The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

To remember this - Ellen recommended today at Pat's birthday party.

to read: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Songs Without Words by Ann Packer

I loved this book so much and it was so resonant with me that I read it twice.

I don't want to spoil what all happens but it's a lot about female adult friendships and mothers (both lost and found) - and set in the modern Bay Area (always nice to have characters meeting monthly over a bowl of tom kha gai).
Also one of the characters has a therapist and has the same kind of thoughts that I sometimes have (what does the therapist do right before and right after the appt? - and other thoughts).

Ysabeau Wilce - author of Flora Segunda...

This is the official website of Ms. Wilce, whom I met at WisCon at a dinner organized by Ellen Datlow (which Pat invited me to).

Her site makes so much more sense now that I've read her book. It's an awesome site but it was a bit confusing prior.

So many things about the book that I like, it's hard to get all of them in right now. Just finished it yesterday - Pat had lent it to me on Monday night.

The WisCon program is crazy...

Crazy Busy!
Several programs I want to go to are happening at the same time. I guess that's a good thing. It's not for lack of trying on the planners' part -- there are things going on every day, and scheduled into the night.

I went through the program today while on the plane, and kept almost exclaiming "Dang!" out loud when coming to a conflict.

It's my first time at WisCon so I have no idea what I'm getting into.

Met a very nice woman in Mpls airport, on her way to WisCon with baby and hubby. She was also having issues with Northwest Airlines (hers were much worse than my one delay).

My godmother came to pick me up at the airport because I'm staying with them tonight, and a woman came up to us to ask where the shuttle was for the Concourse Hotel (where WisCon is being held).
It was kind of fun to explain that I didn't need a shuttle, I had a ride. Unfortunately I couldn't help her either.
Really fun visiting with Tom and Ginny - they were quite tired after their days at work, and I am still on California time so I'm awake...
I'll probably have to see their alpaca farm in a different visit...

The Opposite of Love by Julie Buxbaum

Excerpts from email to Julie Buxbaum, who came and spoke to our group at Kapp's Pizza last week:

(also fyi - there was this Washington Post review, which was favorable, but Julie pointed out that it didn't go very deep into the emotions of the characters. It's all well and good to be Carrie Bradshaw's smarter sister, but that's not all this book is about.)



I went and bought the book at Books Inc down the street that night and finished it the next day. Unfortunately I wasn't thinking about the impact of crying at the end, and wound up finishing it while sitting at Peet's Coffee and starting to sob.

On top of how the book speaks to me, as a woman and a motherless daughter, I also find it very inspirational to hear of people (especially people close to my age) writing first novels successfully.
I did the National Novel Writing Month last year (NaNoWriMo) and was really happy to finish something that vaguely is a connected storyline, in 50,000 words and 1 month!
Right now I am at WisCon, which is a feminist sci fi and fantasy convention, and hoping to recharge batteries here.
One of the women in my life who is one of my "Ruths" (author Pat Murphy, she was the officiant at my wedding) flies to Madison from San Francisco every Memorial Day for WisCon, for almost 20 years now --- she thinks it's pretty cool, and it looks like it will be.

Anyway - quick list of my favorites in The Opposite of Love:

* Ruth and the book club. Emily's thoughts about how much she wants to be with this group of older women, regardless of what they're reading, really hits home to me.
Especially as I get older (I'm 34, Mom died at 42) I am more and more drawn to women who are in their 50s and 60s at least. They are the only models really for what it's like to live longer than 42.
And Ruth being a career mentor for Emily too, as my friend Pat is (although my writing is just getting going, she's also a good overall career mentor. Just in the 2 years I've known her she's had some of the most interesting jobs ever.)

* picture of Emily's mom on the beach - taken before she was born, connecting to a mom she never knew. I have a similar picture of my mom standing in front of a lake, and I always thought it was weird that I feel closer to this picture than to the later pictures that I remember being there for. nice to see a character having the same feelings.

* writing the letter to her mom and the feeling that she sees her around - this is part of what my NaNo novel was about.

