Snowpocalypse 2010 — or Is It Snowmageddon?

Yeah, it was as bad as they said it was going to be. Since we don’t normally get much snow here in Northern Virgina, the communities don’t invest in the high-end snow removal equipment — what would be the point? It would be overkill. So we were told to “shelter in place.” And we did, after raiding the grocery stores. As one supermarket manager told me this morning, his store did a month’s worth of business in one week. Some of the shelves were literally bare, and one grocery store even sold out of frozen vegetables.

But enough of all that. I have pictures that tell the story much better than I can. The first are of Eddie and Dave indoors:

 

Next, the outside of my house:

My car, and two perspectives of people digging out on my block:

And finally, some random shots of the neighborhood, including my back alley and enclosed porch:

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Exiles, by Ron Hansen

Recently, the New York Times Book Review offered an essay on boring books, explaining why book reviewers seldom call books “boring.” That essay was a lot more interesting than Exiles, which is a very boring book.

Here’s where I explain why I read it: Ron Hansen has a strong reputation as a best-selling author, and the ostensible subject matter — the deaths of five German nuns in an 1875 shipwreck – sounded promising. I still think the sinking of the Deutschland would make for a good book. But someone else is going to have to take a crack at it, because Hansen’s book was boring.

Buried in Exiles are the seeds for a few fascinating short stories about life in the 1800s and what happens to German girls from poor families and the migration of European missionaries to the United States. Or maybe someone could structure another book around these ideas. They just need to read Exiles as a cautionary example of what not to do.

Where did Hansen go wrong? Well, there’s an epic poem about the Deutschland, written by a priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And at least half the book, maybe more, is about Hopkins, who wasn’t all that interesting himself, at least as portrayed by Hansen. I also didn’t like the fact that Hopkins’ seminary came across as roughly equivalent to a shabby but elite college for the rich.

I am not recommending it.

As for animal lovers, you have nothing to fear — there are no animal characters in this very boring book. It is therefore SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Never Enough, by Joe McGinniss

Every so often, I read a true crime book, enjoy it immensely, then forget about the genre for another year or so. So it was with Never Enough, by Joe McGinniss. This fascinating story of greed, infidelity, and murder takes place mostly in Hong Kong, where Rob and Nancy Kissel lived for several years before she killed him.

Nancy Kissel seemed permanently dissatisfied, and not bright enough to figure out that there was there was any other solution to that problem beyond shopping. Then, in the midst of putting together her dream home in a small town in Vermont, she encountered the local womanizer and fell in love. Since “the stereo guy” — as I came to think of him — couldn’t keep Nancy in her lavish lifestyle, she decided to make her fortune as a widow. So she drugged Rob, then beat him to death with a tchotchke, and went on to claim self-defense against a sexual sadist even though there was zero evidence that Rob ever did anything to Nancy other than lose her interest. Meanwhile, the Vermont Lothario moved on and Nancy more or less lost her mind. It was all very sad, and very unnecessary.

So that’s what happens, but the book is worth reading for McGinniss’s sterling writing. The guy knows how to convey suspense even when you know exactly what’s going to happen (although the Wikipedia link is good for checking on the status of the appeals). I’m giving this one a strong recommendation.

There were no pets present, and the only disturbing thing involving animals has to do with a description of some Chinese food (their meat selections are broader than ours). If this bothers you, skip page 78, which is not pivotal to the story, and you’ll be fine. Otherwise, this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of All This Heavenly Glory, by Elizabeth Crane

Here’s what I didn’t like about All This Heavenly Glory: long, long, hopelessly long sentences, and long, long, hopelessly long paragraphs. This drives me crazy. It’s not artistic or cute, it’s annoying, and it’s discourteous to readers — you know, those people who actually buy the books. Breaking up sentences and paragraphs helps readers hold manageable thoughts in their heads. And, contrary to what many authors obviously think, we do not sit down and read the entire book all at once. End of rant.

Otherwise, this was a good book. I’d previously reviewed a short story collection by Crane and really enjoyed it. This book is episodic aspects, like short stories, but it  tells the tale of Charlotte Anne Byers from childhood through her forties. Charlotte can break your heart and make you laugh both at once. She is neurotic, drinks too much for a while, loses in love, stumbles in her career, and makes many lists. Not much happens other than a woman living her life, but the way Crane tells it, that is enough. This is a glorious book, and I highly recommend it.

All This Heavenly Glory is also SAFE for animal lovers. There’s a dog that lives with a little boy who needs more parental supervision, but that’s it. Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Holy Cow, by Sarah Macdonald

Holy Cow, an international bestselling memoir, covers much of the same territory as a more recent bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The good news is that Holy Cow is not at all pretentious and Macdonald is much less annoying than Gilbert. In fact, she is barely annoying, and only when she explains her situation for about the 48th time, which means that most people won’t find her annoying at all. For close to the entirety of the book, Macdonald is, in fact, quite delightful and a charming narrator.

