Three to Get Deadly - Janet Evanovich

Maybe I was just not feeling it this time around, but Three to Get Deadly was just not as good as Two for the Dough (see that review here). In this installment, Stephanie Plum needs to bring in Uncle Mo, a local guy who runs a candy store in the neighborhood and who is universally adored. People aren't that helpful. 

The story really moved slowly. Whereas the earlier books had a bit of suspense and drama related to the fugitive, those moments just fell kind of flat in this one. There was not enough Grandma Mazzur in this book either. She always provides good comic relief and has the most laugh out loud statements in all the books. This book seemed to rely more on Lula for that than Grandma Mazzur and the book suffered for it. 

What the book did have was some steamy Joe Morelli parts. I'm a fan of Morelli. I think he knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to Stephanie. And I'm glad Stephanie finally realized in this book that she was interested in him. But then again, Stephanie's reticence was and is kind of getting old. 

But overall, the steamy parts just couldn't make up for the utter lack of F's I gave regarding what happened with Uncle Mo and the candy store. It just took too long to build up. Even with a bunch of other goons running around threatening Stephanie, and a bunch of drug dealers showing up dead, the story just never gripped me at all. And given that his bail was relatively low, I didn't see why Stephanie cared so much about it.

3/5 Stars.

Ploughshares Spring 2016

When I started reading the Spring 2016 edition of Ploughshares I thought it would be a quick read before I sunk my teeth into Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton - a book I've promised myself I would finish prior to seeing Hamilton on Broadway June 10. Typically Ploughshares is something I can devour in a couple days - five at most. But apparently that was not to be this time around.

Ploughshares has given me so many delightful editions over the past three years of my romance, subscription. It was bound to fall short sooner or later. I can't really explain why I couldn't get excited about this edition. Both guest editors, Alan Shapiro and Tom Sleigh are great poets, and their ideas about poetry - as noted in the profiles of the editors at the end of the edition (one of my actual favorite parts of the edition) - jive a lot with mine. 

The issue of Ploughshares is dedicated to four poets, Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013), Philip Levine (1928 - 2015), Mark Strand (1934 - 2014), and C.K. Williams (1936 - 2015). Perhaps the fact that I don't know any of these men started me at a particular disadvantage. Shapiro and Sleigh note in their introduction that the poems chosen for this edition were a "lament for the makers . . . praise of the highest kind, an affirmation of enduring value." Shapiro and Sleigh write that in each poem they were looking for a "simultaneous reckoning with life and language, innovation and tradition." Seen from this perspective, they were successful, because the poems, and the limited short fiction included, all touch on the sense of the abnormal within the normal. It makes the reading slow going and thoughtful, but not necessarily something I connected with. 

That said, there were, as always, poems and stories I absolutely adored:

Catherine Barnett - Lyric and Narrative Time at Cafe Loup
I absolutely loved this poem's exploration of time. Time as a relative concept, time as a tangible object. "Time is one part of the body that never gets washed." Is going to be a line that sticks with me for a long time.

Katherine Damm - The Middlegame
This short story also explored time. Time as a concept of what happens when our mind wanders. It starts out with the question of whether you can have two thoughts at once. In the story, the narrator is playing a chess game while simultaneously thinking of her family life, and our own attention wanders with hers back and forth from the game. It's a really brilliant way of showing narrative control and the passage of time without observation.

Kirby Gann - The Obscening of Engine Kreuter
I appreciate any story that uses a made up word in its title. This was a really fun story about a rock-n-roll guy finally selling out after eeking by. 

Mary Karr - Psalm for Riding a Plane
This poem delved into the experience of flying in a plane and the sort of ridiculousness of the concept of being inside a contraption that then lifts into the air and flies us somewhere. 

Michael Ryan - Three Days Flu No Shower
Some of the rhyming in this poem just really made me happy. And it painted such a grungy picture I could really smell and feel. "Between the showroom and the shop, he leans his push broom and he stops. Beef Barley soup as it plops out of the can into a thin tin pot." 