* I really liked the prologue with the ultrasound (or is it sonogram) -- we know that there is a baby coming eventually, and there is a father, but don't know who the father is exactly. I think you did a great job with the character of Andrew also -- As I got to know him better, I really felt so hopeful that it would indeed turn out to be Andrew who is the father.
Very real, but not sappy, descriptions.

* references to other people being "grownups" -- their friends having a "grown-up" apt, and so on. My husband and I still talk like this sometimes!

* the whole theme of being afraid to really commit. Sometimes I just want to push people away because I am afraid of losing them if they get too close. I'm pretty happy that my husband withstood previous attempts to do this and stayed with me, and that we are married!

Anyway - thanks again for coming. I hope that your work on the second book is going well. I'm looking forward to reading it.

How to Survive in the Line of Fire

I want to write about this now while it's still fresh in my mind...might be good for the germ of a future story.

I was riding BART and reading Pontoon, by Garrison Keillor (which is making me nostalgic and thinking a lot since it has a mother dying plus a woman going home to MN for her wedding...). Also the book review on this link has Keillor with a shaggy graying beard.

I was late (it was after 9 am) so I didn't have a seatmate for most of the trip until Civic Center when a woman sat down next to me.
When I was packing up Pontoon to get off at Montgomery, I see that my seatmate is reading a little card that is titled "How to Survive in the Line of Fire" and has all of these tips and diagrams for trying to stay out of harm's way in that situation.
It looked like something from those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks, and after googling around, I am pretty sure it was.

It made me wonder why she has this at this time. Does she have the whole set and she reads one each BART ride to be prepared? They are meant to be humorous but this one was a bit surprising to see she was reading it specifically.
When I got up I accidentally jostled her and all this colored paper she had fell on the floor. I helped her pick some of it up. It looks like she is making a card for someone - she also had colored pencils...
Is she making a card for someone going into the Army? Is it just a joke card? The tips were so realistic that it seems it wouldn't be a joke.
She was in her thirties or early forties, long brown hair curly in ponytail. She was grateful for me trying to pick up the papers even though I could only grab one and hand it to her before I had to run off the train.

It was also kind of weird since I am not usually on this train at this time - I missed my appt in Rockridge so wound up taking the train up from Millbrae like normal.
Side note - coming out of BART I also saw a woman wearing the same boots I just bought on Saturday. She is thin enough that she can tuck her jeans into the tops of the boots...

NaNo Dedication

Trout in the Dishwasher, by Solveig Pederson

Inspired by Pat Murphy, Susan Juby, Madeleine L’Engle,

Madeleine E. Robins and Ellen Klages

For David, who does keep me fed and almost sane, and makes life fun.

And for my mom, Diane Marie Dahlen Pederson. 1948-1990

“Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.”

-- Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls

I'm not going to do much with the NaNo "novel", at least not right now, but can post the dedication page, and more info than I sent in a larger group email earlier, about some background.

Last night I went to the NaNo party at Root Division .
That was quite fun as my first time - Chris Baty actually bestowed me with a sticker on my crown (yes, paper Burger-King like crowns, but they were generic, not actually from Burger King). The stickers had numbers for how many NaNos one has won. Many have 6s or 7s on their crowns by now, it's been going on for 9 years.

I was also glad I was there to hear Chris' toast because it really captured the feeling of - "wow, we've been writing every day or trying to now, as much as possible for a month, and now...we don't have to anymore...but we kinda still want to!"

He told a story about accidentally bringing his laptop with him to a concert last night (after he was done with his NaNo) and then having to sadly leave it on his bed, crying its "dell tears" in its neglect.

Then I went to Killing My Lobster's first all female show - "For the First Time" which was appropriate for the first-time NaNo person, and conveniently next door to Root Division where the NaNo party was. The link is to a SF Weekly review of the show, which is pretty spot-on - there were parts that were amazingly funny but parts that were not.
Ellen and Mad met Pat and I there. More details/thoughts to be written in my actual journal...

And here's the NaNo Dedication (see below) - I had emailed out the basic dedication but not the paragraphs below of extra background info. See I don't want to email out the novel but will talk about bits.

In addition to the major literary inspirations below, Annie Lennox was my constant companion throughout the entire month, and actually popped up at the main character's door during a North Dakota snowstorm looking for refuge.

