn't the kind of book that I should have been bringing home as bedtime reading over the Easter holiday. Admittedly, the timing wasn't so good, but it was recommended to me by a colleague and I just couldn't help myself. How could I resist a book that promised to raise my consciousness to the fact that atheists can be happy, balanced, moral and intelligent? (And yes, I did stoop so low as to remove the cover so I could smuggle it into the house. Sorry, Mom -- I'm not proud of it.)

Dawkins, an Oxford professor of ethology, asserts that a persistent (insistent?) "false belief in the face of strong contradictory evidence" is delusional. He then goes on to quote Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who said, " When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." And that, my friends, was just the introduction!

I would be a liar if I told you that I didn't enjoy the text and identify with parts of what Dawkins has to say. Yes, religion sometimes legitimizes some pretty dumb things. And yes, out of context, even the most sane and normal of religious practices can seem kind of weird. Unfortunately, much of what Dawkins asserts is undermined by that fact that he often comes across as a pseudo-religious zealot who glosses a text to hide/support a weak argument. I was expecting the book to be a little more persuasive, and frankly, a little more articulate. Two point five deities out of five.

Oh, and just because I know at least some of you reading this post will ask me what I believe, I will tell you here and now. I'm with Einstein. I can't conceive of anything as perfect as a strawberry or as beautiful and functional as, say, a golden eyelash, without understanding god.

Nature vs Nurture

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
Harper Perennial

I'm not exactly sure what it was about this novel that grabbed me so much. The central character, Eva, is a successful, hands-on business woman, who obviously has some serious commitment issues. Her job frequently takes her away from home (sounding familiar?) and while she occasionally grouses about being away from Franklin, her husband, she's really not that interested in changing careers. One day, she decides that she might not be "happy enough" and asks Franklin if he wants to have a baby. Franklin is dying to be an all-American dad and readily agrees.

Months later, Kevin is born. Right from the start, he and Eva have an uneasy relationship --he won't take to the breast, he goes through nannies like diapers, and is fundamentally a mean (can I say evil?) little boy. When, two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin turns into a Columbine-type mass murderer , Eva's world is shattered. In putting it back together, she is forced to re-examine her life in the context of Kevin's horrific act of nihilism.

Reading We Need to Talk about Kevin is both a gripping and a harrowing experience. Written in the form of an epistolary novel, Shriver uses the text to implicitly provoke readers into considering the nature versus nurture question. Did her son turn out that way because Eva was a cold, aloof, emotionally-absent mother, or was he just bad from the beginning? Personally, I believe that the latter is more often the case. Sure, parents can seriously muck-up their kids, but the existentialist in me asserts that we are all responsible for our own choices and that morally there is a right and wrong. Kevin, like my boyfriend Dexter, (remember him?) is smart enough to understand the conventions of morality -- even if they don't exist for him as part of his nihilistic world-view. Three and a half Nietzsches out of five.

P is for Paris

The End of the Alphabet

CS Richardson

Doubleday Canada

Aphorisms be damned! I know they say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but that's what I did with the subject of this week's post and it seemed to work out fine. I was originally attracted to The End of the Alphabet by the picture of the camel that graced the front cover. The cousin that lives with me at the moment has been nuts for dromedaries since she was a little girl. She's got pictures, stuffed animals, figurines, Christmas ornaments -- you name it, and if it has a camel on it, I'm sure she has one.

When I picked up the book and read the publisher's blurb on the dust jacket, I didn't quite know what to expect. I suppose I thought it would be like an alphabetized Book of Hours crossed with Tuesdays with Morrie. It turns out that my assumption wasn't that far off the mark.

Somewhere in his early fifties, art lover and advertising man, Ambrose Zephyr learns that he has a month to live. He decides that in his remaining days he wants to travel his way through the alphabet and use the time he has left to absorb the beauty of art, life and the self. He and his wife only make it as far as Istanbul when Ambrose returns home to die. Gentle, witty and charming, The End of the Alphabet is a magical love letter well worth picking up. Three camels out of five.