Jason Sommer - Grudge
Also a poem I really liked because of the way the rhyming worked, but also because of the concept of having the last word in a late night argument. 

Helen Schulman - In a Better Place
This story, about a woman who sees her supposedly dead father while on vacation in Normandy, France was entertaining and an interesting play on the concept of saying someone who has passed on is "in a better place." Her dead father certainly was, galavanting at outside cafe's with a young new companion.

Other poems I really enjoyed:
Christopher Merrill - The Red Umbrella
Honor Moore - Night Cafe
Katie Peterson - Note to Self
Paisley Rekdal - Astyanax
Maurice Riordan - Fleet
David Wojahn - Two Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger

I did enjoy the end of this edition more than the first half. The majority of the stories and poems I really liked came toward the end, but overall my own appreciation of the poems was uneven and this edition was not my favorite.

3/5 Stars.

S is for Silence - Sue Grafton

How many letters in the alphabet are there? I feel like I've been reading this series forever. But honestly, the writing is solid and the stories are entertaining. S is for Silence was an interesting departure from R is for Ricochet (you can read that review here). 

In S, Grafton does what she's never done in earlier installments, she presents the story from multiple points of view. Kinsey has been hired by Daisy Sullivan into the disappearance of her mother, Violet - missing since 1953. The chapters vary between Kinsey's point of view, and flashback stories told by the involved people. 

Did Violet disappear or did she die? Was she killed? And why? The mystery unfolds slowly and Grafton does a good job of keeping several people in the mix of possible whodunits. There is her husband, Foley, known for physically abusing Violet for years. Chet Cramer, a wealthy upstart owner of the local Chevy dealership who is in a loveless marriage. Tom Padgett, married to an older woman for her money, which she is not sharing with him. And Jake Tanner, who's wife died of cancer in 1953 when Violet disappeared. 

All of these actors have their own motivations. There is someone to dislike with relish, the nosy, self important Kathy Kramer. And there are people to root for as well. The book takes a step back from Kinsey's personal life and her relationship with Cheney Phillips as much of the action happens out of Santa Theresa where Kinsey lives. This is a bit disappointing as I'm always looking for Kinsey to grow a bit as a person. 

It also is a little discongruent because in R, Kinsey was a bit afraid of her surroundings and events, however in this book, she's back to form. S is more in line with how I've come to expect Kinsey to act in certain situations.

3/5 Stars.

The Lake House - Kate Morton

On a recommendation from my sister - who almost never steers me wrong - I picked up The Lake House, as I was in need of a new audio book for training for this 1/2 marathon (two more weeks folks).  I was a bit astonished to see a run time of 21 hours though! To put this in perspective, my average book for running is about 10-11 hours. This meant I'd be "reading" this for about three weeks. (Actually it took me more than a month - ouch).

So I settled in for a long story. And it was long. But also good. I liked the writing, even when Morton did get a little long winded. The story is framed by Sadie Sparrow, a London detective who is on administrative leave following a press leak regarding an investigations she was assigned to looking into the disappearance of Maggie Bailey.

As a concession to her partner, Sadie goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandfather, Bertie on holiday. She can't get the Bailey case out of her mind and wonders if it has anything to do with a recent letter she received from the baby she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Layers of several mysteries that are woven together.

To distract herself from all of this, Sadie takes up a keen interest in the Lake House she discovers while running. Turns out that the family that lived there moved shortly after a tragedy in 1933. The tragedy? The disappearance of an 11 month old boy, Theo.

The story then vacillates between Sadie's story in 2003, to 1933 and before told through the eyes of Alice and Elinor Edyvane (yeah sorry, I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right, I only listened to the book). It turns out Theo's disappearance hinges on the family secrets of several of the Edyvane family's individual members. The story gives away just enough to keep you guessing throughout, until the end, when it all starts to fall together and the reader has quite the jump start on Sparrow. I started to lament that she might not be a very good detective after all.

While Morton is certainly long on supposition and story-telling to the point where you don't really care to hear all the details of the moth eaten area rug that serves no purpose in plot - what she does end up giving you is very full character development. Sadie, Alice and Elinor are complete characters, with back story, motivation, failures, character flaws and all the rest. So the completion of the novel - a rounding up of both the Edyvane and Bailey cases, while maybe a bit eye-rollingly coincidental and predictable, is none-the-less very satisfying.

4/5 Stars.

Ravelstein - Saul Bellow

Ravelstein is a book I found sitting on my shelf at home and I honestly cannot tell you how it came to be mine. I did not purchase it, and I have no memory of it being lent or borrowed from anyone. If you are reading this and it happens to be yours, let me know if you would like it back.

How fitting that I finished reading Ravelstein while on the plane home from my weekend visit to my grandmother in Canada. You see, Saul Bellow was born in Canada and when he was nine his parents moved to Humboldt Park in Chicago. Bellow eventually attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. 

And despite my also having a Canadian background, and living in Chicago, and the fact that Saul Bellow has won both the Pulitzer Prize (1976 - Humboldt's Gift) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), I'd never heard of him before. For all this, Ravelstein is Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, five years before his death, Ravelstein is written in the style of a memoir. 

Abe Ravelstein is a professor with lots of opinions and ideas. Urged by his friend Chick, Ravelstein pens a book and finally meets with commercial success equal to his spending appetites. In turn, Ravelstein urges Chick to write a memoir of Ravelstein - you see, Ravelstein is dying, in the 90s, from AIDS-related complications. 

Chick, however, is unsure how to begin. And what unravels in the prose, is the tight intertwining of friendship, where a portrait of the subject is not complete without an equally revealing portrait of the storyteller. Clearly Ravelstein holds a place in Chick's life that cannot be duplicated, and his thoughts and opinions have formed some of who Chick is and his loss has left a large hole in Chick's life. 

Chick's style of telling the memoir is conversational, anecdotal -it's almost as if you've sat down with Chick at table and asked him to tell you about his late friend Abe Ravelstein. His tale marches backwards and forwards. Short on facts, the novel somehow paints a more complete picture of the man than a straightforward biography.

The way in which the memoir genre is explored in the novel is a huge feat. The novel is said to be based on Bellow's friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, the philosopher Allan Bloom. Bloom taught at UofC and was well known in academic circles, but gained notoriety with his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind which heavily criticized contemporary American higher education. 

If I had anything negative to say about the book, is that while brilliant, it is clear that Bellow was writing, perhaps not for the average person, but really for his contemporaries and colleagues - those that shared a common language and experience as he and Bloom. The book delves heavily into critiques on literary theory and philosophy, subjects that are a bit lost on me and probably the average reader as well. 

This may actually be a strong support for Ravelstein and therefore Bellow's argument about the failing of today's higher education. Chick notes that Universities today are well equipped to turn out engineers and mathematicians, but woefully inept at producing the level of caliber of great thinkers and philosophers who were once the recipients of a liberal arts education. As a recipient of an English undergraduate degree, I can see his point. 

All this can seem a bit of sour grapes as well as it means that type of men Bellow - and therefore Bloom and Ravelstein - were was becoming less valuable to society as a whole. And therefore Bloom and Bellow, at the ends of their lives were becoming all to aware of something lost. Bellow has been criticized for being out of touch with modern society and his novels are apparently not well liked in modernist and feminist circles.

But what stands out to me, is that Ravelstein captures a world and a language that is somehow slipping away from the author. On the other hand, the language of love and friendship, and the way we define ourselves through the lens of those who have impacted us most, is a concept that is timeless.

4/5 Stars.

R is for Ricochet - Sue Grafton

Most of the time I get where the title of the book comes from but in this one I'm kind of scratching my head. The most I can think of is that this story's main plot actually surrounds a person who is NOT Kinsey.

