Setting the Bar

Lady Killer is legal thriller author Lisa Scottoline’s latest novel. This novel features Mary DiNunzio, a young, go-getter from South Philadelphia, whom we first met in Killer Smile. Mary’s teenage years are at the forefront of this novel when the Queen Bee from High school, Trish Gambone (a.k.a. Trash, according to Mary) arrives at Mary’s office, begging for her help in escaping an abusive and mob connected boyfriend. Shortly after rejecting all of Mary’s practical ideas, Trish goes missing and Mary is blamed by the neighborhood for Trish’s disappearance. Mary then opts to take on the new mystery, all the while threatening her work, career and personal relationships to solve Trish’s disappearance.

I really enjoy Mary DiNunzio. I think she’s Scottoline’s best character, by far.  She’s the only character that Scottoline has created that isn’t shallow - she has a lot of depth. And I really related to her - she’s not sure if she wants to remain a lawyer, even though she’s sucessful and makes a lot of money for the firm that she’s out. This is a typical urban legal thriller though and is utterly predictable. It’s an easy read, that took only a few days to read (and I had a really bad cold and ear infection too!).  It’s a good one to bring to the beach with you or bring to the couch, with a glass of wine. But don’t expect it to be Pulitzer Prize material because it isn’t.

One Fifth is Candace Bushnell’s latest work. Ms. Bushnell is perhaps most famous for her novel, turned television series, turned movie, Sex and the City. This is a story about different sorts of women - aging gossip columnists, the hedge fund manager’s wife, the business women and the twenty something with loose morals - as well as about old age and new money. Bushnell’s characters seemingly lust for power, prestige, social prominence and money.

That being said, it’s not a book that you should expect to find a plot in. In fact, there was no plot.  The novel seemed to ebb and flow with no direction and its culmination wasn’t as solid as you would find in the river that this book so resembles. The characters were so shallow, you could practically feel the bottom of them by simply looking at them. I could not even relate to these characters, and I grew up in New York. 

The only saving grace about the Audiobook was the narrator. Award winning actress Donna Murphy narrated the novel and she was amazing and entertaining.  She did different voices for each of the characters in an attempt to make the novel more entertaining and engaging to the average listener. It also helped me to differentiate the characters from each other. However, such wonderful narratives didn’t help - the story was pointless and shallow and wasn’t very good at all.

The War Photographer is a 2001 documentary on the work of war photographer James Nachtwey.  Mr. Nachtwey has been a war photographer for over twenty years and this film demonstrates his dedication and compassion and the empathy with which he treats the people that he photographs. Mr. Nachtwey spent time in Vietnam, Rwanda, South Africa and Bosnia.

I was very much surprised by some of the scenes in this film. Mr. Nachtwey had attached miniature cameras to his own cameras so that we could get the same exact view that he was getting and I was really shocked at how close he actually got to the subject matter that he was photographing.  Oftentimes, Mr. Nachtwey (and his crew) were put in physical danger - they followed a man being chased and beaten by a mob, just to capture pictures. In the Middle East, Mr. Nachtwey found himself in the center of the group that was being bombed with tear gas and smoke bombs.

What I loved about this documentary is that it captured the poignancy of being a photographer in this sort of situation - how physically, mentally and emotionally dangerous it can be, but it also shows the poverty, suffering, violence and brutality that photographers see everyday.  It shows the toll that takes on the photographer - it must be hard to see such continual depression .

The style of the documentary is very jarring - sometimes, it’s hard to keep track of what is going on because the cameras are moving so much. It also fails to explain to explain what motivates this photographer to do what he does - to put himself in the position that he puts himself in to get the pictures that he does.

Edgar Sawtelle is the only couple of Gar and Trudy Sawtelle and he was born mute. Edgar can communicate only through sign language and even then, it’s his own version of sign language - a version that only his immediate family and teachers know and understand. Edgar can hear everything that is said to him and around him, though, and, even though he can’t vocalize like everyone around him, he leads a pretty idyllic and happy life. For generations, Edgar’s family has raised a unique, fictional breed of dogs - Sawtelles - famous for their breeding and their training. Edgar forms a unique bond with one of the dogs - Almondine - who was born at the same time that Edgar was, has looked after Edgar (for instance, by getting Trudy or Gar when Edgar would begin to silently cry as an infant). In fact, the pair has their own unique way of communicating. Life seems perfect until Claude, Edgar’s paternal uncle and both a charm and a menace, returns to the farm and Gar dies suddenly, the victim of a murder.  Edgar’s life is thrown for a loop and he takes off, consumed by the guilt he feels at being unable to help his father in Gar’s last moments.

I was really astonished and impressed by David Wroblewski’s descriptions of the methods of training dogs and his descriptions of nature. It is almost as if he experienced these parts of Edgar’s life first-hand, as if he were Edgar and not David. I was entranced and it was heartbreaking to have to put the book down in order to care for myself and my son. I even found myself believing parts of the story that I wouldn’t have ordinarily. For instance, there are segments of the book that are supernatural in occurrence and I found myself believing that it all could have happened.  

I loved Wroblewski’s spare prose, that was somehow flowery at the same time. It is elegant and understated at the same time and I appreciated that. I didn’t have to re-read sentences to grasp their meaning (although I found myself re-reading passages simply because they were beautiful and I enjoyed them and wanted to savor them again and again).

I really enjoyed this novel and would highly recommend it. 

Red Letter Year, released on September 30, 2008, is Ani DiFranco’s latest release. With twelve singles, the album rungs forty-seven minutes in length and demonstrates DiFranco’s continuing evolution in music and lyric writing.

I’ll be pointblank here. I’ve always loved Ani DiFranco. I’ve seen her in concert more times than any other artist and I’ve seen her in a ton of different venues - from Central Park outdoors one summer, to the Landmark Theater in Syracuse, NY, to the State Theatre in Ithaca and the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH. I’ve loved her lyrics and her music - she writes about everything from women’s rights and law to poverty, in her early works. While she still writes about that sort of stuff now, she’s also been influenced heavily by motherhood and marriage, at one point (although I think she’s divorced now).

This disc reflects Ani’s relocation from Buffalo, NY to New Orleans and her new status as a mom. While she still writes politically focused songs (the title track, Red Letter Year, talks about how much she detests George W. Bush), there are a fair number of songs about being a mother. My favorite song on the disc talks specifically about her daughter - Present/Infant. The most poignant lines, for me anyways, were

lately I’ve been glaring into mirrors, picking myself apart. you’d think at my age i’d have though of something better to do than make insecurity into a full-time job make insecurity into an art…but now here’s this tiny baby and they say she looks just like me and she is smiling at me with that present/infant glee and i would defend to the ends of the earth her perfect right to be.

I think that this demonstrate’s Ani’s uncanny ability to not only be prolific in her writing but to write music and lyrics that are poignant and evolving. As she grows and changes, so does her music; life is never static and neither is she. And that is something that I admire in her and her work. I also admire that she is brutally honest, almost to the point that her honesty makes you feel raw.  She says the things that she feels, straight up, in your face and she stands by them, regardless of how they make you feel or whether you agree with her or not. And that’s pretty phenomenal, in my book.

This is a wonderful addition to my Ani DiFranco catalogue and I look forward to many more albums to come. Cheers!

I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time when I was 16 and a sophomore in high school.  I loved it at the time because Holden Caulfield was a badass, quite frankly. He was the rebel that I didn’t have the ovaries to even consider being in high school, although I painfully wanted to be (and frequently wish that I was now, as an adult because the nonsense that I thought was so important then, really wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things). I just recently re-read the book now and I like Holden for somewhat similar reasons.

Holden Caulfield is Salinger’s protagonist in this novel and he has just been kicked out of his latest prep schools.  Salinger allows us to follow Holden through the 48 hours after he learns that he has been expelled from his upscale prep school. Holden is actually the narrator of this novel and Salinger allows Holden to narrate it in the first person. This book takes place in the early fifties (it was published in 1951).  When we initially meet Holden, he is ambiguous as to where he is narrating from, but it’s obvious that he’s been committed to a mental institution, most likely for depression and a suicide attempt.

Holden’s major hang-up is that the majority of the people that he deals with are “phonies” and for this, I utterly and truly appreciate him. He has the uncanny (and utterly cynical) ability to call a spade a spade, and stick to his guns. And one of the people that he admires is a person that stood up for himself, told people exactly what they thought of them, didn’t change their words in the face of bullying and died for it.  I, honestly, like Holden because he sees that people are fake - and most of the time they are, in real life - and he says that they are.