Somebody's Watchin' Me

The Traveler
John Twelve Hawks
Vintage

A few months ago, one the big debates being discussed in the Toronto media was whether or not the city should install CCTV cameras to monitor activity in a few "problem" areas in the downtown core. Frankly, the idea that the city could track my movements even more than they already do gave me the creeps. Don't worry, I'm not one of those "live free or die" types, but I do believe that the both the government and big business know way too much about what I do, where I go, and what novel I'm likely to choose next at the bookstore. We could just chalk it up to being one of the perils of living in a post 9/11, information age. Or not. I think it's a matter of perspective.

John Twelve Hawks, the author of 2005's The Traveler, might argue that it is possible, and somewhat preferable, to fly under the information radar and "live off the grid" since it is the only real way to live free. The novel focuses on a pair of brothers, Gabriel and Michael, who are suspected to be Travelers -- that is, men who can escape their physical beings and use their energy or "Light" to travel to other dimensions. An evil empire called the Tabula (headquartered in Purchase, NY) want to capture the brothers and use their powers to open a portal and map a path between realities. While Michael is eventually captured and convinced to use his powers for the dark side, Gabriel manages to elude his seekers and flees to the Arizona desert. He is assisted in his escape by a young woman named Maya -- a trained killer sworn to protect Travelers, and a couple of Angelinos who believe in the cause.

I really liked this book. Twelve Hawks (if that, indeed, is his real name) has managed to put together a novel that defies categorization. Part sci-fi/fantasy, part thriller, part social criticism, this novels works, and works beautifully, on so many levels. Despite the fact that I understand this novel is the first in a trilogy, there is very little fat in the text and even the characters names are invested with meaning. Twelve Hawks has done a fantastic job making this an intelligent, engaging read. Four points of light out of five.

Leonardo's Girl

I, Mona Lisa
Jeanne Kalogridis
St. Martin's Griffin

So, believe it or not, I'm one of those odd ducks that doesn't actually mind spending time at the airport. When my brother and I were quite young, my dad used to take us to Malton on Sunday afternoons to watch the planes from the roof of Terminal One. If we were really lucky, the afternoon would conclude with a dinner at the Ponderosa. Yeah, I know -- I am so small town it hurts.

Anyway, aside from the noise pollution and the smell of automobile and jet exhaust, there isn't much about the airport that I don't like. I still enjoy watching the planes take off and land, I love making up stories about the people I see, and I get a huge kick out of the randomness of the whole experience. I can tell you which airports across North America have the best bars, the best ice cream, the best lounges, the most inconveniently located car rental agencies, and, of course, the best bookstores. What else is there to do when you take a 3 hour delay?

As you've probably guessed from the lead-in, I've been travelling quite a bit lately and the subject of this week's post I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis was purchased last week on my way home from YOW. Set in Florence during the early 16th century, the author skillfully weaves fact and fiction to create a compelling and immensely readable narrative about the fall of the de Medici, the rise of the Savonarola, and the vie quotidienne of one Lisa di Antonio Gherardini. Surprisingly, the most interesting character in the novel is not the subject of that much talked about painting. It is the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci that really captures the reader's imagination and leaves him/her wanting more. Three flights of fancy out of five.

What in Me is Dark, Illumine

This Blinding Absence of Light

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Penguin Books

Every once in awhile, you come across a book that speaks to you in such an intimate way that it becomes a touchstone for how you live your life. I'm lucky enough to have three -- Le Petit Prince, The Alchemist, and now, This Blinding Absence of Light.

Geographically, the book is set in the Tazmamart prison camp in southeastern Morocco. Though he never fired a gun, the narrator (a lieutentant in the Moroccan army) has been incarcerated for his participation in a failed coup d'etat against King Hassan II. The "prison" is actually a concentration camp and for twenty years, he and the other inmates literally live in the dark -- given only enough bread and water to exist on the edge of death. Individually confined to cells that don't allow them to stand, they only see the light when one of their companions dies and the guards allow them to attend the funeral. Eventually, this "privilege" is also taken away and the men must exist in total physical darkness.

