Our cable company has FINALLY come through on the promise of five months ago and brought us OnDemand. Which, when you work from home, is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever depending on how productive you’re trying to be.

We had this service when we lived in New Hampshire, too, so I’m a pro at it now. It’s like having your cable service be your Tivo for you, but you just don’t get to pick the shows. Since I am broke butt po and can’t afford a real Tivo, this version is fantastic. They carry random movies, new releases that you can buy if you gots the cash, and a bunch of cable shows like BBC’s Coupling and Adult Swim’s Home Movies. AND since we have HBO, we also get all the HBO series and a bunch of their currently running movies. Which is really the only way to have HBO, because otherwise the movies you want to see always seem to start a half hour before you sat down.

This new version of OnDemand that just showed up also includes the single best use of the television medium I’ve ever seen: Personal Ads. You can scroll through this list of internet handles like abeil and xxcit, and then when you pick one, up pops this picture of a person of varying degrees of freakiness talking about why they’re so great for four solid minutes. There are not words to discuss the genius. IT’S. AWESOME.

So, as if I wasn’t distracted before, I now have all these nameless people calling to me from my T.V. “Don’t clean the house, Tresa, let me tell you all about myself!” I found one the other day with the thumbnail, “ziplining with monkey’s in Africa, flying to Asia, adventure seeking, can you keep up?” I expected to either see a frat boy or his female counterpart pretending to be wild and zany to distract from the lack of substance, and instead found a quite pretty woman, despite being overweight and having a wicked underbite but rocking on the hair and makeup front, describing how she’s from South Africa and studies International Relations so that she can be a legitimate traveling bum for her whole life. Wow! People are fascinating!

And some are freaky and fun to laugh at.

The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore
The pile of books to review is growing larger and larger and I’m bored and pissed off right now, so I doubt very much this will be my most profound post ever, but it distracts me from the crap in my life and makes me feel productive at the same time, so here I go.

Bear and I picked this up right before a road trip to visit the inlaws. It was right before Christmas and it looked amusing and unique, so we took a chance on it. We’re suckers at Christmas. Although not big enough suckers to be entertained by “The Christmas Shoes.” That is such treacly sap I go diabetic just thinking about it.

This was one of the greatest accidental discoveries we’ve ever had. We started reading it together in bed like the old married couple that we are. Bear reads while I knit. [shakes head] I swear, I’m not a little old lady.

Bear has a learning disability and has had some trouble reading, so he often reads books to me so he can overcome his problem, and it entertains my brain while my hands are busy. But with this book, we only got through the second chapter before I took it away from him and started reading it myself. It’s freaking hilarious and Bear was stepping on all the jokes! We laughed so hard we nearly wet the bed. Then we took it with us on our road trip and I read the book to him the whole way there and back.

Essentially, an angel comes to a small California town to grant a Christmas miracle. Through a comedy of errors a little boy thinks he sees Santa Claus die, so he asks the angel to bring Santa back to life. In the process, the angel unleashes the crap that hits the fan.

It’s hard for me to find words to express how funny this book is. The characters are bizarre, the scenario is so twisted that Moore *has* to be on medication to come up with it. And I was holding my sides the entire time.

Life is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Claubman

Since one of the books I want to write one day is a memoir, although I don’t think I could publish it as one since my family is crazy and vindictive, I read a lot of them. And it’s a tricky genre. How do you come off the way you mean to? A lot of memoirs either get stuck in self-pity or self-flagellation. Either everything you did was wrong or everything that happened to you was wrong. I have read a few that also suffer under the weight of arrogance. Obviously, writing a memoir at all is a fairly arrogant undertaking. What’s so special about you? But a good memoir writer can skate underneath that by describing what’s so special about life in general.

Life Is So Good was a pleasure. Not necessarily to read, because it wasn’t especially lyrical or descriptive or weighty, but it’s a pleasure that it exists. It’s a book that you forgive for any errors or missed steps because it’s just a joy. It’s the story of George Dawson, a 103 year old black man who learned to read at 98 years old. Set against the backdrop of this turbulent century you’d expect harrowing stories about wars and the civil rights movement and discrimination. There are a couple harrowing stories, but Dawson learned his lesson from those early on in life and just strove to keep his nose clean for the rest. When asked about WWI he says,

“I mean all this killing over someone’s honor. Seems like, especially back then,
folks were going to die if a white man is put off too badly. They was too ready
to kill each other. For colored folks, it was different. We didn’t have the time
to worry about honor and we didn’t have enough power to lose. Staying alive,
keeping food on the table, that’s what counted for us. That’s what I remember
about 1914.”

Staying alive and keeping food on the table is what the majority of the book is about. We read about Dawson’s succession of jobs, his family, but they all happen so fast that when you read about his retirement you think, “Already?” It’s not until the book is nearly over and the authors are wrapping things up that you read, “I had come to record a life of hardship and was not prepared to hear of gratitude,” and it suddenly all sinks in. Dawson is, of course at 103, old school. He doesn’t have any rage left in him, it’s all quiet contemplation. But I don’t think the book emphasizes that enough. There had to have been a time where he was angry about how he had been kept down his whole life. Maybe there wasn’t. Dawson seems to just understand the way life is and accepts it completely. When asked if a glass is half empty or half full he says, “I see it as being enough. So it’s just fine.”

Glaubman obviously tried to get Dawson to react more. He brought news clippings to every meeting trying to get a response to some of the shocking events in history, but Dawson relentlessly didn’t care about what was going on in the world. He always brought the story back to where he was working at the time and how he was putting food on the table.