Also, my co-workers Shannon and Peri have been thanked in person and on Facebook -- Shannon brought up the idea of cooking trout in the dishwasher, and our co-worker Amy did it and wrote about it on facebook, getting my attention.

Peri told me about the cryptography career of actress Hedy Lamarr, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr) which gave my 12-year-old main character, Anastasia, an interesting topic for her combo science/writing project, and resurrected a huge amount of word count in the middle of the month. This article is really a great summary of her career as inventor, with a lot more detail than I found on the wikipedia.
It's really fascinating about the culture clash between the military and Hedy and her co-inventor, as their patent was partially inspired by a player piano, and as soon as the military read that, it lost a lot of credibility.

The Severed Wasp, by Madeleine L'Engle

I was also reading my beloved copy of "The Summer of the Great Grandmother" this week and also decided to check this out from the library, because I wasn't sure if I had read it or not.

Much (all) of the present storyline of the book takes place in New York, in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I know that she actually spent time at the library of this cathedral - Kati and Kari and I had always wanted to bump into her on the grounds, and we're sad now, that that is never going to be possible.

It's interesting that in these couple weeks where I seem to be quite present for my teen self (doing the focus groups, promoting Pat's "middle grades" book, thinking about what I was doing during these teen years) -- that I read this book and will be reading "Wild Girls".
This book, although an adult novel, has a lot of teens and children being mentored and encouraged to develop their talents (both in Katherine's past and present). Katherine Vigneras, the distinguished pianist who is the main character, becomes a teacher/mentor for a young girl who finds she is a good composer (she loses her ability to practice her main talent, dancing, because of a tragic accident).

Yolande, a former pop singer, teaches another young girl who has a singing gift.
And really there is a good mystery here, but on top of that is just feeling like I'm spending some time hanging out with Madeleine L'Engle. You feel that L'Engle herself, as a famous author living in NY, may have dealt with some of the prank calls and other trappings of fame, that Katherine does in the book.
And then in Pat Murphy's "Wild Girls" -- we have a charismatic writing teacher who brings out the talents of Joan and Fox...

The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm listening to an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, while sitting in the library writing on my work laptop. Curtis is about 2 years younger than me, since she won a Seventeen short story contest in 1992 when she was 16.

This title is a very ironic title, but I bought this book on the day that Dave proposed to me, which was a bit bizarre.
We were in Mendocino shopping at a bookstore and I saw the book - it is her 2nd novel after her debut, Prep, about a girl from Ohio who goes to an East Coast prep school.
So I bought it, but Dave thought I already suspected that he was going to propose that night and that's why I picked it. I didn't even think about the title of the book until after Dave had proposed and he pointed this out.

The Christmas weekend was very romantic and I already wrote about it in a more private journal.
But this book is really awesome, the character has a lot of similarities to me in having low self-esteem, not believing that the words "Hannah's boyfriend" are real. (she feels like it is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp).

And Curtis apparently is constantly having the reporter question of whether or not the events in Prep and in this book are autobiographical. She basically points out that now that the two characters are out, there are a lot of differences between them so they can't both be autobiographical...
(Oh she is saying in the interview that Ethan Canin, who is a doctor and a alumnus of the Iowa Writers Program, was one of her teachers in graduate school there in Iowa).

Curtis is a Stanford English major grad also, and there are various scenes in this book, especially in the college years, where I see a lot of stuff coming from my memories of Stanford (Hannah doesn't go to a cappella and improv shows as a freshman because she thinks they're kind of stupid, but then realizes all the bonding and socializing happening at these shows).
Also Hannah didn't like eating alone in the cafeteria and has a very similar relationship with her therapist - she has this idealized notion of the therapist's normal life which is similar to mine.

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages

Buy on Amazon!

I completely loved this book - I think I was one of the first to buy it at Borderlands on Valencia in SF as they hadn't yet put it out on the shelves and I had brought up the postcard to them, asking "Do you have this here yet?"
Then I took it home and read it all afternoon. I was sad when I was done just because the main character, Dewey is such a great character - had I read it when I was younger or if I read any slower, I would be able to live with the character longer.
The story is about Dewey and Suze, two girls growing up at the Los Alamos site, in the midst of all the top scientific minds building the bomb. Dewey gets to talk to Nels Bohr just randomly on the street for an hour about her scientific projects, for example.

