The Dog Doesn’t Die

My book group read this as a light summer reading choice. And I have to say — as I told them — I was disappointed. I’m perfectly capable of getting into chick lit, but this felt like it was written by a software program. In other words, it was way too predictable. Yes, genre fiction follows a structure. But this book went well beyond that. And the set-up involved a single lost piece of paper on the crowded desk of the overwhelmed protagonist, a successful attorney. This single lost piece of paper led to huge financial losses and a scandal. Oh, please. In any office I’ve been in, there would have been 100+ e-mails checking on the thing. Single lost pieces of paper do not happen any more.

Oh, well. Were there any animals in it? Barely. One of the other attorneys brings his dog to work. So this book is Safe for animal lovers. But I’m not recommending it because there’s better chick lit out there. For example, Elaine Viets is a better writer than Sophie Kinsella, and her books are more amusing and shorter. Check out Viets’s Dead-End Job series next time you’re tempted to try Kinsella. Just be careful with her book on the pet care business, because it’s not completely safe for animal lovers.

This book caught my eye a few weeks ago and, since I’m always on the lookout for a good novel based on Russian history, I grabbed it. I think what I really want is a book that’s as good as the movie, Reds. The People’s Act of Love is good, although it isn’t that ideal Russian history novel I perpectually seek. However, author James Meek has some unusual characters, good plotting, and unexpected background situations. I would recommend it but for the fact that it is Extremely Unsafe* for animal lovers, especially in regard to horses.

Unfortunately, too, I can’t say something like “skip pages x through y” because a number of pivotal plot points occur in scenes that integrate the damage to horses. For example, one of the main characters is in the Russian cavalry and finds himself in the midst of a massacre that changes his life and the lives of other characters profoundly. It’s realistic that the horses would also be harmed and killed in this situation, and it’s shown. Meek does an excellent job portraying this and similar incidents, and like it or not, he goes into some detail.

I hope this provides some people with a better basis for making a decision about whether to read this book.

*If you don’t care about violence to animals, by all means get this book, read it, and enjoy. However, one of the main purposes of this blog is to provide people who don’t or even can’t enjoy books in which animals suffer or die with a means of screening books that might disturb them.

Meg Cabot has written, oh, about 40 books, many of which were aimed at teenagers. Yes, this is the woman behind the Princess Diaries series. Moving up the food chain into the chick lit category, she has also written a series about Lizzie Nichols, the Queen of Babble. The one book in this series that I read was harmless, and SAFE for animal lovers. Sure, there’s a reference to someone dissecting a lab rat while in school, but we don’t see it. And there are nice people with dogs in the book. If are an animal lover who wants to read the literary equivalent of cotton candy, go ahead and read this book. It’s mildly amusing and sweet. And there are times when that’s the kind of book you want to read.

Next up — serious literature! But not for a few days.

I am a huge fan of the TV show Top Chef, and I was really torn between wanting Stephanie Izard and Richard Blais* to win Season 4, which ended last night. Stephanie claimed the title, and the only thing wrong with that was that Richard didn’t win as well. (Too bad he didn’t compete in Season 2, he would have blown those clowns away.) So congrats to Stephanie, and may she and Richard have successful careers making beautiful food for the rest of us. I look forward to buying their cookbooks someday, and maybe dining at their restaurants.

For a bit more info on Richard, see the comments below. And I have been misspelling his last name, which is Blais, not Blaise. Oops. I did get a lot of hits from people who made the same misspelling, so I’m keeping the tag for the benefit of the misspellers. Fellow misspellers, if you Google “Richard Blais”, you will get the info you seek. Here is the link to his website.

And the first Top Chef cookbook is out! It’s really half cookbook, half show chronicle. I recommend it to one and all.

Away from the television and my fantasies of making television food, I have discovered a new Ethiopian restaurant. If you are unfamiliar with Ethiopian food, here’s what you need to know: it’s different. It tends to be spicy, often but not always hot, and there are no utensils. You eat it by tearing off bits of ”injera”, a spongy pancake, and using the injera to pick up bits of food. Anyway, Meaza has won great praise as an “authentic” Ethiopian restaurant in the Washington DC suburbs. Dave and I were there for about an hour and 15 minutes the other night, and for the first 45 minutes everyone else in the place appeared to be Ethiopian immigrants. The food was exceptional, especially the lamb tibs, which we will definitely order again. With two beers, one salad, and two entrees, we paid about $40 plus tip, so it was also reasonably priced. I can’t wait to go back!

