Four Stars

Well damn.

This book, you guys. This book will maybe haunt me. As far as war-related novels that I will remember, it ranks only behind Atonement. I appreciated that it was, I feel, a really well-told story. Others have reviewed it for CBR before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a quick synopsis. A young girl Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father, a museum curator, in Paris before the war. They flee when Paris is invaded by Germany. Werner is a German orphan with a younger sister. He is conscripted into military school as a teenager.

 The story is told through very short chapters, and alternates between the bombing of Saint-Malo and the years of Marie-Laure and Werner growing up. The writing is extremely vivid; I could easily picture every scene. It could have been too flowery, but instead it was just lovely.

 I read one review (I believe on CBR) that said it wasn’t real enough in describing war, making it seem more like the bedtime story or fairy tale version. I disagree with that assessment. Or, I should say, it felt that way to that reviewer, but I had a very different experience with the text.

 **Start Spoilers**

 I thought that the realities of war were brought out remarkably well. I appreciated that this wasn’t just a story about how war impacts soldiers, but about how it impacts individual civilians attempting to live their lives during extraordinary circumstance. For example, the way Madame was risking her life – and the lives of Etienne and Marie-Laure – to participate in the underground anti-war movement was harrowing. My breath caught when Marie-Laure took over. During the chapters on the bombing, I just thought of how someone who literally gets around because she knows the streets so well would have such challenges when the streets are no longer the same. How she couldn’t know if someone had snuck into the home.

And I did not think that the book was overly sympathetic to Werner. Now, if this were the only book or exposure a person ever had to Nazi Germany then sure, it’s clearly not the story of every Nazi soldier. But I think it’s so easy for people to just assume that everyone on the other side of is pure evil. I think it can be much more complicated than that – especially with young children are involved – and dehumanizing ‘the enemy’ makes it all too easy to forget that it’s possible for the person you think of as regular or even good to do some pretty awful things. I also think that Werner’s ending was absolutely appropriate. He’s done something he think is finally right (helping Marie-Laure), and gets so ill that in a fever dream he walks into a minefield. In a sense, it matters greatly that he helped Marie-Laure (for her, obviously), but for him … he still ended up dead from war.

 **End Spoilers**

 We are reading this for book club, so I’m really looking forward to hearing other peoples’ takes on this one. I don’t read that many novels, but I’m definitely glad I read this one.

2 Stars

This book took me forever to get through. It is gift-book sized and has fewer than 300 pages, but it was a slog. Some of the information was interesting, for sure, but if Professor Irvine’s understanding of Stoicism is correct, there are definitely a few things that I definitely disagree with.

The book starts with a bit of a background on Stoicism, and how it is misunderstood. Since we commonly use the word stoic to mean unemotional and humorless, Prof. Irvine argues that this is not what the Stoics were all about. They can control their emotions, and try not to waste energy on things beyond their control, but at the same time they still experience joy.

The goal for the Stoics is tranquility, and it is achieved through a few different tactics. One is negative visualization, which is where you picture the things you love going away. The goal is to appreciate them while you have them, yet recognizing that at some point they will be gone. It might seem a little dark, but I kind of get it.

Another tactic is focusing our desires on things within our control. We should be able to identify what is totally outside of our control and never worry about that. We should instead focus on things that are wholly within our control (what we do) and somewhat within out control. So instead of creating a goal of being the best X in the world (which is outside of our control), we should focus on being the X we can be. Then if we aren’t the best X in the world we will know its because of things we couldn’t change anyway. That, too, seems useful.

There’s an air of fatalism in Stoicism. There’s also a weird sort of libertarian / Scientology component. At least, that’s the best way I could describe it. I spent on chapter just infuriated by this white guy talking about how most people are unhappy because they let themselves be unhappy, and they should just not let the external world get to them. He laments being politically correct which, if you’ve read some of my other book reviews or comments on Pajiba, you know is the quickest way to get me to stop taking you seriously. If you think being respectful of other people is somehow a bad thing, or that we shouldn’t ask people to be responsible for how their actions and words affect others, then we don’t really have much to say to each other.

There are some things in here that are helpful, and I might try to incorporate into my life philosophy, but I’m certainly not interested in his version of Stoicism.

4 Stars

I’ve seen every episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve stuck with it through LVAD wire cuts, Dead Denny visions, the Seattle Grace / Mercy Death merger, plane crashes, bombs, active shooters, you name it. I’ve stuck with it (and almost always enjoyed it) even when she takes extreme dramatic license with the details of how catastrophic emergency response in Seattle would work. (Side note: Shonda, feel free to call me if you’d like to talk about how a mass fatality would be handled in this city that I love.)

Between Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder, Shonda Rhimes has created worlds that may not act like ours most of the time (thank goodness), but that actually look like ours. Not everyone is white. Or a dude. Or straight. Or cis. Not everyone wants to get married, or have kids. Her worlds are awesome.

It makes sense, then, that she would be able to write a compelling memoir / personal growth book.
The year (actually 18 months) of yes started with a flippant remark her sister made, about how Ms. Rhimes was always turning down invitations and pretty much just staying at home when she wasn’t working. After realizing this was a frighteningly accurate description of her life, she decided she would say yes to all invitations. She’d give a commencement address. She’d agree to be interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel.