From the very beginning, where Dewey is coming on the train to New Mexico but she doesn't know where exactly she's going because of the secrecy around the war, I was hooked in. Details like her experience of the sleeper seats and the observation car reminded me of our trip across Canada in 1987 from Banff to Vancouver.
Anyway, I won't go on any longer about it. It's an awesome book, for everyone (not just for kids). I'm happy for once that we eavesdropped on Ellen as she sat behind us at the Neil Gaiman event, otherwise I might not have known about her (unless PM happened to tell me).

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Buy on Amazon!

I love Anne Tyler. When I was reading this it was during a time when I was thinking about a supergroup salon of wise women - Anne Tyler, Nora Ephron, my therapist, and PM of course.
I always forget how much I like Anne Tyler's work - I don't think about it that much, but when I see a new book I always pick it up and I'm surprised and pleased.

This book opens with what seems to be a purely coincidental event - two families congregating at the Baltimore airport to welcome Korean orphans that they are adopting.
This chance meeting of these families at this pivotal point in their lives becomes an event they mark every year, highlighting their cultural differences and characters as Tyler moves around in perspective throughout the book. We're in Maryam's world (the matriarch of the Iranian-American side) for most of the book, but it was so cool to have a book starting with one of the characters as an infant (Jin-Ho, arriving from Korea) and then later in the book we get a couple chapters from her POV as a young child. What do all these well-drawn family members look like, to this newest addition to the family?

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

This story is what happened when us war babies grew up and needed answers. When we got them, they weren’t what we expected at all.

Set in 1950s London, this book begins when Penelope is invited to impulsively share a cab with Charlotte, a stranger who sees her standing at the bus stop. She also gets invited to tea, which she accepts because she muses that if this were the beginning of a book, she has already started it off by getting in the cab - not going to the tea would cut off the story in the beginning.
I liked the characters and the first person perspective - I won't blither on more about the story itself, but this is a book that looks and feels like a frothy "chick lit" book on the outside, but has some real substance when you get into it. (Very like Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld).
It's also a treat to see the beginnings of the rock era in England - Johnnie Ray is the hottest thing ever to these girls. But Penelope's uncle from America has brought over some 45s and pictures of Elvis, soon to conquer everywhere in the next year.
Buy on Amazon!

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I went to the Khaled Hosseini event for One Book One County (San Mateo Reads) event, today at San Mateo Performing Arts center. I had loved this book, The Kite Runner, although it was so emotional and disturbing that both Kari and I are not sure if we would want to re-read it again soon.

Dr. Hosseini was asked at the end of the night whether he thought that "the pen is mightier than the sword" and whether his work would help to bring peace to Afghanistan.
He said he had no hopes of that, but that part of fiction writing is talking about the kinds of things that people don't want to talk about, but that they know to be true. For example, the Pashtun/Hazara prejudices he writes about in the novel - he's been criticized by other Afghans for "bringing out their dirty laundry."

Buy on Amazon!

Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea

Here's an interview she did before writing this book and here is the SF Chron's very long review.
Although this is set in a dilapidated town on the East Coast instead of in ND, and Trisha's family is way less dysfunctional than mine was, much of this is resonating with me - especially the "in crowd" clique, constantly concerned with fashion, shopping, and the mall, which Trisha ends up pretending to be part of in order to get a job at "Omigod!" which apparently is the trendiest spot to the clique.
I don't know, I can't really do it justice in this space. I now want to go read the rest of her stuff too, instead of just hovering in the bookstore and voyeuristically paging through Rent Girl, for example. This is her first actual fiction book, and looking at the Amazon blurbs, it amazed me that the whole book took place over the course of one day.
It just kind of washed over me in a rush and I wasn't really thinking about how quick the timespan was...

Buy on Amazon!
And she is going to be moderating a panel at the Women on Writing conference in March again this year.