What is so moving about this novel is that collectively and as individuals, the men resist despair. Despite the horrific conditions, they use their faith and their imagination to rise above/beyond their physical selves in an attempt to survive. To be able to transcend the kind of cruelty, pain and suffering that these men endured is a testament to man's infinite capacity for hope. They lived in complete and utter darkness, but some never succumbed -- they never lost sight of the light. Five shining stars out of five.

Get a New Plan Stan

Getting Rid of Matthew

Jane Fallon

Harper Collins

As unfair as it might seem, I had big hopes for this novel. The premise is definitely intriguing. An under-achieving, but very beautiful secretary/PA decides to end the four and a half year affair she has been having with a much older, married co-worker. In the process of leaving her lover, she somehow manages to befriend his wife, alienate his pre-teen daughters, and fall madly in lust with his son. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun, right? Sigh. If only it had lived up to its potential ...

I honestly can't think of anything good to say about this novel. I didn't hate GRoM (it wasn't written well enough to evoke that kind of passion in me,) but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to any of my friends. I found the main character to be vapid and shallow and flat-- much like Kitty Fane at the beginning of The Painted Veil. It could be that the novel is just a victim of bad timing --admittedly, my mental landscape is still occupied with thoughts of Adam Spark and I still don't seem to have room for much else. Or it could be that I had such high expectations (I was hoping that GRoM might be the harbinger of an anti-chick lit genre) that the book just couldn't measure up. I'm not sure. In any event, I have to give this one two thumbs down.

Save Me

The incredible Adam Spark
Alan Bissett
Headline Review

A very unusual thing happened to me last week when I was coming home from the gym. It was Saturday afternoon and I had just finished a gruelling workout (note to self -- never do legs when the trainer has a hangover -- she gets real mean.) As a reward for making it through the session without either giving up or throwing up, I decided that I deserved a trip to the bookstore. As usual, I let the books pick me and I ended up coming home with three selections. I didn't notice it at the time, but each of the titles contained a boy's name -- The incredible Adam Spark, Getting Rid of Matthew, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. I'm sure there must be a message in there somewhere -- if only I had collected enough cereal box tops to send away for that decoder ring ...

Anyway ... let's talk about Adam. The incredible Adam Spark was, for me, a very engaging read. Bissett's brilliant use of colloquial Scots combined with a sort of stream of consciousness narration quite literally hurt my head. I found that I often had to resort to reading sentences out loud in order to figure out what the narrator was saying. Not such a bad strategy in the privacy of my own home, but it did occasion some odd looks on the streetcar during my morning commute.

The story centres on a developmentally challenged young man, Sparkie/Adam, who, after getting a nasty crack in the head, wakes up to discover that he has superpowers; not only can he see auras, but he has also developed the ability to communicate with machines and animals. While his new skills may come in handy in his quest for Employee-of-the-Month, Adam understands that he really needs to use his powers for good. Knowing what "good" is -- well, that's the challenge.

Over the course of the novel Sparkie/Adam has a lot of adventures. He falls in with a gang, falls out with his sister, and falls in love with girl name Bonnie. He is both wonderful and repulsive and I didn't really want his story to end. I'll definitely be coming back to Bissett to see what other work he has written. There was so much packed into a few hunderd pages that I will be thinking about this book for weeks to come. Four big macs out of five. Supersized.

Who Are They Anyway?

Them - Adventures with Extremists

Jon Ronson

Simon & Schuster

A couple of you keen observers/blog readers have noticed that for a short month, I've managed to churn through quite a few books. Um, well, not that I am apologizing or anything, but some of the material has been quite light (seriously -- it take less than two hours to blast through a Harlequin.) And frankly, I've been in a bit of a funk and what do I do when I'm feeling blue? I read.

