Happy Link Day — And I Do Mean “Happy”

If these do not make you smile, you are dead.

This is the new hot video on YouTube. Extreme sheep indeed! Let’s give credit to the gentlemen from Wales and, especially, their border collies.

Next, we have the pinnacle of cute. There is nothing cuter than this.

Remember the original Hamster Dance? It’s back!

And, finally, there is Owl Cam. A pair of owls hatched an egg in a planter outside an office building in Viera, Florida, and the baby can be seen during daylight hours. Late in the afternoon, one of the adults brings her a small, fuzzy, dead thing to nibble on, and she is so delighted with it.

Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Katherine, by Anya Seton

Anya Seton was the Philippa Gregory of her day, and vice versa. We know Gregory as the author of The Other Boleyn Girl and similar historical fiction told from the female point of view. In acknowledgement of her predecessor, Gregory has used her success as an author to promote Seton’s books, written in the 1940s and 1950s. As a result, some of Seton’s works have been reissued, with forewords by Gregory.

While there is a dated quality about Katherine, I think Gregory has done the right thing in trying to get it and other Seton books back into circulation. Aside from some relatively chaste bodice-ripping, along with a bit of overwrought yearning, Seton has written a well-crafted history of Medieval England. In Katherine, she tells the story of Katherine Swynford, third wife of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. Although they married late in life, Katherine and Lancaster became lovers shortly after the death of his first wife, Blanche, to whom Katherine was also devoted. (Why didn’t they marry sooner? This was the 14th century, when royal marriages were based on political alliances.)

Seton takes us through wars, rebellions, and the plague, deftly using her characters to show us life at all levels, from the poorest serfs up to the most self-centered kings. I finished this book feeling as if I knew more about what it was to be alive then, regarding the customs, the clothing, the values, etc.

I know of John of Gaunt primarily through Shakespeare plays and the odd bit of history. Seton’s portrayal of him as politically astute and mostly benign — except for one vengeful period following a questioning of his legitimacy — is echoed in Wikipedia which, while not being the ultimate authority, backs up Seton’s take on the man. His vengeance, however, led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the destruction of his luxurious Savoy Palace. In one of her most harrowing and strongest chapters, Seton shows Katherine and a daughter trapped in the palace at the time of the attack.

So I definitely recommend this book, if you will keep in mind that it’s long, and writing styles have changed over the decades. Neither of those facts should put you off, however.

As for animal lovers, this book is set in the Middle Ages. They did things differently back then. Bull-baiting was considered fun, and other activities we wouldn’t tolerate were routine. But really, this book is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers. There’s the occasional beast of burden that needs more rest than it’s had; Katherine feels affection for her horse, Doucette; a dog is kicked; royalty fuss over their falcons; and children play with kittens. I didn’t come across any especially gruesome or sad scenes that couldn’t be ignored.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris

Every once in a while, my book group will go for light, commercial fiction. This is how I found myself rereading Dead Until Dark, which I first read shortly after it came out. By that time, I was out of my “vampire fiction” phase. I’d read Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat books as quickly as she wrote them, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and stuck with them long after Rice began writing for her own head instead of caring about her readers. That was enough, I thought. When Harris began her series 8 or 9 years ago, a friend recommended Dead Until Dark, which I liked well enough at the time but which didn’t pull me into reading the entire series.

Times have changed. I now want to read the entire series and just bought the next two books. It’s not the vampire fiction I’m into this time, however – Harris’s expert storytelling is what I enjoyed most about Dead Until Dark, and that’s what I hope I purchased more of with her sequels.

Protagonist Sookie Stackhouse is a closeted telepath at a time when vampires finally have the option of joining mainstream society, thanks in no small part to the creation of synthetic blood by the Japanese. Just like we can go to a bar and order a bottle of beer, vampires can now head to the same establishments and order a bottle of blood. And Sookie works as a cocktail waitress in Louisiana (of course). Thanks to her work and a series of misadventures, Sookie takes up with a local vampire named Bill, although she also encounters Eric, who ranks much higher in the area’s vampiric hierarchy. This being a murder mystery, Sookie and Bill have to find a murderer in order to keep Sookie’s handsome-but-dim-and-totally-set-up brother out of jail.