Good Faith by Jane Smiley

I read this during the March hiatus from the blog - it was from the library.
Jane Smiley is really good at depicting realistic and complicated families, especially with an idiosyncratic patriarch. Gordon, one of the supporting characters in this book and father of the woman that the prototagonist is having an affair with, is one of these interesting patriarchs.
He's a more benevolent one than the father in "A Thousand Acres" though.
There's a lot of real estate wheeling and dealing in this book, which at times can get a little bit tedious. Maybe I don't connect to it as well as I think I connect to the farming in A thousand acres, even though I haven't lived on a farm or ever bought any real estate.
The book seemed to end pretty abruptly although it was long and dragged a bit in the middle. It was enjoyable but not sure I would re-read it...

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and Victor/Victoria

This is a time travel story but it is really primarily a love story. Henry De Tamble is a man with "Chrono-Displacement" disorder - causing him to suddenly shift into a different time period of his life, appearing naked because he can't take any objects between times with him.
Claire Abshire is the woman who eventually becomes his wife - although they first meet (for Claire) when she is 6 or 7 and he is in his thirties. For Henry, they first meet when he is 28 and she is 20 (in real time) - he is flabbergasted to meet this beautiful woman who knows so much about him, but whom he has never met (yet...)

The story is told in 1st person switching off between Claire and Henry which makes it very personal, and it can get pretty mind-boggling as each chapter is in a new time frame, but Niffenegger really ties it together with the romance between the two of them, pushing you further and further into the story.

Speaking of awesome marriages, I also watched the DVD commentary for Victor/Victoria by Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews who are married to each other and apparently had a great time while making the movie too. I know the movie so well that I could almost say the lines myself while listening to the commentary, and it was quite fun to laugh and hear Julie chuckling at the same time.
They talk of various bits of knowledge that Blake took advantage of while directing Julie, including her true fear of cockroaches and her susceptibility to crying during Madame Butterfly (there's a scene at the opera when she is just _weeping_ and they say in the commentary that Blake just set her in front of that opera and that was it.)
Anyway, it's such a relaxing and positive movie.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

This book is a post-apocalyptic vision told mainly in flashback by the last surviving human, a man who used to be a boy named Jimmy and now calls himself Snowman.
It's also a story of the triangle between Jimmy, a beautiful woman named Oryx, and a scientific genius and Jimmy's childhood friend - Crake.
Even in Jimmy's childhood, the world is still in a time at least (hopefully) a little bit in the future. The coastal cities have all been submerged and there is no New York, only New New York.
This book pushes you along quite fervently to figure out _what really happened_ to the world, to bring about the scenario in which Snowman is living on a beach, supported and leading a group of genetically designed post-humans he calls the "Children of Crake."
There's also the sub-mystery of what happened to the world to bring out the closer future from Jimmy's childhood.
I read some of Atwood's essays on the site linked from the book cover above - she said that she had already started writing this novel when September 11 happened and she had to stop writing for several weeks - as it was hard to write about a fictional world tragedy when a real one was actually going on.
I bought this at Kepler's Books on Saturday, Feb. 12 and had finished it by Sunday Feb. 13

This book also reminds me of "The City Not Long After" by Pat Murphy, which I also fell in love with when I read it a few years ago. (You can't say no to any book where San Francisco has been taken over by the artist community and someone has painted the Golden Gate Bridge blue.) Pat Murphy and her group of Brazen Hussies(2 more great writers) will get their own blog entry - I just looked her up on the web and am also intrigued by many of the books written by the other Hussies, especially Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein which apparently ties together children's books with the BART system somehow...

Prey by Michael Crichton

We were at the library and I saw this book and got hooked on it once I started reading.
Like most of Crichton's other books it is very gripping and quite scary. This one is about swarms of nanotechnology "insects" (man-made with biological additions that allow them to now learn, reproduce, and even imitate the human body).

It's set here in Mountain View - as the protagonist and his wife both work for Mountain View based sketchy Silicon Valley companies - his company programmed the code for the swarm which her company then bought (unbeknownst to him) and started using it to make these actual swarms (first they were to be used for military cameras).

I think I finished by the morning after I checked it out -- I read it that night and then took it to breakfast at the local bagel place and read it there and finished it there. Very hard to put down!