The book really was a lovely way to pass the time on an airplane, but I wanted more payoff. If Dawson had managed to live to this age and gain perspective, I wanted to know more about what that perspective taught him. If he won’t offer insights into history, then tell me what he thinks about today.

Hometown by Tracy Kidder

I’ve been trying to read more non-fiction lately. One of many reading goals I have. In fact, I didn’t realize just how many reading goals I have until I started writing about my reading.

1) Become more well-read. Read the classics and Pulitzer or Nobel prize winners.
2) Fill in gaps from childhood wasted on garbage books.
3) Read every book on my bookshelf before buying (too many) more books.
4) Read more non-fiction. Your degree was in history, remember?

Maybe my BA burned me out, but I’ve read hardly any history at all since I left school, and very little non-fiction. So I figured that by reading Tracy Kidder’s Hometown, I’d almost be accomplishing two goals with one try. Kidder’s a Pulitzer prize winning author, just not for this one.

Hands down, Kidder is darn fine at what he does. How, praytell, does an author take the most mundane and banal of topics, so trite that “Main Street, USA” is almost a synonym for vanilla, and make it a fascinating read?

This is another book I got from a clearinghouse and, being unfamiliar with Kidder’s work before this, and seeing as the copy I bought is some kind of advance copy without the usual marketing, I actually wondered if it was a novel that had been misplaced. Either Kidder takes great liberties with his subjects, which I don’t believe for a second, or he just has a *remarkable* gift for getting to the core of what his interviewees are hiding. The frankness he inspires makes for an entertaining, educational and, that favorite buzz-word of the literary critic, “fully-realized” work.

The titular Hometown is Northhampton, MA. And after living in New Hampshire for a year and a half, Massachusetts takes up a significant spot in my heart. I was on point to spot something wrong, and I never did find it. Kidder nails the “vibe” (oh dear, my California roots are showing) of the city perfectly, from the history to the new progressive movement. Out of the many reasons I enjoyed this book, that was the main one. Through my years of moving from state to state, I’ve learned that there are such sharp divisions between segments of our national culture, that sometimes we might as well be different countries. And I’m not talking about the red and the blue states, although, yes. I’m talking about my blue state of California and my blue state of New Hampshire. The Yankees and the Granolas. The Texans I lived with in my childhood, the Utahns of my college years, and the Seattlites of my teenagehood. Each group is so widely different even as they seem so similar to the rest of the world. And each group is completely ignorant of what makes them distinct. It’s not just the Midwesterners who think they’re the “real Americans.” We all do.

But Kidder picked up the distinctions and described them with clarity, while giving them the national context it deserved. So that while this does seem like the most apple-pie-and-baseball American town in the nation, you can still see the New England Yankee influence.

He treats class and ethnicity differences with the same understanding and journalistic, almost to the point of scientific, objectivity. For every eccentric millionaire in the book, there’s also a coke dealer. For every struggling but upwardly mobile single mother, there’s a police informant who’s luck is running out.

The only complaint I had about the book was that it emphasized my dissatisfaction with where I’m living. I’m sure Modesto is a lovely town and I’ve met some lovely people, but I long for that small town where everybody knows the police by name and talks to the mayor and belongs. Heck, Modesto probably is that town for a lot of people. Maybe if I stayed in one place for longer than a year I’d discover that for myself.

Half Magic and Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager

I’m striving towards the goal of being well-read, and considering how frequently a literary reference goes right over my head, I have a long way to go. I’ve been trying to pay special attention to the Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners when I pick a new book, feeling righteous every time I do.

But you can only struggle through a Bellow novel for so long without feeling like a dunderhead.

It’s at those times when I reach for some Children’s Literature. Partly because it’s comforting to read something where I’m pretty much guaranteed to know what all the words mean, and partly because there are some gaps in my reading there that I’m trying to fill too. Oh what I would give for a kindly librarian to have turned me in the right direction. To have some sweet old lady pull the Danielle Steele novel from my chubby hands and give me something worthwhile to read. Cest la vie.

At any rate, I’m trying to make up for lost time now. I own the entire Dahl oeuvre, and of course everything by J.K. Rowling, and a few other favorites I picked up from school, but I’m always looking for who else I missed. I *completely* missed Edward Eager. When I worked at Borders these were the books we were told to recommend to parents coming to find something else to shove under their kids nose before the spell of Harry Potter wore off. And though they were written for a decidedly less jaded and media savvy generation, they always did the trick.

It’s refreshing to see kids being kids again. Harry Potter I could read as an adult and relate to as an adult, and I suspect that’s what kids like about it too. Who didn’t want to be older than they were as children? That’s why the half years are so important to reflect your correct age. I remember a neighbor girl bragging that a ten-year-old was coming to live with her. In fact, that single trait was so impressive that that’s how we referred to her exclusively – The Ten Year Old. I think kids see these life and death conflicts in Harry Potter and fantasize about their adult lives – or maybe the even better alternative, their teenage lives – not their current ones.

But Edward Eager celebrates childhood. A time of fantasy, and yet not being sure when fantasy no longer becomes acceptable. The children in his books seem more pertinent to today’s generation than any other because they are so obviously torn between the two worlds. They want to believe in magic, and yet they feel pressure to be responsible and well-behaved and Mature. Yet ultimately, the childhood impulse wins out and they have all kinds of magical adventures.

In Half Magic, a group of siblings finds a magic coin that grants wishes, but only by half. After only a few misadventures, they find the loophole and start wishing for things like, “I wish I was twice as far as home again.” In Knight’s Castle, another group of children end up in the world of their dolls every time they go to sleep. And they are forced to repent for any abuses they’ve inflicted. Every magic scenario Eager invents is just charming, and something that would be guaranteed to tickle the funny bone of a kid.