The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen."

To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others. The last tribute alive receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food. All year, the Capitol will show the winning district gifts of grain and oil and even delicacies like sugar while the rest of us battle starvation.

"It is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks," intones the mayor.

-The Hunger Games

First, a programming note: I hadn't intended to step away from this blog for so long. I gave up on the collection of mystery short stories because they proved to be too hard-boiled for my taste. The next book I picked up, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, also proved to be slow going. While batting out on the reading front, I was also working on my own NaNoWriMo project, which meant my free time was devoted to writing, not reading. All in all, not a combination that encourages posts here.

Luckily, I had The Hunger Games in tow as I traveled last week.For the first time in weeks, I had a page-turner in front of me instead of a slow slog. It was a breath of fresh air.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is set some time in the future, when the country has been divided into twelve districts (there were thirteen—see the excerpt), under the totalitarian rule of the Capitol. The exact circumstances that took North America to Panem, as it is now known, are unclear, though both natural disasters and war are mentioned. We see Panem through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl living in District 12. Katniss has seen enough poverty and despair to be wary of the government, though she is too smart to say anything aloud. In District 12, you never know who might be listening.

Katniss, an able huntress, has provided for her family since the death of her father in a mining accident some years earlier. Technically hunting is illegal, but even officials are willing to turn a blind eye to the activities of Katniss and her partner Gale in exchange for some much-needed meat. Daily living is a struggle, but Katniss is a survivor.

Then comes the annual drawing for the Hunger Games. Each district picks two representatives between the ages of 12 and 18. These 24 tributes will be brought together to the Capitol in order to fight to the death. Katniss braces herself to hear her name, but she never expected the name that is actually called: Primrose Everdeen, her younger sister.

Katniss volunteers to take her sister's place and soon she, along with fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark, are whisked away to the Capitol. What they encounter there is a strange mix of vulgar overindulgence (the rich foods, the elaborate costumes) and what soon becomes a bitter fight for survival. Along the way, Katniss tries to make sense of the people around her. Aside from Peeta, whose motivations Katniss cannot fathom, there's her drunken mentor Haymitch, the only living Hunger Games winner from District 12; her perceptive costumer, Cinna; and the many other tributes, including the sprightly Rue and the bellicose Cato.

Honestly, when I first heard about The Hunger Games, I didn't think it was for me. The "fight to the death" angle seemed much too bleak for me to get any enjoyment from it. However, I kept hearing good things, and I'm so glad I read it. Katniss is about the best heroine for an adventure story you can imagine, and Suzanne Collins keeps things going at a brisk pace. I could have easily finished the book in one day, but I didn't want to be stranded without any reading material. I just put sequel Catching Fire on hold at the library. I anticipate it's going to be a long wait, but I'm very excited to keep reading about this world.

Up next: Good question! I have a few magazines laying around. Maybe Tales of the City?

Born Round by Frank Bruni

I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted when I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except I wasn't so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

-Born Round

"Born round, you don't die square." So believes Frank Bruni's grandmother: that kind of change isn't possible in a lifetime. What does that mean for Bruni, though? He's a born eater, a self-professed baby bulimic who has struggled with food issues his entire life. At the beginning of the book, he's working in Rome as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. After a rough period during which he covered the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush and piled on the pounds, he finally seems to have his weight under control. A life-changing opportunity comes his way: the position of Times food critic is open, and he's up for consideration. But can he handle the intense commitment to food that the job requires without falling back into his old habits?

Having posed the question, Bruni travels back to the beginning of things. He details a childhood filled with food and love, with the former seen as an appropriate way to express the latter. His beloved grandmother, born in Italy, never makes anything short of a feast for her family, and Bruni is happy to partake. He does notice that his appetite outstrips that of his siblings, and even at a young age he's bigger than his older brother. His mother begins to devise diets for the two of them to try, but it breaks his heart to turn down one of his grandmother's fritti.

Bruni is able to (temporarily) leave diets behind when he finds he has a natural affinity for swimming. His rigorous practice schedule keeps his weight in check, although he still finds himself eating more than anyone around him. When he goes off to college and quits swimming, he scrambles to prevent his overeating from affecting his weight, eventually turning to bulimia. Although he manages to recover from that, his weight problems continue to plague him. He's intensely self-conscious about his weight, going so far as to repeatedly postpone dates so that he can lose just a few more pounds before he's seen. It may come as no surprise that these dates often never happen.

