Being Written

by William Conescu

It started with a click.  Or what I thought was a click.  A year and a half later, when I finally sought medical intervention, I was informed by the physical therapist it was snapping.  Whatever the name, my hip is getting worse, with louder and more frequent noise that would cause me to take the car into the mechanic/snapping from the hip when at the the pilates studio, or working with my trainer, or sometimes just standing up from the sofa.  And the hip has started to hurt, and I've got that slight limp that comes and goes according to some unknown social schedule of its own.

The physical therapist recommended I go see a hip specialist and get an MRI, just to make sure.  That I don't have some hidden flaw that will eventually make my leg fall off.  Okay, she didn't suggest that, but when the pain from the offending joint is keeping you awake in the middle of the night, your brain sometimes fills in the blanks with disturbing imagery.

After a month's wait I get to go see the hip doctor, and I'm nervous (because, yes I'm pretty sure my leg won't actually fall off, but the thought does nag that surgery could be a solution to my problems) but also anticipating getting some answers.  But I don't really get any answers, just more waiting, as the MRI can't happen until insurance approves it, and I have no idea how long that will take, other than the obvious too long.

I drive out of the clinic parking lot, and because I was hoping to be full of answers, and now just feel empty.  I think random thoughts, mostly food related.  See's is near here, I could get a chocolate butter cream.  Or two or six.  Or, ooh, I think the bakery at the mall has eclairs.  But then I realize I'm not really hungry, and pretend to be an emotionally healthy adult and keep driving.  Only I still feel the gnawing need, even as the mall gets smaller in my rear view mirror.  And I realize that, yes I am driving home, but that I am also driving right past the cupcake shop, and wouldn't a chocolate cupcake with sweet chocolate icing be really good?  Or, oh, the lemon cupcake with actual lemon curd inside, and lemon icing on top!  

As all my resolve has been used up avoiding chocolates and eclairs, I pull into the parking lot.  Only to realize that if I just drive around the corner, my local ink dealer is right there,  filled with hundreds of books that I haven't read, and that this will be much more filling than any sugary stress eating could ever be.

So, ink addict that I am, I am sucked inside, and make it all of eight feet before I see a book with Being Written scrawled across the cover in faux pencil(and at this point I will admit that when a young girl I thought that both faux and sans were both colors... you know, like sans stockings must be a color of beige, and faux pencil  was some unknown color, but probably found in the expanded crayon box).  And a giant pencil being carried away on the back of a not so giant man.  While an avowed ink lover, I also have a great fondness for graphite, so that was enough to get the book into my hand. 

The cover also promised "a white-knuckle thrill ride" and insights, interviews & more.  Neither of which I noticed until just now, so clearly they didn't influence my book reading (or buying) decision.  (Something I thought I'd mention in the almost impossible chance that Milan Bozie, cover designer, ever happens to read this blog post... you know, information for the next book design...)

The back cover text ("Daniel Fischer has a secret.  He knows he's a character in a book that's being written.") made me think this was the book the 2006 Will Farrell movie "Stranger than Fiction" was based on, but that appears not to be the case.  But I didn't know that at the time, and since I'm waiting for "Stranger" to come up on my NetFlix cue, and I like to read the book before the so often butchered adaptation, that misperception was the last bit of motivation I need to buy then read the book.

Like I needed much encouragement to buy a book that day.  In addition to the general if I had this little self control about any other area of shopping, I'd have to join an -oholic support group to control my spending I was having general emotional angst need to fill it with something problems that day.

 And, because not all emotional needs can be met with paper and ink, right after the economic exchange others would call buying a book but I call meeting a primal need, I went a bought a cupcake.  Lemon.  It was very good, thank you.

Sex and Bacon

by Sarah Katherine Lewis

Here is the thing about bacon - it is salty, greasy, crunchy, and when marinaded in maple syrup and baked in the oven it achieves sweet.  It covers all the food groups of the tongue*, and you get to eat it with your fingers. It's a wonder food.

Which makes it amazing that I've stopped eating it.

I got sick in college and lost the ability to easily digest red meat, and when I got healthy enough to eat it again I was on the my boyfriend lives in New York and I'm in California and I'd rather talk to him on the phone than spend money on food diet, and meat just cost more. And after graduation, when I had a job and money for exciting things like all the groceries I wanted, avoiding red meat had just become a part of how I define me.

Except...  We were visiting a friend I've known since junior high, and her kids wanted bacon with breakfast, so she started frying some up.  And, after giving both the kids two pieces of bacon each, she and I stood in the kitchen talking and finished off the pound of bacon.  Her husband freaked a bit, because in the more than twenty years he has know us, my friend and I don't eat bacon.  And we don't.  Except, apparently, when we get together and suddenly become the twelve year old girls we were in seventh grade, because way back then, we loved bacon.

