Double Feature

Last night, instead of reading W&P as I intended, I got hooked by TCM. First I had to watch The Philadelphia Story because as we all know, NO-ONE can pass up Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. All in the same movie!!! It was great. Katherine Hepburn was great, her clothes were kinda bad. I would never pick that party dress. Jimmy Stewart was great, he won the Oscar that year. Cary Grant was gorgeous and charming. His hair was super black and shiny. sigh.

Then they played another George Cukor movie, The Women, and it was great too. This film is a love it or hate it, with stereotypical portrayals of women, and old fashioned views on marriage and fidelity. The Women, based on a play by Clare Booth Luce starred Joan Crawford as the baddie, Norma Shearer as the excellent Mary Haines and Rosalind Russell as the very funny Sylvia Fowler. Russell's physical performance alone made the movie worth watching. Not to mention all the hair, hats and fabulous socialite outfits.

The crazy thing about this film was that there is not a male in it. At All. Even the entire supporting cast including extras was female. Female background people, female orchestra, female servants. Amazing. I kept expecting a husband to stroll on screen to subdue the wacky women. Nope.

Being a modern gal, it was a little tough to take this portrait of women as gossipy and silly and preening and dependent on men. The people I really take issue with were the absent male characters. What a bunch of lice! Cheating, Cheating Cheating. What were those poor New York Socialites to do? Gossip and file for divorce I guess.

Edited to Add:

I keep finding that I cannot stop mentally revising my posts. Now that I wrote about Skeletons on the Zahara, I have so many more things to say about it. Plus I keep seeing things that would totally go with that post. Plus I hate what I wrote.

I did use "Edited to Add:" yesterday. A little trick I learned from my blogging mentor Stimey.

I also suck at revising. Tenses, run-on sentences, spelling, it never ends. I can spell almost any word aloud, but typing coherently is very difficult for me. Every time I click back to review this blog I see something I need to correct. Already clicked published? Phooey, I just hop right in and change it. Y'all will probably never notice anyway.

Another super hard thing about having a book blog is reading. One has to read books to talk about them. It's tough to read books when you spend so much damn time watching TV. For instance last night, I watched Obsessed and My Life on the D-list. Kathy Griffin KILLS me. Then for good measure, and because I want to be supportive of his new show, I put in a little time with Conan. By midnight, I wasn't into reading a whole lot about Pierre and Natasha.

I think it's time for a TV free week, I will have to DVR So You Think You Can Dance and maybe then I will be able to complete War and Peace, which is on it's second renewal. See what I mean about run-ons?

Survival Coincidence

I had just finished my torturously difficult to write review of Skeletons on the Zahara, and was feeling mildly embarrassed about my gross out first paragraph. So I flipped on the tube and found Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern Survival Special. Hah! I love multi-media studies! I hope he eats something really awful.

I'm not sure two days in the jungle is quite hard core enough to compete with what I've been reading though. Sorry Mr. Zimmern.

Surviving, again

Although the subtitle to Skeletons on the Zahara is "A True Story of Survival" I didn't realize that this would be yet another survival book. Duh. This is kind of the ultimate survivor book in which you learn that it is apparently okay to drink urine. Your own, your shipmate's, a camel's, whatever. You can also drink the green liquid in a camel's stomach, and eat the contents of the small intestine. If you are hungry, snails are delicious, as are locusts; just pull off their heads and legs first.

I can't wait to go on vacation to the Sahara!

Dean King endeavors to update Captain James Riley's 1816 memoir, introducing a story familiar to almost every 19th century American to a modern audience. Once I got past the detailed recounting of the ill-fated ocean voyage, things sped up. I was mostly interested in the gruesome horror the crew faced once the ship was dashed against rocks. As a historical narrative, Skeletons on the Zahara has a distracting number of characters, dates, and locations. I blithely ignored the maps, place names and names of many characters, preferring to focus on the action rather than get bogged down in the details.

Other than a fine Sunday's entertainment, I got two main things out of this book; one a very thought provoking look at Nomads in northwestern Africa and a lesson in heroism from James Riley.

King did plenty of his own research for this book, as shown in his extensive bibliography. He even took a trek in the Sahara on a camel, trying to recreate some of what the castaways went through. The life of the desert nomads was amazingly brutal, many of them subsisting on camel milk and small amounts of foraged food. Perhaps in reaction to the extreme climate, the culture is correspondingly wild and rough, with a strongest take all mind set. Despite the harshness of the society Captain Riley and his crew encounter admirable bravery and honor from a few of the nomads they encounter.

Captain Riley is a great character. He carefully observes the people around him and is able to judge situations cannily and modifying his behavior in turn. At times, dangerously standing up for his men, or being meek and humble as the situation requires. It seems that most Western castaways had little hope of returning home when they landed on the West Coast of Africa and Captain Riley was a rare example of a hero, getting at least half of his crew home again.

Edited to add: This book is packed full of fun extras, including a glossary, index, bibliography, suggested reading, and more!

Predictable

I just got on Amazon to look at some of the books I put in my Western Non-Westerns list and realized how I am totally predictable.

In the "Customers who bought this item also bought" Kent Haruf, Leif Enger, Sara Gruen, and David Wroblewski were all in the first two screens full of suggestions. All the covers have cool colors and shots of the sky.

