You’re Annoying # 1

I hate when people without kids question my decision not to answer the phone while Jack is taking a nap. I don’t question why they don’t answer the phone when they’re taking  a shit, in the shower, having sex, watching a movie, etc. So, back the hell off.

These people can’t handle the truth.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone earlier?”

“Jack was napping.”

“So.”

They can’t handle lies either.

“I didn’t hear it.”

“How could you not hear your phone? Where was it?”

Seriously?

That hour and a half that he naps is my time to do something besides talk to you. Like, my fucking job, for instance. There’s nothing you have to say at 1pm on a Tuesday that is so damn important that it can’t wait till 2:30pm. Because, I would like to point out, not one of those missed calls was to inform me that someone had died. At least not someone I cared about.

I don’t need you giving me alternatives either.

“Why do you have the ringer on if he’s sleeping?”

“Because, nosy ass, the ringer is on low and that won’t wake him up. But me blabbering with you might. Also, I have another small human out there in the world that I’m responsible for and if her school calls to say she just threw up in gym, I might want to get that call. That is worth the risk of waking my child, but talking to you is not. And why not just tell me what the hell you wanted now, instead of wasting three minutes of my time questioning me about earlier?”

People without kids always feel the need to mention the sacrifices parents make when they have kids as if we suddenly become walking shells of our former selves with no social or sex life to speak of. We are perpetually broke and miserable. Um. No, we’re not. Some of us are happy and extra happy when we’re together. This is why I also don’t answer the phone after 9pm. That’s family time and I don’t want to squander it talking to you. Sorry, I just don’t.

I would never, ever, ever, have the audacity to question why someone chooses not to answer their phone. But you can chalk that up as another thing non-parents feel completely comfortable judging parents on, in an incredulous voice, as if ensuring that our children get uninterrupted sleep is wrong. Screw you.

The best revenge will be to wait until they are parents and do it to them. Oh, your kid is sleeping? Sorry, I’ll talk to you later. Then I’ll make note in my planner and make that shit recurring.

12pm – Asshole’s Kid Naps (Mon-Fri)

Then I will call consistently to interrupt whatever it is you save for when your kid naps – your shower time, get housework done time, sex time, fart in peace without hearing a toddler say, “Ew, Mommy you tooted!” time, lunch time, work time, etc.

And when you try to be nice and tell me that your kid is sleeping in that deep whisper you hope conveys what a pain in the ass the call is, I will say insensitive, audacious, rude, things like:

“Well, why don’t you move him to another room?” or

“Still? He still sleeping? Damn, how long is he gonna sleep?”

When you finally stop answering because you’re sick of my rude ass mouth, when I finally DO catch you on the phone, I will say things like,

“You need to train him to sleep through noise.” or

“I’m sick of him always sleeping when I call.”

Um, he was sleeping BEFORE you called, fucker.

12 of 2011 – Part Two

I’ve pledged to read 12 books in 2011. I’ll read more, but I’m definitely going to read this 12 (one a month) this year. The first part of the list can be found here.

7. Ninteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult -

Best known for tackling controversial issues through richly told fictional accounts, Jodi Picoult’s 14th novel, Nineteen Minutes, deals with the truth and consequences of a smalltown high-school shooting. Set in Sterling, New Hampshire, Picoult offers reads a glimpse of what would cause a 17-year-old to wake up one day, load his backpack with four guns, and kill nine students and one teacher in the span of nineteen minutes. As with any Picoult novel, the answers are never black and white, and it is her exceptional ability to blur the lines between right and wrong that make this author such a captivating storyteller.

On Peter Houghton’s first day of kindergarten, he watched helplessly as an older boy ripped his lunch box out of his hands and threw it out the window. From that day on, his life was a series of humiliations, from having his pants pulled down in the cafeteria, to being called a freak at every turn. But can endless bullying justify murder? As Picoult attempts to answer this question, she shows us all sides of the equation, from the ruthless jock who loses his ability to speak after being shot in the head, to the mother who both blames and pities herself for producing what most would call a monster. Surrounding Peter’s story is that of Josie Cormier, a former friend whose acceptance into the popular crowd hangs on a string that makes it impossible for her to reconcile her beliefs with her actions.

At times, Nineteen Minutes can seem tediously stereotypical– jocks versus nerds, parent versus child, teacher versus student. Part of Picoult’s gift is showing us the subtleties of these common dynamics, and the startling effects they often have on the moral landscape.

Sophie has been trying to get me to read a Picoult book for awhile now. This one’s plot was the first to really interest me. If it makes me cry, I’m punching Sophie and Jodi in the face.

8. The Sookie Stackhouse books – My friend, Marge, very generously sent me the boxset of the first 8 or so Sookie Stackhouse books for my birthday last August. Since I’m a fan of the ridiculous show, True Blood, the books are based on, I’m really looking forward to diving in. Marge assures me that the book Sookie is not nearly as annoying as Anna Paquin’s portrayal.

9. The Confession by John Grisham –

In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donté Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he’s guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm’s legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth–and to persuade the condemned man’s attorney that Boyette’s story needs to be taken seriously.

This, and my next selection, can be considered my super-fluff reads. They’re not particularly challenging, often predictable, very quick reads, but they’re fun.

10. Cross Fire by James Patterson – Just as Alex Cross is about to get married, a serial sniper fucks things up. See? Simple and fun.