Bacon, the time traveling food.

Oh, and there was the New Year's morning at the neighbors with movies and breakfast snacks and bacon, and I ate it, and it was years ago, and I remember how salty greasy crunchy good it was.  Which I would feel worse about, since I now have a more clearly defined food ethos that is firmly against eating things I wouldn't want to kill, and pigs are large animals that might be intelligent.  Unlike chickens which are small and annoying and several of whom live next door and there have been many early mornings that I would have been happy to hop the fence and kill the feathered alarm clocks by hand.  So I'm okay with eating chicken....Um, I got distracted by my chickens are bad neighbors rant... where was I?  I think I was going to include some sort of rational about why it was okay I ate the bacon.  But there isn't one.  I just did, no one cared, and I don't eat it anymore.  

I clearly have fond memories of bacon.  So you can see why wandering through a bookstore the title Sex and Bacon:  Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad For Me would have caught my eye.   Plus a heavily tattooed bleach blond woman holding a frying pan is a pretty eye catching photo.  Even if it is just to think ouch or does that make it hard to get a job?

The back covers promises that the book is about the intersection of food and sex.  Which might make it sound like a sociological study, until you read further down and see that the author is an actress/model/dancer bisexual who loves meat.  At which point you can probably assume that the tattoos aren't interfering with any career prospects.

And that is not how I ended up reading this book.  I never ran across it in a bookstore.  A friend lent it to me.  Months ago.  And right after she did we had in-laws coming over to visit, at which point I edited the house, and clutter and provocatively titled books were tidied away.  I saw her last week, and was reminded that I still had the book unread in my house.  And that is how I ended up reading this book - because it goes against my nature to borrow a book for this long and to not actually read it.

*Right, officially the tongue also perceives sour, bitter and savory. And crunchy isn't exactly a taste.  So we'll go with the emotional food groups of the tongue.  Happy now?

The End Of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

If this book was a piece of fruit, I probably would have bruised it in the store.  

Leigh's has a table with new fiction near the door, and I find reasons to step inside and peruse the offerings on a regular basis (The reasons are usually some variation of 'oh, I can see the bookstore from here.  There are books in it.'  That's a reason, right?  It's a form of literary tourism.)

The End of Mr. Y lived at the end of the table, easy to see as I walked past.  The cover has an orange-y background, which also increases its visibility.  And a big black dot.  And a mouse.  And, well Kelly Eismann, where ever you are, you are one fine cover designer.  

A quote on the cover by Jonathan Coe promised "Not only will you have a great time reading this book, but you will finish it a cleverer person than when you started."  I like being cleverer.  (Did I have any idea who J. Coe was at the time?  Not a clue.  Even now I only know what I saw when I skimmed Wikipedia.  So clearly it is the quote not the one being quoted that drew me in.)

As implied by the bruised fruit statement, I picked this book up, put it down, picked it up again, down again.  Left the store.  Did not come rushing back in as I imagine one might at an animal shelter, realizing that someone else might grab that adorable kitten while you are thinking about it.  Didn't think about the book until my normal literary tourism drew me back to the store.

Once again attracted to the cover.  Once again picked it up, read the back cover again.  Which, re-reading it just now, can see how it did not draw me in right away.  Still not oozing persuasion to me.  Once again put it down.  Ended up with a different book.

It wasn't until my third visit to the bookstore with The End of Mr. Y on the table that I ended up buying it.  I think I was just used to holding it by then.   When it comes down to it, the book probably came home with me because I was hungry for a book, and it felt familiar yet new.

The woman at the register was excited that I bought it, since she was the one who had ordered it for the shop.  That is one of the things I love about independent bookstores, you're dealing with individuals not distant corporate managers. 

And then the book just sat around the house.  Because, as is often the case (and yes, thank you, I do have a book buying problem) I actually had stuff at home to read.  And the same pick it up and put it down impulse I had at the store continued to impact my relationship with the book even when I owned it.

But finally around New Years I realized I still hadn't read it, and so I finally did.  And that doesn't really answer the why did I read it question.  What was the magic line in the sand that finally got crossed that got it transferred out of the to be read pile and into the I've read it and need to sell it back to the new and used book store?

Um... dunno.  Maybe that's why I call it the magic line...  if I knew how it worked it would be the clearly defined line with accompanying spreadsheet.

Mediterranean Summer: A Season on France's Cote d'Azur and Italy's Costa Bella

by David Shalleck & Erol Munuz

The thing about getting married is you lose track of time.  