Don't bother with this blog, just check Amazon, and you can find my personality, big as life.

Stupid marketing whizzes. Rats.

Western Non-westerns

I've noticed that I frequently mention books that are set in the American West. I finally realized I love this setting when a friend of mine requested recommendations that were not American. At first I was embarrassed. I must be terribly single minded. How simple and silly of me to love American books so much.

Then I realized Duh. Of course I love books about America. America is great. It is a sweeping landscape full of hope, personal explorations, soaring vistas and plenty of tragedy. Here are a few more authors and titles that deal with the west that I love.

Kent Haruf. This author is tremendous. He has a quiet tone and good stories. The stuff he writes about, family tragedies, loneliness, are sad, but I have such a glad feeling when I think about Plainsong or The Tie that Binds. When looking up Kent Haruf, I just noticed there is a sequel to Plainsong called Eventide --I can't wait!


Larry Mc Murtry He is quite prolific but has some misses along with his hits. Best is Lonesome Dove which I'm planning to re-read someday. Two men, Call and Gus set out from a lonely Texas town on a cattle drive to Montana. It's a great novel and a prototypical western, disqualifying it from this list. Read it anyway.

McMurtry also wrote The Last Picture Show it is set in mid-twentieth century Texas and focuses on the coming of age of a couple of teenage boys. I recommend The Last Picture Show above the two books that follow it, they aren't quite as good and TLPS stands on it's own nicely.

All of these Larry McMurtry books have been made into movies or mini-series. The Lonesome Dove miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones was very good, I caught it on cable recently.

Steinbeck. I mentioned The Grapes of Wrath. You pretty much can't go wrong with Steinbeck, but East of Eden is maybe on top. Although critics don't, I love Cannery Row (not a western). It has great characters and kind of a homey quality. If home is living near fish factories and whorehouses.

Annie Proulx (pronounced approximately Prew) wrote That Old Ace in the Hole Set in Texas. It has her traditional almost comic names, and odd trajectories of people's lives. I found it to be enjoyable, almost as much as I liked The Shipping News. (Which I loved but is set in Newfoundland and therefore does not qualify for this list. I also totally liked the movie of the Shipping News starring Kevin Spacey.)

Louise Erdrich Plague of Doves. This is a kind of twisty and slightly confusing book dealing with reservation families and white families over the course of the last century. I am not too familiar with Louise Erdrich, but I liked this book and have gathered the impression that she writes powerfully about the west and reservations and the like.

I feel like I'm forgetting something...

ACK! How could I forget My Antonia and O Pioneers! by Willa Cather? These are portraits of immigrants in Nebraska making a new life and an impact on the land. Excellent reading. I re-read these pretty regularly. I am looking forward to checking out The Song of the Lark which I somehow missed during my Willa Cather phase.


Books I have mentioned previously on this blog and that are set in the American West but not necessarily westerns are here:

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger

Deep Survival

Here's my problem with survival, everyone dies sometime. No-one survives death, so what makes anyone a survivor ever? Surviving may just mean living long enough to tell others your story. If you don't leave a written record, did you live at all?

It turns out some people are just better at living longer in perilous situations and those skills can be translated from everyday life and back again. Here's the main point when in a bad situaton: don't panic. If you are panicking, don't move or act until you have calmed down. Also, don't be paralyzed by your panic. Be smart and you might survive.

I started reading Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales and wasn't hooked. I have recently read a few books involving survival; Into the Wild by John Krakauer, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and other Survivors by by Edward E. Leslie and Sterling Seagrave; (all worthwhile) so maybe I was kinda tired of surviving. I decided to give it another shot, opened to another, later chapter and was sucked in.

Gonzales provides anecdotes about survivors in many different situations, examining the issue from all sides, sprinkling in brain function and psychology and personal anecdotes. He laces it all together with his own quest for survival and his relationship with his father. All the time making frequent reference to the amygdala.

At the very least, Deep Survival was a nice break from Russia and Napoleon. I am going to try to get back to Mr. Tolstoy tonight or tomorrow.

Not Reading

Argh! I am so frustrated with myself for neglecting this blog. I mean to write, but am not actually reading much.

I had a great trip to New York but spent eight hours on the bus knitting and daydreaming. I came home with almost a whole mitten, and some great new fantasies about a life in New York, but with no pages read.

I did pick up Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales but the first chapter didn't draw me in. I may have another look at it, but will probably put it and Catch-22 into my never to be read stack.

I have the evening to myself tonight, but plan to go shopping rather than read a book.

So, stay tuned, I may start reading again, I may not. I do plan to keep blogging though, and may have to get creative with my topics.

Cheap, but kinda lazy

Remember how I said how much I don't pay for all the materials I read?

Sometimes I pay. Here's why:

I normally renew books online, but I recently got a new computer. Because I am slothful, I did not transfer all my passwords and logins to a new secret yet convenient place on my new computer. Because I would have to get up off my botto, which is large, and find my library card to look up the number to login and renew; I didn't renew W&P. Even though I vaguely knew that it was due soon. It was not due soon, it was due three dollars and fifty cents ago.

Darn.

Edited to add: I did in fact finally renew. I have another three weeks. Not to worry.