11. The Dice Man by Luke Rinehart

I tried to find an adequate description of this very… different… story online and couldn’t. I first heard of this book in a blog post by my friend Zoe Brock a few years ago. It wasn’t available for purchase then, nor could I find it in the library. Another friend, Emily, recently reviewed it for her website and I was happy to see it’s available at Amazon.com. Here’s a bit of Emily’s review:

Dr. Lucius Rhinehart is bored. Bored with himself, his family, his psychological practice, with society and its ridiculous rules and constraints; BORED. His wife irritates him, his children are tedious, his patients never get any better. He’s stagnating in every sense of the term and is contemplating suicide. Coming to the conclusion that suicide isn’t an option, he decides that he is going to spice up his life by leaving some of his decisions to chance – that is, he assigns a certain number to each of several choices, rolls the dice, and does whatever the dice choose. No rolling again, no taking it back. Sounds like harmless fun, right? Unfortunately, Dr. Rhinehart’s black sense of humor gets the best of him and his first “decision” one evening is whether or not to go to bed with his wife, stay up reading, or go down the hall and rape Arlene, his attractive neighbor and wife of a colleague. Perhaps not surprisingly, the dice choose Arlene, and Luke dutifully trundles down the hall.

12. The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson –

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.

A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne’s care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished.

This was tossed about as a possible selection for my book club, but something else was chosen. The description intrigued me and I promised myself that I’d eventually get around to it.

12 of 2011 – Part One

This year, I’m going to read 12 books. I’ll probably read more than 12 books, but I’m definitely going to read at least 12. In fact, these 12:

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett – What perfect timing for this optimistic, uplifting debut novel (and maiden publication of Amy Einhorn’s new imprint) set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club sets relies and mistrusts enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who’s raised 17 children, and Aibileen’s best friend Minny, who’s found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their stories is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and history, this one has bestseller written all over it.

Sophie recommended this book to me months ago. She loved it. She said a friend of hers couldn’t get into it because of the way some of the black characters (set during the Civil Rights movement) spoke. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it from everyone that has read it.

2. Getting to Happy by Terry McMillan – Fifteen years after Waiting to Exhale, McMillan brings back Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin–now in their 50s–for a disappointing and uninspired outing. As the story opens, Gloria is very happy, Savannah believes she might be happy, Bernadine is fighting addiction and losing ground, and single mother Robin is trying to resign herself to being alone while things at her job begin to unravel. Within the first few chapters, Gloria and Savannah are struck by disaster, and things go rapidly downhill from there for everyone. Most of the misery has to do with men who lie, steal, cheat, or disappear, or with adult children who face similar problems. Unfortunately, the beloved cast isn’t given a story worthy of them; instead, this reunion reads like a catalogue of personal catastrophes annotated with very long, rambling discussions, with more emphasis on simple drama than character.

With a review like that you might be wondering why I want to read this book. Well, Waiting to Exhale was the first “black” contemporary fiction I remember reading. It had all of the juicy love, loss, and betrayal found in other “chick lit” books, but for the first time, it featured people that looked like me, my friends, and our mothers. Going to see the movie based on WTE was a full-out girlfriend affair. And though I must say that while the review above doesn’t surprise me (I follow the author on Twitter and I swear that 90% of her tweets are bitter, angry or confrontational), I am dying to know how the characters end up.

3. The Hunger Games: Book 1 by Suzanne Collins – In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch. When 16-year-old Katniss’ young sister, Prim, is selected as the mining district’s female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She and her male counterpart, Peeta, the son of the town baker who seems to have all the fighting skills of a lump of bread dough, will be pitted against bigger, stronger representatives who have trained for this their whole lives. Collins’ characters are completely realistic and sympathetic as they form alliances and friendships in the face of overwhelming odds; the plot is tense, dramatic, and engrossing. This book will definitely resonate with the generation raised on reality shows like Survivor and American Gladiator. Book one of a planned trilogy.

This is my first time reading what this trilogy is about and it’s not something I’d usually read. But there was so much buzz about the third book, Mockingjay, when it debuted a few months ago that I have to see what all the fuss is about.

4. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen –

Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

I’ve heard the buzz about this book for awhile now (and the movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon). This isn’t usually something I’d be dying to read, but I’m determined to read outside of my usual genres/authors a bit more this year.

5. The Likeness by Tana French – French’s debut novel, In the Woods (2007), introduced Dublin Murder Squad detective Cassie Maddox and earned unanimous critical praise. Cassie is back, and French has written another winner. The body of a young woman is found in the ruins of a old stone cottage in a dying village outside of Dublin, and the dead woman and Cassie are virtual twins. Lacking suspects or leads, the victim is reported by the police to be injured but alive, leaving Cassie to step into the dead woman’s life as a Trinity College graduate student and the housemate of four other students. Despite the tensions of being undercover, Cassie quickly learns to love her quirky, insular housemates and her new life in a once-grand house, even as the Murder Squad investigation yields little. Someone stabbed her doppelganger to death, and Cassie must find the killer. The Likeness has everything: memorable characters, crisp dialogue, shrewd psychological insight, mounting tension, a palpable sense of place, and wonderfully evocative, painterly prose. In the Woods was an Edgar Award finalist; this one just might go one step further.

French’s In The Woods made my best of 2010 list and I’ve had The Likeness waiting on my Kindle for months. Her third book, Faithful Place, is on my list, too.

6. The Book  Thief by Markus Zusak – Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.