Although it’s fun to read, this is also a violent book. I’m not big on reading about violence, although I can read it more easily than watch it, so I doubt I’ll be tuning in to the HBO series. In any case, the violence is there. And if you are an animal lover who is reading this blog to find out if certain books include violence against animals, I have to caution you. No violence against animals is shown, but there are several animals in the book, and not all of them make it to the end. So I will declare this book only PARTLY SAFE for animal lovers.

I’m still going to recommend it, though. Enjoy!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner

As I mentioned in my previous post, concerning Iceland, I was reading The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner. In a nutshell, Weiner looked at research on the happiness levels of people in various countries, then visited some of the happiest and least happy countries to see what he could learn.

Yes, his visits were likely too short to get much more than a surface impression, and yes, he relies on anecdotes and personal experience. This isn’t a textbook or scholarly treatise, however. Weiner works for NPR, and has spent his career creating short bursts of information aimed at a broad audience. That’s what he does here, very successfully entertaining the reader while also making us a wee bit more informed about the places he visited.

I liked this book. I still have no idea why the seemingly humorless Swiss and the organized Dutch are among the happiest people in the world; if anything, Weiner decreased any interest I had in visiting Switzerland. But I’m an American. It very well might be that the Swiss are happy because their lives strongly reflect their values — values that aren’t mine, since I’m not Swiss.

You see where this is going? While I do feel as if I read a series of travel essays that shared a theme, I don’t feel like I know more about happiness after reading this book. Still, it was fun. The Bhutanese have made happiness a core value in a way that makes Western measures of wealth seem inadequate and maybe even fraudulent. In fact, with the juxtaposition of Eastern and Western values, which Weiner doesn’t point out so much as he puts it under our noses, I wish he’d gone to Japan, which gives the impression of being the most materialistic Eastern country.

I do recommend this book — reading it will probably make you happy. It’s funny in spots, and Weiner is a charming narrator. One thing I noticed and appreciated was that in each country, he spoke with both men and women in equal or near-equal numbers. That’s good reporting.

For those who read this blog because I discuss whether or not a book is safe for animal lovers, I will declare it SAFE.  I had to love the British woman who said “Dogs are the key to happiness.” I might say “dogs and cats” or “pets,” but the point remains. A loving animal, furry or feathered (or finned? I don’t “get” fish as pets), can brighten our days. There are a couple of brief mentions of negative animal incidents, like dogs traumatized by fireworks in India, and a psychology experiment involving dogs (page 193, skip the bottom paragraph if this kind of thing bothers you), but that’s it.

Iceland, the Global Economy, and Culture

Like a lot of people, I’m doing my best to muddle through this economic crisis without having a personal crisis on top of it all. And, like a lot of people, I find myself following the various analysts and commentators as they address the situation. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about Iceland, the global economy, and culture. And the question that arises is, “How did this happen?”

In his Letter from Reykjavik, published in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker, Ian Parker discusses Iceland’s banking collapse primarily from an economic point of view. Parker’s answer to my question is that single-minded men — and they were mostly men, not women — paid no attention to warnings because the warnings didn’t match what these single-minded men wanted to believe. (How familiar is that?)  These are people who would have continued to invest with Bernie Madoff after he was indicted. Parker reports the aftermath: the protests, the occupation of Iceland’s Central Bank, the election of a new prime minister. It’s an instructive article, although the link provides only an abstract for nonsubscribers.

More lively and enlightening is Wall Street on the Tundra, by Michael Lewis, in the April edition of Vanity Fair. Let’s start by copying the magazine’s own blurb on the piece:

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Lewis covers a lot of territory in this article. From the brusk Icelander who bonks him in the head with a suitcase to the binge drinking to the widespread belief in elves to the fact that everyone there knows everyone else, including Bjork, Lewis provides a sense of who Icelanders really are.  He explains how the country provides few jobs worthy of its highly educated population, and gives some examples of skilled fishermen becoming bankers with no training in the field. Why did they think they could pull this off? They think they’re superior to everyone else. Well, maybe they don’t think that anymore, but they thought it before their banks collapsed. Now, who knows? Many Icelanders have $35,000 Range Rovers with loans worth $100,000, vehicles that some of them simply blow up in explosions that rocked Lewis out of sleep his first night in the country. He also observed that Icelandic men and women have very little to do with each other except when sex is part of the equation. Yes, Icelandic women are well-educated, enjoy equal rights, and fully participate in the workforce. But they don’t seem to interact with men very much; the two sexes often treat each other with open disdain.

Lewis’s answer to my question about how the Icelandic banking crisis occurred would likely be “because of the country’s culture.”

And that leads to the third piece I’ve read about Iceland recently: the Iceland chapter in Eric Weiner’s book, The Geography of Bliss. I’ll be reviewing this book in its entirety on Wednesday, but I want to mention here the chapter on Iceland. Weiner visited Iceland and wrote his book before the economic collapse. His purpose was to visit the happiest and unhappiest places in the world. According to his research, Iceland often ranks as one of the happiest countries.

Why? Keep in mind, Icelanders were flush at that point, buying homes in London, hauling in Elton John to sing at birthday parties for $1 million, purchasing $35,000 Range Rovers that they would incinerate in 2008. But it wasn’t the money that made them happy. They’d been gauged as very happy before the money turned fishermen into international investors. What Weiner pointed out, with no idea of what was to come, was that Icelanders have little to no fear of failure. In fact, they embrace it. They accept it and see failure as a worthy outcome of engaging in a process they enjoy. As Weiner notes, there are a lot of terrible musicians in Iceland, and that’s not including Bjork. They are also career changers who accept that the change might not work. Are you a fisherman who wants to try banking? Even if you know nothing about finance? In Iceland, that’s not a problem, or at least it wasn’t. Weiner interviewed a music producer who had also been a professional chess player, journalist, theologian, and construction company executive. This man was 40. Weiner’s answer to my question about the Icelandic banking collapse might be “they tried out careers that didn’t work.”

Of course, all of this leads me to a new question: Are Icelanders still happy? I hope so, but I wonder if the incredible debts many of them have taken on might have dampened their enthusiasm for failure.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Dreamers of the Day, by Mary Doria Russell

Born in the 1880s, Agnes Shanklin thought she was going to be a pale shadow of a person, living with constant nagging from her mother, having no chance of realizing her dreams, envying her younger sister’s freedom and, for a time, that of her brother. Then the Spanish flu hit, leaving Agnes as the only surviving member of her family — a survivor with an unexpected fortune. Following an uplifting visit to a fancy department store, Agnes decides to visit Egypt. Accompanied by Rosie, the long-haired daschund she’d saved as a puppy, Agnes arrives just as T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), Winston Churchill, and Gertrude Bell have completed the task of drawing the boundaries of the modern Middle East.

Lawrence, Bell, and Churchill aren’t minor characters in Russell’s thoughtful and sometimes amusing exploration of self-definition and self-discovery. Agnes has quite a lot of interaction with Lawrence, for example. I would have thought it difficult to use historical figures as significant characters to this extent, but Russell pulls it off.

Overall, I thought the book was excellent — Agnes is an endearing narrator, the pacing is good, and the characters are well-drawn. Sometimes it seemed a bit too much like a travelogue, and Churchill came across as a self-absorbed buffoon: possibly true, possibly not, but I’d not seen him presented like that before. These are quibbles, however. I loved this book, I’ll recommend it to my book group, and I recommend it to anyone else looking for a well-written, well-told story.

In terms of animals, this book is most definitely SAFE for animal lovers. Rosie is one of the main characters, and Agnes might not have met Lawrence and the others without her. As authors often do with animal characters, Russell uses Rosie to amp up the tension a few times, but ultimately the dog comes to no harm. There are a few cranky camels, and Lawrence shoves one to get it to behave, but this is a very animal-friendly book, and Rosie is one of the most vividly drawn animal characters I’ve seen in a long time.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Wit’s End, by Karen Joy Fowler

I was wacked out on cold medicine part of the time I was reading this book, so I am going to try to be fair by calling in some additional reviews. I will say, however, that I loved two of Fowler’s previous books, The Jane Austen Book Club and Sister Noon. I didn’t feel that this book measured up — I never felt drawn in, I felt the plot was fuzzy, the protagonist (Rima) seemed weak, etc. It struck me as a good novelist’s first draft more than a finished effort. But like I said, I don’t completely trust my impressions, though I wasn’t that deeply medicated — it’s not like I’m a major NyQuil junkie.

In the story, Rima is the last surviving member of her immediate family and decides to visit her godmother, Addison Early. Addison is an extremely popular mystery novelist who builds dollhouses before starting each book. Addison was also close to Rima’s father, in a relationship that Rima doesn’t quite understand. There is also something about a cult based at a place called “Holy City.” Addison incorporates real people into her books, and there’s some analysis of how fans consider certain characters to be their own, etc., etc. So Rima tries to sort it all out while coming to grips with her losses, and quite frankly, I sort of got lost in all of this.

Anyway, here are highlights from some other reviews:

The Amazon reviews were all over the place, which isn’t normal. The positive reviews praised the Fowler’s wit and voice, the quirky characters, the Santa Cruz setting. The negative reviews noted the lack of a satisfactory conclusion (so maybe I should quit blaming the cold, since I agree), Fowler’s political views (which are the same as mine, so I thought this was a plus), the fuzziness of the plot (yes!), and a sense that the characters weren’t “real” enough (they weren’t, but that doesn’t bother me). If I were reviewing on Amazon, I would give the book 3 stars out of a possible 5.

Elsewhere, Louis Bayard, writing for Salon, actively disliked the book. The Washington Post reviewer found it “unengaging.” And the reviewer for the Baltimore City Paper loved it. I think there are enough reviewers disliking the book that I’m safe saying that I don’t recommend it.

If you are an animal lover considering reading this book, rest assured that it is SAFE. The book’s two long-haired miniature daschunds, Berkeley and Stanford, are all over the place in the story and come to no harm. Addison uses a cat as a murder weapon in one of her mysteries, but its fate is never revealed. An otter released from an aquarium attacks baby seals on page 220, but that incident is never mentioned again.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Toast, by Nigel Slater

Let’s see … bad food, sexual ambiguity, weak stomachs, cold parents? Yes, it must be a memoir of a British boyhood!

You know you’re in trouble when you read the author’s preface to the American edition and he expresses concern that we won’t understand it. And you know you’re in trouble when the 2-page British-to-American glossary at the back doesn’t even scratch the surface. Slater was right when he thought we might not get it. At least I didn’t get it. I recently said of a Russian novel that it shouldn’t have been translated. This book is in English, and yet I’m not sure it should have been published in the States. There are so many brands and food terms that aren’t obvious. I guess this is a demonstration of how regionalism remains a factor in food preferences and the way we talk about food.

Okay, I’m sounding cranky, sorry. There were some amusing vignettes, like when Slater’s family tried the radically different, alarmingly innovative dish called … spaghetti bolognese. However, after Slater’s beloved mother dies and his father takes up with the despicable Mrs. Potter, the silver lining is that Mrs. Potter can cook. We see Slater’s eyes open to the possibilities of good food made well.

But overall, this book was completely wasted on me. I’ve read lots of British novels and memoirs, so it’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with the culture, but this book was over the top. For that reason, I’m not going to recommend for or against it.

As far as animals go, an unnamed family dog comes to no harm. Slater reveals himself to be one of those nasty little children who tore flies apart, and there is an upsetting but brief episode in which two Jack Russell terriers get hold of his pet rabbit. So I’m going to declare this book MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers, though if you’re a sensitive person in general, you probably won’t enjoy this book for the descriptions of the author’s constant barfing. Bon appetit!