Doesn’t it sound glorious? You pack up the family and move to a mansion in another country, get to know the locals, experience various mishaps that you laugh about later, turn the dilapidated estate into the home of your dreams, and write a book about it. This has just about turned into its own genre. And while I rather enjoy it, not all books in this category are equal. Fortunately, Tahir Shah’s book, The Caliph’s House, is among the best of its type. Unfortunately, it is entirely Unsafe for animal lovers. If you are sensitive to the treatment of animals, you may want to read The Caliph’s House anyway, but be forewarned that there are some cringe-inducing scenes involving animals.

It’s not Shah’s fault, by the way: he’s just reporting what he experienced. The Washington Post described the book as a “black comedy,” and that is correct. Shah is Afghani by heritage and lived in London for many years, which is presumably where he made the fortune that allowed him to purchase the wreck of a home that he and his family moved into. In Morocco, there is a belief that an empty building attracts Jinns, which are invisible spirits that seem to rule most aspects of Moroccan life. It’s all well and good that Shah doesn’t believe in them — the workers who refurbish his new home, the three guards who seem to come with the property, and his indispensible majordomo, Kamal, all believe. So Shah is held hostage to the whims of the Jinn whether or not he believes. I’d head back to London, but Shah is more intrepid than that. Plus, I believe he sees this as a test by the locals (a common theme in the big-house/strange-country genre).

Anyway, this blog exists in part to tell animal lovers whether they’ll be upset by a book due to violence against animals. And as much as I otherwise loved The Caliph’s House, I found it out-and-out creepy in regard to the treatment of animals. Sheep must be killed to placate the Jinn, Shah comes across cats that are killed as a warning to him, Moroccan boys torment squirrels and other animals, a bull is killed, more sheep are killed, etc., etc. It’s pretty ugly.

I still liked the book and recommend it to those who think they can deal with the animal issues.

Since I loved Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place so much, I thought I’d read another one of her books. I don’t know if I chose the wrong one or what, but I wasn’t that impressed with The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. I liked the concept, about two women, a Hans Christian Andersen tale, opera, and missed opportunities, but the book didn’t come through for me. I think my main problem was that I wasn’t drawn to either Frances or Helle, the two main characters. And it really seemed as if Davis had some fascinating ideas that didn’t translate to the page. Oh, well. I’m not going to give up on her, but I was disappointed.

As for the animals, this book is Mostly Safe for animal lovers. There are a few unpleasant images, such as foxes being made into a fur coat, and a poisoned wolverine. But, as in The Thin Place, Davis treats animals with respect. Along with a couple of dogs, one of her characters befriends a rat, for example. Unlike The Thin Place, the animals do not have their own voices and are not characters in and of themselves.

My recommendation is to read The Thin Place if you haven’t already, skip this book, look for anything new Davis writes, and — please? — let me know your thoughts on any of her other books you might have read.

This is an odd book. I hate comparing authors to each other, but I’m going to do that now: this book reminded me of Patricia Highsmith, except it was way too light-hearted, even amusing in spots. Highsmith couldn’t have pulled it off, but I kept thinking of her as I read. As far as the animals are concerned, there are some unpleasant but brief images, and a pet hamster dies, although we don’t actually see the hamster’s demise. So I am going to declare this book Mostly Safe for animal lovers.

The published reviews for this book are all rather cagey, and there’s a reason for that. I think there’s a tendency among readers to trust first-person narrators, at least at first. But is this trust warranted? If the answer is “maybe” or “no,” it leads to a cagey review. Like this one.

Lanchester takes his narrator through some long, winding asides that are often amusing. I liked the book and recommend it for most readers, but if your primary values are fast pacing and snappy dialogue, this is not the book for you. It’s not a beach read, though it might be a beach-house read, if you get the distinction.