In the aftermath of a trip to India during college, Macdonald (and I have a hard time not capitalizing that first D, but that’s the way she spells it) swore she’d never return. Yet 11 years later, she moved there in order to join her boyfriend and eventual husband, a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Company. In doing so, she gave up an exciting career and figured she’d find something to do in India. And what she ended up doing was checking out the various religions.

Macdonald makes the interesting point that India welcomes all religions. Some have an easier fit than others, but Macdonald, who was not raised with a religion, finds herself chatting up not just Hindus but also Jews, Buddhists, Parsis, Christians, and a range of practitioners and gurus. She goes to a meditation retreat where she must remain silent for 10 days, she becomes enamored of Judaism until she’s turned away by those who don’t believe in converts, and she dissects the entire topic of arranged marriage. She’s a bright and informative tour guide through India’s various belief and cultural systems, and I look forward to reading more of her work. I highly recommend this book. I’m also tagging it as a beach book, because it’s an easy read.

As for animals, just as there is starvation among people in India, there are also starving animals, which Macdonald mentions. Some of these are cows, which seem to understand their ability to stop traffic but which also eat garbage because that’s often the only thing available to them. One of the best things in the entire book, however, is a gassy Doberman named Sweetie, who has been declared a spiritual guide. I’m declaring this book MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti, by Annie Vanderbilt

This is another one of those books that came to me by means I don’t recall, though I suspect it was when I was looking for another book. I read so much that I have to follow these odd little paths off to the side.

Madame Olivetti is a typewriter. So really, this book is about Lily, a middle-aged widow who travels to a home in France that she inherited through her late husband’s family. There, Lily writes her family history, including light and frothy parts, serious parts, and everything in between. The stories are more serious than the cute cover and Lily herself would lead a reader to believe. Vanderbilt has written a series of linked vignettes, including two of Lily’s lost loves, infidelity, death, the joys and frustrations of marriage, and thwarted ambition. There’s also a fair amount of sex and, to my great annoyance, several characters with the same names. Like I’m going to read this in one sitting so I can tell which Paul is which, or I’m not going to have to reread a paragraph to determine which Justine Vanderbilt is talking about? Vanderbilt doesn’t even go with “old Justine” or “young Paul” or nicknames. This was an entertaining book, but it wasn’t compelling, and the name issue put my nose a bit out of joint. So I’m going to give this a provisional recommendation: it’s a good beach book if you want something light but not completely frivolous, and if the name overlapping doesn’t bother you as much as it bothers me.

As for animals, there is a cat character, Alonso, who catches and eats birds (referred to, not shown), and who Lily worries about at the end. Her late husband, one of the Pauls, raised cattle. There are wild birds, a cooked rooster, the occasional dog, horses, elk, mice, and insects. The book is UNSAFE for bird lovers, but probably SAFE for other animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Widow Clicquot, by Tilar J. Mazzeo

I really enjoyed this short book on the life of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, the woman who, in the early 1800s, turned the Clicquot-Ponsardin winery from a small business to an international champagne powerhouse. As she explains several times throughout the book (we get it, really, we do), author Tilar Mazzeo had very little to work with in the way of a historical record. Barbe-Nicole put in 14-hour days at the business and didn’t have time to write letters or journal entries. So the fact that there is anything here at all is a testament to Mazzeo’s persistence and tenacity.

And in fact, the story is interesting and Mazzeo is a good writer. What more do you want? Barbe-Nicole faced one daunting challenge after another, to the point where you wonder why she didn’t just give up. And these barriers went beyond the fact that women were discouraged from entering business in the Napoleanic era. Everything from political forces to fragile glass to bad crops worked against her. Plus, there was the layabout son-in-law whom she doted on and who apparently thought he was a sure thing to inherit Barbe-Nicole’s empire. And still, she prevailed. As she wrote in a letter to her one surviving great-grandchild, “[Audacity] is a precious quality that has been very useful to me in the course of my long life. … I can be bolder than you realize.”

This is an excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

As for animals, they’re not a factor, so this book is SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

This very silly book is based on Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility. In fact, much of the text is from that very book, which Ben Winters has woven into his story. However, unlike its equally silly predecessor, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, SS&SM does not read like a Jane Austen novel with an overlay of creatures from a horror movie. Instead, it seems like a sea monster tale that incorporates some of Jane Austen’s book, but not all that much. I felt this was mostly Winters’ book. Still, despite the quibbles, I had a great time reading it, though I didn’t love it the way I did PP&Z.

SS&SM is much more violent — and much more inventive — than PP&Z. Winters also lays bare the “ditziness” of Austen’s era, as we would perceive it. The compulsions of society are taken to extreme: servants are as expendable as paper napkins, it’s unspeakably rude to change the subject even in the face of an attack by giant lobsters, etc., etc.

As an example of the changes, Austen’s original took place in a variety of locales, including London, which SS&SM has replaced with “Sub-Marine Station Beta.” And although it’s been a while since I’ve read Sense and Sensibility, I do not believe the youngest Dashwood, Margaret, filed her teeth down to points and ran off to join a strange cult. Nor do I recall that Lady Middleton had been kidnapped from a tropical island and was desperate to return. While the giant lobsters, giant octopi, swordfish, two-headed dragons, and other monsters are kind of fun, they have a much larger and more intrusive presence than PP&Z’s zombies, who are simply minor distractions from Austen’s tale of class, love, society, and manners.