What I think that I missed the first time is how sensitive Holden really is. He puts forth this stone like front - all people are phonies and he hates them anyways because they’re phonies, so he doesn’t really care what they say - but he really does care what they think. Or he really cares what certain people think about him. For instance, he cares what his sister says and thinks about him. The death of his brother Allie really hurt him and, at the time that he tells the story, he hasn’t ever really gotten over Allie’s death. In essence, Holden is a big marshmellow, way down deep. And that’s why I genuinely like him.  I really do.

I wish that Salinger had developed him a little bit more though. Holden went through the entire, friggin’ book without learning a damn thing about himself or the world or another person. I wasn’t expecting him to get over the death of his brother or getting kicked out of his fourth prep school but I was expecting him to come to some sort of epiphany, to change in some way, and Salinger didn’t deliver on this. In fact, Salinger didn’t do ANYTHING to develop Holden as a character.  He was the same at the end of the book as he was in the beginning. 

Upon a re-read of this book, I would have to say that the passage of time has done nothing to make this book better or different for me.

The first time that I read the Lord of the Flies by William Golding I was a junior in high school. I loved English and I enjoyed reading. I was lucky enough to have a teacher that didn’t give two hoots about the administration coming down on him, so we often had the best discussions. Even with a phenomenal teacher, I didn’t like this book then, though I appreciated the significance.  I guess that I hoped that by reading it now, as an adult, I would like it even more. But lo and behold, that wasn’t the case. It still didn’t interest me now, over ten years later.

The Lord of the Flies begins with a group of British schoolboys being stranded on a deserted, tropical island. They are of all different age groups.  Initially, the group cooperates with each other by building shelters, gathering food, starting a fire and electing a leader. Eventually, the groups split with Ralph and Piggy maintaining the “civilized” group and Jack, the red-headed hunter, stealing away a band for his “tribe.”

I didn’t particularly care for the style in which the novel was written. This was my major hang-up the first time and I was reminded of it again. It wasn’t very accessible.  However, the book’s message is a very important one – human behavior needs to follow rules or anarchy and savagery will take over even the most civilized of people. What I also appreciated was Ralph and Piggy’s seeming confusion over how people didn’t always do the “right thing,” meaning the moral thing.  That lesson is one that still holds true in today’s world, as people in their own personal interactions and relationships don’t always do the “right thing.”

This is a particularly difficult book to read because of the language and the symbolism.  I wouldn’t suggest it unless you have the time to dedicate to sit, quietly, digesting it.  

“What was she thinking” should be the subtitle to Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, American Wife, a novel based loosely and quite obviously on the life of current first lady Laura Bush and her husband, George W. Bush.

This ambitious third novel introduces us to Alice Lindgren, when she’s in high school and falling in love with a boy that she eventually kills in a car wreck.  We follow her through a terminated abortion and almost spinsterhood, when she meets and falls head over heels in love with Charles Blackwell. Charlie is spoiled, fun and a manipulator, who uses all of his wiles to get what he wants.

What I loved about this novel was that Ms. Sittenfeld was able to nail down the personalities of the protagonists – Charlie and Alice – to the minutest of details. Charlie’s profanities and his manner of speech made me imagine that George W. Bush was there in my living room.
Alice’s mannerisms were exactly as I have seen and imagined Laura Bush’s would be.  I particularly loved the early sections of the book in which we are introduced to Alice and her family and see her grow into the very public woman that she later becomes. I loved seeing the early relationships between her and Charlie and her and Charlie’s family play out.  I was absolutely intrigued and Ms. Sittenfeld’s writing style just led me to savor each and every word that was on the page. The first few sections of this novel make the price of a hardcover well worth it.

The last section of the book, which focuses on
Alice and Charlie’s time in the White House, leave much to be desired.  I just wasn’t as interested and it got boring – maybe it was because I knew what to expect in a way. The writing style was still phenomenal, as it has been in all of Sittenfeld’s novels to date, but the end section didn’t sit well and it was too tidy of an ending in my mind.  Nonetheless, I truly enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it, even with the less than stellar ending.