So, let's talk about Them. In a nutshell, this book is the chronicle of one man's journey (Jon Ronson) into, well, what my mother would call "Land of the Wackos." Ronson, a British humourist/journalist follows around and reports on the comings and goings of various "extremist" individuals. What makes them "extremists" is not their desire to blow up buildings or kill thousands of innocents -- no, they are "extreme" because they all believe, to one degree or another, that world events are being manipulated by a clandestine, insidious cabal of prominent politicians, thinkers, and financiers. While I'm not so sure that I don't agree with Them -- such a group does exist -- I might dispute the author's contention that this shadowy organization is the infamous Bilderberg group. You see, I had always been under the impression that the world was controlled by the insidious cabal that writes and publishes The Economist. Hmmm ... had I only known ...

To be candid, Them is much more disturbing than it is amusing. I will admit to laughing out loud when the author describes being outed at the Jihadist training camp (Ronson is Jewish, not gay -- imagine the potential consquences!) What really scared me, though, was reading the profiles of the closer-to-home, America-based weirdos. I know I should take comfort in the fact Michael Adams argues that Americans and Canadians have socially divergent values and that the gap is widening every day. And I also know that Ronson is really only describing the lunatic fringe. What scares me is that at the end of the day, people are people, regardless of their country of origin, and weirdos, well, they're not all harmless like me. Three crackpots out of five.

Canada Reads

lullabies for little criminals

Heather O'Neill

Harper Perennial

When I was a little kid, one of my favourite poems was Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie. Aside from the fantastic rhymes, I liked it because it made the complicated ideas of want, need and sacrifice very easy to understand. My grade three teacher, Mrs. Graham, once asked our class what was it that we loved as much as alligator pie and what would we be willing to give up to keep it? To be honest, I have no idea how my eight-year old brain answered that question -- it was the question itself that stuck with me.

If you were to ask me today, however, I would tell you that my alligator pie is CBC Radio-One. I wouldn't be the person that I am if it weren't for the influence of our much maligned public broadcaster. Canada Reads is a perfect case in point. Heading into its sixth "season" CR is essentially Survivor for CanLit. Five panelists each choose a book to defend and at the end of a week, there is only one book left standing. The debates are lively, erudite, heated, and, like most programming on the Ceeb, make you think.

Why the digression into childhood poetry and my love for the Mothership? Well, this week's book, lullabies for little criminals, is actually one the novels being debated in this year's Canada Reads. Set in the rougher neighbourhoods of Montreal, the story is about a young girl, Baby, who is walking the fine line between childhood innocence and the temptations offered by the street-life world of drugs, sex and addiction. Billed by reviewers as a "coming of age"story, the novel definitely exhibits characteristics of the traditional bildungsroman. Aside from her sexual awakening (at the hands of Alphonse her pimp and her ur-nerd boyfriend Xavier), I am not convinced that Baby actually transitions from childhood into maturity. The ending left me curiously unsatisfied and I'll be interested to see how lullabies fares in the debates. 2/5 étoiles.

In the Immortal Words of DW -- Boogity boogity boogity!

Thunderstruck
Roxanne St. Claire
Harlequin

So, I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume that some of you reading this blog are wondering what in the H-E double hockey sticks I'm talking about in the title. Um, well ... DW would be Darrell Waltrip. Boogity boogity boogity is what he says at the start of a race. Uh huh ... that's right, sports fans, tomorrow afternoon will find me sitting in front of my television, a Budweiser in one hand, a bowl of chili in the other, celebrating the start to a new NASCAR Nextel Cup season.