Still, I’m going to recommend this book. Read it when you need a good giggle.

This blog exists in part to alert animal lovers to books that might disturb them. In this review, I am not counting the sea monsters. Some die, some don’t. Beyond them, there are references to butterflies, generic “rodents,” and other animals. Most prominent is an orangutan named Pierre, and he does not have the happiest ending. There is also a reference to fighting otters that I didn’t care for. But I’m going to declare this book SAFE for animal lovers nonetheless. Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff

The Danish Girl is based on the true story of Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe and Gerda Gottlieb, two Denmark- and Paris-based artists from the 1910s and 1920s. David Ebershoff’s book is a fictionalized version of their lives, and changes a few of the facts. But he sticks with the general sense of what happened in their lives, which is a rich and entertaining story.

Einar and Greta (Gerda’s fictitious counterpart) are a young married couple living in Copenhagen. He is a successful artist; she is still searching for her creative identity. One day, Greta asks the rather slight Einar to model another woman’s shoes and hose for a picture. From that incident was born Lili. The Danish Girl is the fascinating story of how Einar slowly vanished, with Lili taking his place. The impact of this change on Einar’s marriage and art, and Greta’s courage and love in adapting to this unusual situation, are at the core of the story. Ultimately, Lili had sex reassignment surgery to better match her possibly hermaphroditic body to her identity as a woman — despite claims to the contrary a few decades later, this was the first such surgery ever attempted.

I am giving this book a mostly positive review, and I think most people are likely to enjoy it, but I do have one major misgiving: I did not like Einar/Lili. Sure, I admired the courage necessary to go through the difficult process of discovery. But beyond the story of gender identity and Einar’s struggle to become his true self as Lili, I found Lili, especially, to be weak, self-centered, and dull. She offers nothing. She even stops painting and takes a job selling gloves at a department store. Once Lili becomes Lili and not Einar, there is nothing interesting about her. She shows no interest in others except in terms of what they can do for her.

Greta is courageous and generous, but we learn little, if anything, about what motivates her, what drives her. Where Lili is boring aside from her drive to match her life to her sexual identity, Greta is mysterious, and not in a good way. I have to fault Ebershoff for not digging deep enough with her, and I have to wonder the extent to which he even tried to look at the situation through her eyes. It’s almost as if he sees her as less of a person than Einar/Lili, while I see her as a much stronger and more intriguing person. My feelings are a bit too tepid to give this book a recommendation.

As for animals, there is a Wegener family dog named Edvard IV who comes to no harm, although he ages. His mother and littermates did not fare so well, though that is mentioned only in passing. There is a Manx cat named Sophie, and Ebershoff makes both benign and unpleasant references to other animals. Because of the latter, I will declare this book MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of When She Flew, by Jennie Shortridge

This most recent Jennie Shortridge novel is her darkest and, I think, her best. I feel like I have to disclose that she had the book sent to me after I’d reviewed a couple of her other novels. But we both understood that a freebie was not going to require a positive review. I’m too much of a contrarian for that. So really? I just liked this book a lot.

For the most part, this is the story of Jess and Lindy, and Lindy’s father, Ray. Motherless Lindy, a bright and sweet-natured 12-year-old, is living off the grid with Ray, a traumatized Iraq veteran. Specifically, they’ve created a home for themselves in a public forest. Ray sees to Lindy’s education, and her portion of the narrative shows that she is happy, though there are hints of the rebellion that is likely to occur when she becomes a teenager.

Policewoman Jess knows all about that rebellion — her daughter, Nina, hasn’t stopped rebelling, even though she’s now in her 20s and has a child of her own. In the rare moments she allows herself to think about their estrangement, Jess is in agony. So she immerses herself in her job. When Lindy and Ray are discovered, Jess is drawn into their situation and finds herself having to make some uncomfortable decisions about her own life in ways that affect theirs.

I thought this was one of the most heartfelt novels I’ve ever read. Shortridge tends to be a generous author, imbuing even her villains with a substantial degree of humanity. If anything, her characters make too much sense in light of who they are. But they are challenged — and everyone in When She Flew is challenged — they discover capabilities and stances they didn’t know they possessed.

I’m strongly recommending this book. If you haven’t read anything by Shortridge, I advise starting with this or Eating Heaven.

As for animals, there are a lot of birds because Lindy watches birds and cares about them. She and Ray even have a near-pet in the form of Sweetie-Pie, a barn owl who Ray rescued from a fox and who hangs out at their encampment. Blue herons play a big role, too, both literally and symbolically. For her part, Jess befriends Chris, a policeman from the K-9 squad whose partner is a German shepherd named Larry. Otherwise, there are assorted farm animals.  Since none of these animals come to any harm, I am declaring this book SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy!