Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Murder with Reservations, by Elaine Viets
I’ve long thought of Elaine Viets as one of the better “brain candy” mystery writers, and I have enjoyed her Dead-End Job series quite a lot. When I finished this book some weeks ago, I did not feel enlightened, more knowledgeable, a better person, enriched, or any of that good stuff. Instead, I felt like I’d jammed strawberry-flavored salt water taffy into my brain.
Sometimes, you need a brain full of strawberry-flavored salt water taffy. This is a book for such times. Viets does her research on the dead-end jobs. She does the work herself or trails people doing the work or both. So there are job details. But this is still brain candy.
And what is Murder with Reservations about? Well, the Dead-End Job series tells of Helen Hawthorne’s attempts to make a living while evading her angry ex-husband, who has a fairly substantial court judgment against her even though she only destroyed his precious car after finding him in bed with another woman. And with Google, we can all find out everything about everybody, so in order to remain undetected, Helen has to take some low-wage jobs where she’s paid under the table. In this book, she’s a hotel maid in Florida, where she’s resettled.
(Actually, at this point Helen would be wise to up and move to Montana, with another name change and dye job. Supposedly, there’s a pattern to where “missing” people go when they’re on the run, and Midwesterners like Helen tend to go to Florida. Then again, Viets herself is a Midwesterner who moved to Florida.)
Anyway … the body of another maid is found in a dumpster, there’s a cursed room, and Helen once again learns that people occasionally skip out on these dead-end jobs because they’re dead. Of course, she has to solve the crime in order to keep the police, her ex, and the real criminals from finding out who she is. By now, she’s gotten really good at that. Except this time, the ex has finally found her.
Brain candy awaits — buy this book to have on hand for the next time you need something light and insubstantial to read. You’ll likely enjoy it.
Now, since this blog is for animal lovers, I must talk about the various animals that appear in the book. There’s a parrot, Pete, who’s a regular character. Pete comes to no harm and is often amusing. Similarly, Helen has a 6-toed cat, Thumbs, who will live to see another day. And the dead maid’s cat goes without food for a couple of days, but that is rectified. However, she also misses her owner, which is briefly poignant. Anyway, this book is SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy.
Random Thoughts for a Sunday
Dan Brown doesn’t care if I think he’s a lousy writer. And I do think he’s a lousy writer. I’m not alone. This article from the London Telegraph shows why, by dissecting 20 of Dan Brown’s worst sentences. And if anyone figures out what on earth Brown meant by “her precarious body,” please let me know! While you ponder that mystery, you can also play with Slate’s Dan Brown Sequel Generator. Plug in Major League Baseball for an especially good laugh.
If that depressed you, try visiting The Manolo’s Shoe Blog for something that will make you smile.
Finally, you can never have too many cats. Or too much bacon.
Cats on the Internet! Anti-9-9-09 Campaign
I’m convinced this is a marketing campaign of some sort, probably to promote a cat site, but I’ll take it at face value: some bozo wants today to be a day with no cat-related posts on the Internet. However, as my friend Diana says, without cats, the Internet would be nothing but porn and a billion blogs. So, as a public service, I am posting a whole bunch of cat pictures as part of my personal anti-9-9-09 campaign.
These are of Priscilla, my icon kitty, who passed away last year at almost 20 years of age:
Priss at 17
Priss in her prime
me and Priss about 10 years ago
And we need some Eddie pictures. There are already a lot of Eddie pictures associated with his tube-feeding, but these are healthy Eddie pictures:
random Eddie picture
Eddie with Dave
Eddie on my bed
And now, for some random cat pictures I have on my computer and believe are not copyrighted:
somebody's kitten
somebody's kitten again
another kitten
So much for cat-less day on the Internet. Without cats, there would be no Internet!
Tomorrow, a book review. With no cats.
Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Comfort Food, by Kate Jacobs
After loving The Friday Night Knitting Club, I had high hopes for Kate Jacobs’ next novel, Comfort Food. I will admit that there was a point early on where I felt a bit let down, mostly due to the syrupy perfection of Augusta (aka Gus), the protagonist. Then things picked up, the book took off, and I started laughing out loud. I don’t recall Knitting Club as being this funny, so I am here to announce that Kate Jacobs can pull off the humorous scenes as well as anyone in the business.
In a nutshell, Gus has her own cooking show and, in an attempt to boost ratings, the network pairs her with Carmen, a preening, ambitious, former Miss Spain. Gus already has her hands full with two difficult adult daughters she raised alone, an ex-future-son-in-law, a new love interest, a reclusive neighbor, and a contest-winner, all of whom end up on her show, along with assorted others. I did think Gus was an overbearing mother, and I did not sympathize with her the way I suspect Jacobs wanted me to, but Gus lightens up toward the end. It all comes together, as Gus fights to preserve her career, Carmen fights to start hers, the daughters just fight, the love interest fights to get a word in edgewise, and I fight laughing out loud in public.
(Yeah, it’s a simple plot. It works.)
This is brain candy, by the way. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just telling you. And I recommend it to those in the mood for brain candy.
Animals? There are two cats who show up briefly and are not bothered or abused or neglected in any way, shape, or form. So this book is perfectly SAFE for animal lovers.
(Very) Odds and Ends
It’s another link day — cats, cooking, and common sense healthcare.
First, let’s look at the cats. Specifically, let’s look at 1,000 pictures of cats. Some of these animals are absolutely gorgeous.
As for cooking, a question that comes up now and then — and especially now, in the shaky economy– is whether certain items we consider panty staples are cheaper to make at home than to buy at the grocery store. An article on slate tells us one woman’s experience making bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, jam, crackers, and granola. She evaluates not just cost, but taste. The results might not be what you expect. I know I was surprised by one item in particular.
Finally, there’s common sense in health care, a hot topic these days with our devastatingly expensive “system” and the various thoughts on how to address it. This satire starring Fred Willard gets right to the point.
Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Bachelor Brothers’ Bed & Breakfast, by Bill Richardson
I have to thank my Internet friend, Karen from Nova Scotia, for this little gem. And it’s little–only 152 pages. But it’s packed, with hardly a wasted word and at least one quotable phrase per page. I loved it!
Narrated by 50-something fraternal twins Virgil and Hector and a few of their guests, the book takes us to a remote town on a forested Canadian island, where Virgil and Hector operate a B&B for bibliophiles. In fact, some guests visit simply in order to read Proust without distractions. Some of the stories are sad, some wildly hilarious. For example, there’s the man whose office goes on a retreat (is there anything so vile as the office retreat?), leaving him in the woods to talk to the trees — one of which orders him to “get the hell out!” Then there’s the ne’er-do-well cousin who, after an epiphany, “spent the rest of his days, and the rest of his income, traveling the world, seeking out musical eggcups. He picked them up in Istanbul and Paris, in Geneva and Beirut.” Waffle, the brothers’ cat, and Mrs. Rochester, the parrot they inherited from their mother, hunt mice together, with Mrs. Rochester calling “kittykittykitty” when she spots one. I laughed out loud about every other page.
This is great book for animal lovers. Mrs. Rochester has one salty phrase in her vocabulary, which she uses at some of the most inopportune moments. There are also some very happy chickens, a music-critic Pekingese named Valentine, and a vast assortment of other pets. The only sad thing that happens is a brief mention of a parrot — not Mrs. Rochester — who died elsewhere. Plus, Waffle is a mighty huntress of small prey. But I have no qualms about recommending this book as SAFE for animal lovers, including and maybe especially bird lovers. Enjoy!
Two Dogs and A Cat
How can you not love Stump, the winner of the 2009 Westminster Dog Show? Like my cat Eddie, he’s old-ish and he’s been through a medical crisis. Here is a YouTube video I dug up this morning, showing highlights of the Best in Show competition:
I also like this piece from MSNBC that I can’t upload as a video for some reason. But there’s a video.
From last year, since it is so very popular on this site, I’ll repeat Uno’s win from last year.