Kinsey has been hired by Nord Lafferty to go pick up his daughter, Reba, as she is released from prison. She's served almost two years for embezzling her company's money in order to fuel gambling and drinking binges. So Kinsey goes to pick her up and hangs out with her for two days as Reba gets her affairs in order. 

But almost immediately, Reba meets up with an old flame from work and it quickly becomes apparent that something else entirely is going on. Meanwhile, Kinsey attends the party of her old friend from California Fidelity and runs into Cheney Phillips, a cop described as "handsome" in several of the earlier books. This time around, Kinsey finally gets back in the sack with someone. 

It's very bizarre to read about her in a relationship at all but this one is different than just what was going on with Dietz. It's nice because Kinsey spends so much time talking about how she likes to be alone, but really in this book, she's maneuvering to spend time with Cheney and Reba. 

Cheney ends up filling Kinsey in on an IRS investigation of Reba's old flame and the tangled web of financial deceit starts to unravel - with Kinsey on the sideline, as a lot of the action happens off page with Reba. 

In the end, this book felt more like a character arc filler book. We needed Kinsey to get out of her personal relationships rut and see her with someone she is really attracted to. The whole Dietz thing was weird, so this is a good development.

3/5 Stars.

That Whole 30 Update I promised. Whoops!

I had originally reviewed It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole 30 and Change your Life in Unexpected Ways by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, back in December 2015 (you can find the original review here). My plan was to start the Whole 30 January 1 and then post an update on how it went. So first of all, sorry that this update is late. I totally forgot I was going to do this.

Looking back 60 days after finishing the Whole 30, it doesn't seem so bad. The time did go pretty quickly, (I actually started Whole 30 on January 2 in order to observe our Italian family tradition of making ravioli and drinking wine on January 1).

What was easier than I expected: black coffee. It's bitter, but it really wasn't that bad. I immediately went back to having doctored coffee afterwards.Kicking the sugar habit. It was actually kind of nice knowing I couldn't have ANY of that stuff and it made it easier to avoid things I KNEW had sugar in it. That said, avoiding items with sugar in it was almost impossible. Breakfast sausage? Sugar. Packaged Tuna? Sugar. Lunch meat? Sugar. It was extremely frustrating.

What was harder than I expected: snacking. It's difficult when you have an on the go kind of family like we do to make sure you have some things prepared ahead of time. If I needed a quick snack, I tried to grab fruit etc., but if I was on the road or out of the house, I'd try to find a Larabar or some nuts (not peanuts). It became kind of an odyssey on some day. The diet can be extremely restrictive sometimes and in rebellion my tastes veered toward having three Larabars in a row in revolt.

What was unexpected: I have an issue with dairy. I know this now because I had no dairy whatsoever for 30 days and the first day after having coffee with some milk in it, my entire plumbing system was not pleased. So I've switched to a plant based protein supplement for after my workouts.

Pleasant discoveries: Cauliflower makes an awesome rice substitute. I use my cuisinart to shred up the cauliflower and then just plop it in my wok with a bit of coconut oil. It gets all toasty and glistening. Very good stuff and my toddlers even like it. Larabars. I basically lived on these in a very bad way so now I remember them with the fondness an ex-smoker probably has for cigarettes, but they are very very good. Dried, unsweetened coconut. I don't know who looked at dried coconut and thought, I need to put some sugar in this, but that person is crazy. Coconut is so good without all the sugar added.

Unfortunately three days after finishing my Whole 30, I contracted a wicked stomach bug that kept me vomiting and in distress for about 24 hours. The good news is that I met my goal weight after the first day. The bad news was that I had to eat saltine crackers and ginger ale the entire time therefore wiping out all my Whole 30 lessons. It also messed up my usual food discipline so when I started eating normally again, I ate larger quantities than I used it.

I'm glad I proved to myself I could do the Whole 30, but I'm also not sure I'd do it again. I'm glad I learned that I have a bit of a dairy intolerance though. And I'm glad I'm more conscious of what has jaw dropping amounts of sugar in it.