This book, the basis for the movie “21″, is entirely SAFE for animal lovers because there are no animals in it. I’m recommending it because the story is interesting and well-told. I especially like the pacing, which is hard to manage in nonfiction. Mezrich does an excellent job, however.

For those who don’t know, “21″ is about an unofficial (very unofficial) team of MIT students who figured out how to beat the odds playing blackjack in Las Vegas. I am not a gambler, and therefore I know nothing about blackjack, but the story still kept my interest to the point I had a hard time putting the book down. The protagonist, Jeff Ma, who is known in the book as “Kevin Lewis,” is likable without being so perfect as to be unrealistic. I think most people could relate to him and the highs and lows he experiences, first as he enters the world of card-counting high rollers, then as he attempts to integrate this side of himself into the rest of his life.

I have two quibbles, only one of which is with the book. Years ago, I lived near MIT and knew some students there. My observation is that the school presents a psychologically difficult environment, and no one I know who went to school there ever felt differently. I wish Mezrich had addressed this, because my reaction to Ma/Lewis joining the card-counters was “Of course he wants to do something, anything, to break from the unrelenting bleakness of MIT.”

The other quibble is that the movie’s cast wasn’t Asian enough. Yeah, the cast was probably pretty good, but most of the team, including Ma, were at least part Asian. This isn’t political correctness, it’s accuracy! But Hollywood powers-that-be seem to think the default American is a white male and the rest of us are just background. No, we are not.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book. It’s got all the elements of a good beach read or airport book, by the way.

With all the personal drama of the past few weeks, I’ve accumulated quite a backlog. So today I’ll review two books that have little animal involvement and are both Mostly Safe for animal lovers. I don’t have a lot to say about these two books because I wasn’t wild about either of them, though I found the first mildly entertaining.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is a comic novel set in a struggling Chicago advertising agency. The narration is in first person plural, which is a device that Ferris pulls off nicely but isn’t worth repeating. It sort of works and sort of doesn’t. Since most of the action takes place at the office, there are very few animals. However, there is one reference to a character not taking his mother’s cats when he moves his mother out of her apartment. Another character worries about what happened to them, and we never find out. I’m projecting here, but my experience is that neighbors in apartment buildings don’t just let yowling cats suffer without calling maintenance or building management. So I imagine the fictitious cats were soon rescued by a more responsible party, though what happens after that would be unclear. Another character has cats and talks to them briefly, but that’s it.

The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears, got great reviews but wasn’t quite what I expected. Three stories that take place in the same part of France at different times in history are woven together, but they weren’t all equally good. It mostly fell flat to me, although there were sections that were excellent. In any case, there is a reference to one character tormenting cats and dogs as a child, as if this is a standard childhood activity. No, it is not. And there are many references to horses and donkeys as beasts of burden, including a brief scene in which a donkey in peril is saved.

I have another book on my pile that has lots of animals, while the book I am reading has none thus far. I will review both of them in several days.

I’m going to have a busy week away from the computer, so I thought I’d go to a small journal I kept and see if there were any books I could review in bumper sticker format. I found four.

First up is The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. This is the true story of Randy Morgenson, a seasonal ranger with the U.S. Park Service, who disappeared one winter in Kings Canyon National Park. This is an excellent book, one of my favorites, and I highly recommend it. However, quite a few rescue dogs were used in the search for Morgenson, and one of them was injured pretty badly. This dog did survive, and the dogs are heroic in general. With that in mind, I’m going to declare this book Mostly Safe for animal lovers.

Next is Murder Unleashed, by Elaine Viets. This is from Viets’ Dead End Job series of mysteries, which are like brain candy — not very demanding, and fun. However, we learn about some of the bad things that can happen in the pet care industry, and one of those things really bothered me. So I am going to declare this book Probably Unsafe for most animal lovers.

Philosophy Made Simple, by Robert Hellenga, was quite frustrating. It started off great, then collapsed in the last third. I had a pretty strong love/hate thing going on with this book. One of the hate issues had to do with animals. This book is also Probably Unsafe for animal lovers.

Finally, Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen is a good book that is Completely Unsafe for animal lovers. I loved so much about this book, but my book group felt horrible for the animal characters in this book. If you can approach this kind of book as a forewarned reader, go for it. Otherwise, it might upset you.