Finally, talking about old dogs and their medical conditions, my cat Eddie has a lot in common with Stump, in that he almost died. I do get a lot of hits on this site looking for tube-feeding information. So here’s an update: Eddie is thriving! He’s even engaging in some architecture, which is a little weird. He likes to arrange his toys in lines and circles. He recently made a line of his non-catnip toys, and a circle of his catnip toys. He then slept in the circle. Here are some pictures:
Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Eating Heaven, by Jennie Shortridge
Who wouldn’t want an Uncle Benny in their life? He was warm, funny, generous, and attentive to his nieces when they were little girls, and he remains that way now that they’re adults. They needed someone like Uncle Benny in their lives when they were small, because their father was a grumpy, cold-fish sort, and their mother was self-absorbed and somewhat neglectful. So the Samuels girls continue to love Uncle Benny, and when he becomes terminally ill, food-writer Eleanor Samuels — the protagonist of Eating Heaven — moves into Uncle Benny’s home in order to care for him. Isn’t that nice? Except Uncle Benny isn’t really an uncle. He’s the man with whom their mom had a prolonged affair, or so the girls suspect.
The truth about Uncle Benny is a prominent and intriguing subplot in Jennie Shortridge’s story about Eleanor’s journey of self-discovery. And really, this book is about who we choose to love, why we choose to love them, and why we sometimes love people in spite of what we know about them. (I especially like that last part, because I’ve always thought the “in spite of” test was the best indicator of true love.)
I’m a new fan of Shortridge’s. I don’t know if she’s written anything else, but I’ll be looking into that. I thought her characters had great depth, her plotting was excellent despite a few too many coincidences, her sense of place vivid, etc. Having watched my father’s final days last May, I was particularly taken with her descriptions of dying — it was as if I’d given her a checklist of symptoms and behaviors that she then incorporated into a narrative. On another note, with Eleanor being a food writer who cooks quite a lot, there are some of “her” recipes at the end of the book. I like that — if your characters are going to keep going on and on about how great the spice cake is, give me the recipe for the spice cake!
So this book comes with a strong recommendation. As for animal lovers, there is an animal character, a cat named Buddy. Shortridge uses Buddy to amp up the tension a few times, but animal lovers shouldn’t worry about reading this book, which, in keeping with the purpose of this blog, I am declaring SAFE.
Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of My Life in France, by Julia Child
This book was a delight! Although it is less than a comprehensive autobiography, it does encompass Child’s life in beyond her time in France, extending to the success of her TV show here in the United States. And Julia Child is so … endearing, without pretense except in those instances where she is trying to give the benefit of the doubt to someone with whom she has been at odds.
Child and her husband, Paul, went to France as newlyweds in 1948. She had never been there before, while he had lived there in his 20s and was returning to work for the U.S. Information Service. At that point, she was an amateur in the kitchen and seemed rather adrift in her life, other than having found a partner in Paul and playing hostess to their many visiting friends and family members. As she explored Paris, she fell into cooking, taking classes at Cordon Bleu, talking to local chefs, and allying herself with two Frenchwomen with whom she taught French cooking to English-speaking ex-pats. She and Simone Beck went on to write the innovative cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, taking wildly different approaches to recipes, getting dumped by their first would-be publisher, and maintaining a strong friendship despite the tension these situations created. All along, Child took time to smell the sea air of the Meditteranean, follow Paul to postings in Germany and Norway, and become America’s first celebrity chef.
She was also a cat lover, and among Paul’s many photographs illustrating the book is a photo of their first cat, Minette. There is also a memorable French quote that translates to: “A house without a cat is like life without sunshine.” I could not agree more! As far as animal incidents, there are a couple of negative images, but nothing that keeps this book from being SAFE for animal lovers. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
About
This is a picture of Priscilla, who lived to be an old lady cat of 19 1/2 and passed away on July 21, 2008. As Dave put it the next day, she was a great cat. I was privileged to adopt her in 1994, when her first family moved overseas and decided they couldn’t take her along. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife or a real “Rainbow Bridge” or any of that. But love lives on, and so I would like to dedicate this site to Priscilla and my first two cats, Hillary and Rabbit.
Like most blogs, this one includes random thoughts and observations, but its primary purpose is to provide book reviews for animal lovers. Please feel free to add comments or make suggestions of books that are animal-friendly.