When you're a single renter there is a change in the landscape.  You look back and think 'well, I was dating that guy from Detroit, and living in the apartment by the beach with that really skinny girl from LA, so it must have been eleven years ago.'  

But once you're married, it all begins to blur.  'Hmm' you think, 'it was the summer I was living with that guy I love, and we were living in the house that we were lucky enough to be able to buy and still enjoy living in, so it could have been, well any time in the last eight years.'  Which, while fabulous to be married to my best friend living in our comfy house, doesn't do much for carbon dating the events of my life.

Of course there is more to life than marital bliss and owning real estate.  Like your friends, and their lives.  Which is why I know how long our Book Group has been together.  I walked into the first meeting to find a former co-worker already in the room, noticeably pregnant (or should the be visibly pregnant?  Far enough along to be able to politely mention the fact that she was clearly having a baby soon, without running the risk that she in fact was not pregnant, but had just put on weight in a rather unflattering distribution).  Her son is fourteen now, and will forever be, among the many bright brilliant things the future will bring him, the historical marker for the duration of the book group.

Which is how I came to read Mediterranean Summer.  You get a bunch of food and travel loving readers in a room, and it is a no brainer that at some point they are going to be attracted to a book about a chef who spends a summer cooking on a yacht.

Soul Music

by  Terry Pratchet

I should just have a boiler plate for Pratchet books:  Addictive behavior.  

Love Wife

by Gish Jen

I tend to panic when it comes to packing.  Maybe it has something to do with the heat wave I encountered in Seattle, when I had only packed for cold and wet.  Or the Palms Springs trip with almost flooding rain when I was expecting (and packed for) a warm week by the pool.

Whatever the reason, when I pull out the suitcase I suddenly have the need to shove a pair of shoes for everyday I'm gone, with an extra pair 'just in case' and an outfit for any conceivable occasion (including spontaneous car repairs or formal dinners.  Neither of which has ever actually happened on vacation)

The over packing problem extends to reading material.  Because what if everyone I'm visiting with suddenly decides to go horse back riding, only I'm allergic to horses, so I'd have time to fill, and I'm almost done with the book I'm reading so I clearly need to bring an extra one with me.  And what if it turns out I don't really like that one, I better bring three.  And what if everyone decides to watch football all afternoon?  I don't like football, so I'll end up reading, so I better bring four.  

Usually this type of thinking just means I've got reading material to double my suitcase weight.  But a couple of months back I suddenly found myself going on an unexpected trip, lacking the time to go to the library or local bookstore to load up on books.  Fortunately for me I have the world's greatest neighbor, who in addition to being an almost endless source of snacks, also has a vast collection of books I haven't read yet.  So one slightly panicked phone call later I had a comforting pile of books stashed in my duffle bag.  Which due to the shortness of the trip, and the total absence of horse back riding or televised football I didn't have a chance to read.

But I've been working my way through the pile, and that is how I came to read the Love Wife.

An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

I'm good at buying food for dinner, but tend to forget that lunch doesn't appear out of thin air, so on the weekends we usually have to forage for food.  Which sounds much more rugged than it actually is.  I read various blogs where people write about their experiences either growing their own food, or actually foraging in the woods, and in some cases dumpsters, for food.  Us, we get hungry, we decide which restaurant to hand our money to.

The Saturday in question we had a craving for Mexican food, so we headed off to Fiesta Del Mar, which means we drove our car.  And it seemed a little wasteful to have driven for just lunch, so we wandered around downtown for some window shopping, which almost immediately turned into actual shopping at Books Inc.

The title, despite the less than fabulous font, caught my eye.  I think I like the word unexpected. Not generically.  Generically I like the word plethora, because it feels good in my mouth as I say it, and because if just seems full of promise and options, and, oh, I just like the word.  (I mean, this is a blog about why I read the books I read, not a defend your vocabulary favorites site.  It's not like most people even have a favorite word).

Where was I?  Oh, right, I was attracted to the word unexpected in the title, because, um, I just was.  And the back cover listed the hero as female, which is no longer unexpected (anyone remember sci fi in the 70's?  If so you might understand why all these years later I'm still happy when a woman has a lead role).  

There were thousands of other books in the shop that day.  I'm not sure why I ended up with this one.  Today I probably wouldn't have picked this one out.  Not a reflection of the writing (this isn't a review site), just that some days books are like lunch food... some days you want sushi, and other days you want anything but.  No real reason for your choice, except that you were hungry, and had to pick something.  And yes, some days I am hungry for a book.  

Many many days, actually.