That might seem to be a bit hard to relate to if you aren’t currently fending off invites to the Vanity Fair Academy Awards after-party, but I got it. Yes, she’s extraordinarily successful in her career, but that doesn’t guarantee happiness. So she started saying yes in other ways, like yes to ridding herself of toxic relationships. And yes to herself, in the form of taking better care of her health. I found what she had to say interesting and compelling, and pretty darn motivating.

I listened to the audio version, which is read by Ms. Rhimes. With the audio book comes the inclusion of three talks she gave as recorded at the events, which was a really cool idea. Hearing her actual address to Dartmouth grads (instead of reading the words) gave them more life, in my mind.

Three Stars

This book helped me finally understand the difference between baking powder and baking soda. As someone who bakes regularly, this should be something I already get. But the thing is, I mostly just bake recipes other people share; I’m not good enough to be able to sort out my own. I don’t know the best ratios of liquid to dry ingredients, so I can’t just sub things in and out.

I really appreciated that the book has a generous introduction before diving into recipes. The authors talk about the history of biscuits and how different flours in different parts of the U.S. yield different feels to the biscuits. They offer advice for storing and measuring flour and, as mentioned above, the different purposes baking powder and baking soda fulfill in a recipe. They also dive into different types of fat to use (butter is yummy, but you’ll get a lighter biscuit if you use shortening or lard), and different options for liquid (I’m looking forward to using yogurt in one of the recipes).

Finally, and most importantly, the authors take you through the actual preparation of the dough, and include two types of kneading and eight (!) different ways to shape biscuits, depending on the consistency of the dough and the look you are going for. They also discuss some common ways the home baker can totally screw the pooch. It’s helpful.

They then dive into the recipes, broken out into easy biscuits, traditional biscuits, embellished biscuits (I’m so excited to try the black pepper ones), biscuit relatives (cheese straws!), tomorrow’s biscuits (i.e. what to do with leftovers), and desserts. They also include some recipes for things you want to eat WITH biscuits, like compound butter or chocolate gravy. And they include a recipe for refrigerator biscuits so you can make dough ahead of time and just add liquid and bake up as you have time. There are many I want to try out, which I think is a sign of a pretty good cookbook.

Three Stars

More like 3.5, but since that isn’t an option, let’s go with three. This is a lovely little book; I just had a challenging time really getting into it. It has everything I love: food, France, humor, even liberal political leanings, Surprisingly though, I had to force myself to finish it, but I am definitely happy that I did.

I believe this book served as the basis for the “Julia” part of the film “Julie and Julia,” where a blogger takes on the recipes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking while we learn what life in France was like for Ms. Julia Child. I think it’s universally agreed that everyone liked the parts of the film that focused on Ms. Child (played by Meryl Streep) and would have preferred a film just focused on that. I agree, and think the book is so rich with description that there is plenty for multiple films.

The book isn’t just limited to Ms. Child’s life in France with her husband Paul Child (who was a cultural ambassador in the Foreign Service); it instead feels more like a memoir focused on the last fifty-plus years of her life (she died just a couple of days before her 92nd birthday). But much of that was spent living in France (also Germany, Norway and Boston). She shares about her time at Le Cordon Bleu, as well as the process behind creating Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume I and Volume II).

The language is vivid, although the book feels a bit slow. However, perhaps that is appropriate. Proper French cooking takes time, and isn’t something one can just dash off quickly; maybe Alex Prud’homme (who assisted his great Aunt in writing this book) recognized this and felt that there was no need to rush the story. If you like France, or food, or have fond memories of Ms. Child’s cooking show, I think this is a sweet book to check out.

Four Stars

I will forever associate Michael Ian Black with “The State.” Even though we didn’t have MTV for long when I was in high school, I have very strong memories of watching the show and loving it. I own the DVDs (yup, actual, physical, non-Blu-Ray DVDs), and thanks to Mr. Black I can clearly describe to you what $240 worth of pudding looks like.

I now follow Mr. Black on Twitter, which is how I found out about his new book. I was looking for something to listen to at the gym and on my walks to and from work, and this one turned out to be rather perfect for that purpose.

The full title of this sweet, funny, interesting, relatable and vulnerable book is “Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom’s, which I know sounds weird).” It’s about Mr. Black’s attempts to wrestle with his own mortality and aging body while dealing with the fact that his mother is chronically ill. There’s an entire (vividly descriptive) chapter focused on how much he hates his feet. There’s one where he chronicles his attempt to learn what diseases he is predisposed to getting. And there’s a really great chapter focused on training for and running his first 10K race.

I very deliberately chose to include the descriptor “vulnerable” because I appreciated how Mr. Black stripped down to his deepest fears (which many of us share) and was brutally honest with the reader about his attempts to sort through them. It could have been SUCH a heavy book; instead, it was light in the right places, darkly humorous in the right places, and (sparingly) just plain dark when necessary. Mr. Black read the audio version, which I think really made the book come alive.