Imagine my delight (and frankly, bewilderment) when on my way home from work on Friday I stopped at the local bookshop and found Thunderstruck. Honestly ... I had no idea that NASCAR has it own series of Harlequin romances. Once I managed compose myself (I almost hit the floor I was laughing so hard) I purchased a copy of said romance and unashamedly dug in. The basic "plot" is as follows: Handsome, athletic boy meets beautiful grease monkey girl. After much sexual tension and a few kisses, boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl then have a huge fight. Boy and girl then make up and live happily ever after. The end.

I've read my fair share of Harlequins and this one was as wonderfully crappy as all the rest. The best part of this novel, however, was that it was set at the Daytona track during Speed Week. It couldn't have been more perfect! And just in case you missed it in the About Me section of this blog -- this year, I'm cheering for Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Juan Pablo Montoya. While I think all of them are talented drivers (Tony especially), I'm really cheering for them because I think they are all very attractive. Well, I guess there is a little more to it than that ... I like Tony because he can be a supreme dick on the track and his anger and bad behaviour make me laugh. Junior is my sentimental favourite because his accent just kills me, and I quite liked JP (I've decided to call him JP) when he raced in F1.

Enjoy the race, everyone. I know I will.

Ice Cold, Baby

So Yesterday

Scott Westerfeld

Razor Bill

When I first started reading this novel, I did a bit of a double take. Did I actually pick up a book about the pursuit of cool, or was I reading some kind of trippy, fictionalized version of Crossing the Chasm meets The Tipping Point? The scary thing is that I'm still undecided.


So Yesterday introduces us to 17 year old Hunter Braque. Hunter is a Trendsetter (someone who has the innate ability to spot "cool" before it is "cool") and he occasionally works as a consultant for The Client -- a large footwear manufacturer named after a four-letter Greek god. One of Hunter's jobs is to attend Tastings (aka focus groups) where he and a pack of under twenty-somethings are asked to be the arbiters of taste. Hunter's other job is to roam the streets of New York and take pictures of cool things (using his ultra-hip Finnish mobile device, of course) and send them to his boss. It is on one of these excursions that he meets Jen, the girl of his dreams. The girl, as it turns out, is an Innovator and as soon as they hook up, strange things start to happen. Someone is trying to topple the pyramid of cool and bring rampant consumerism to the brink of destruction. It is up to Hunter and his new girl to figure it all out.

What's cooler than cool? Well, not me and definitely not this book. While I think Westerfeld gets readers to think about some of the issues around the production and marketing of popular culture, the story just doesn't work. What the book lacks, I'm afraid, is innovation. Hunter wouldn't have even picked it up.

New Boy in Town

Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Jeff Lindsay
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard

What is it with me, this blog, and the need to confess? As if liking Bruce Campbell weren't bad enough, now I think I'm in love with a serial killer. Is it any wonder that I'm single? (Don't answer that ... it was entirely rhetorical.)

I first met Dexter Morgan a couple of months ago -- my friend Peter actually introduced us one night after work. Dex is a blood spatter expert with the Miami-Dade police department (great job -- lots of opportunity!) and like of most of my past boyfriends, he is quite handsome, very fit, devastatingly charming, and, uh, emotionally unavailable. Big sigh.

You see, Dex has some serious baggage. He went through a terrible trauma as a young boy and it damaged him. Some people, lay people, might even be tempted to call him a sociopath. Actually, if I look at it objectively, I would have to say that Dexter is pretty much a homicidal maniac. The upside, and the reason I love him, is that he only kills VBPs -- very bad people. To make matters a little more complicated, his sister (a complete potty-mouthed cop if ever I met one) is investigating a series of brutal slayings that bear a striking resemblance to Dex's own unique style.

For someone who doesn't usually express much by way of emotion, he has been a little edgy and out of sorts lately. My internal radar is telling me to stay away ... but there is something so, I dunno, sexy about him, I might just have to see where this could lead. BTW, on our last date, he took me to a little medianoche for the best Cuban sandwich I have ever eaten. The decor left a little to be desired, but on the whole I'd give it three and a half stars. I'll keep you posted (pun intended) if things get serious.