Things change for Bruni, but slowly, and they get worse before they get better. Born Round is not only a very personal account of  his struggle with weight, but also a moving story of his family life and the sweetness of his professional success. He really lays himself bare before his reader. It breaks my heart to think back to one story he tells, of a family gathering when he was at his heaviest. The siblings are sniping at one another, and one of his brothers calls him fat. It's everything he fears and hates about himself, and he flees the room, finding an out-of-the-way place where he can cry. It's hard not to be drawn in by a writer who is willing to show such vulnerability.

I very much enjoyed Born Round. I spent awhile reading it, but I could easily see how someone could delve in and read for hours. Bruni is a very likable narrator, and in addition to all of the personal stories, he also has some good inside dirt about being a food critic. I think it would be an excellent book to travel with. I would love to read more by him—maybe I'll dig up some old reviews, if I can find them. I'm pretty jealous of his facility with words, I must say. His prose seems effortless. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he was thirty, and you can see why. Pretty remarkable.

Up next: The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos (Wire shout-out!).

Lit by Mary Karr

That's pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes. 

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn't get public grants, but this guy really can't do anything else. 

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I'd not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

-Lit

Lit is author Mary Karr's third memoir, following her hugely successful account of her childhood, The Liars' Club, and Cherry, in which she recalled her teenage years. I haven't read either of those books, and it did occur to me before picking up Lit that it might not be ideal to drop into the middle of Karr's story. Although Lit might have more resonance in some places for readers who are more aware of the particulars of Karr's background, I found that it worked extremely well as a standalone book as well.

I stumbled upon Lit at the library, where it was shelved opposite Stephen King's On Writing. I had been craving some high-quality nonfiction and, based on some dimly-recalled reviews, I thought that Lit would fit the bill. In Lit, Karr picks up her story on the cusp of a sea change in her life: college. It's a big step for her, a decision she grapples with, and one that will help set her on the winding path to becoming a bestselling writer and award-winning poet (Guggenheim Fellowship!). It's a tumultuous journey in which she is both buoyed by love for her husband (and later her son) and dragged further and further down into the murky depths of alcoholism. The latter takes a wrecking ball to the fragile stability she'd wrought with the former, as you might imagine. Recovery is a slow, halting process.

William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Karr's past pops up continually, from the ongoing drama of her relationship with her parents (Mother and Daddy, as she calls them) to her unease at fitting in with her husband's patrician family to her concern about righting the wrongs of her childhood in raising her own son. The glimpses of her childhood that we get in Lit are traumatic, not the kind of thing that it's easy to make peace with. Karr struggles long and hard, and, surprisingly (to herself most of all), begins to find solace in prayer. She's cynical at first, refusing even to get to her knees as she mutters two sentences of gratitude. Through contemplation and discussion with many people around her, particularly those she's gotten to know through AA, her thoughts on religion begin to change. This can be a tricky subject to address without becoming overly preachy; luckily, Karr is an adept writer who always maintains a humanizing, almost self-deprecating element when recounting her conversion.

Karr's training as a poet is evident throughout Lit. She has a gift for finding the perfect word, and her choices often recall her hardscrabble childhood (people tend to holler instead of yell or shout, for example, as you can see in the excerpt above). It wasn't a difficult read in terms of language, but it was intense, which makes me think I'll wait a bit before picking up The Liars' Club. Based on Lit, though, I know I'll want to read it at some point.

Up next: Continuing the memoir streak with Born Round by Frank Bruni.

On Writing by Stephen King

[B]ooks are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laudromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

-On Writing 

When I was about 15, I went through a Stephen King phase. It was summer, I remember, and I'd picked up a sheet from the public library with spaces to record everything I read (a habit I picked back up in college, and basically just expanded upon when starting this blog). The Stand, Thinner, The Shining—just a fraction of King's bibliography, but a pretty good run. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided his books were too scary for me and moved on to other things (I think this was also around the same time of my ill-fated foray into Oprah's Book Club books, oddly enough). On Writing is the first Stephen King book I've read since, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

On Writing is subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, which tidily sums up the different sections of the book. In the first section, C.V., King lays out his history and details how he got from the four-page stories he wrote as a kid to nailing rejection slips to his wall to publishing his first big success, Carrie. King has a special talent for developing an instant rapport with his reader, and I was with him immediately. He's plain-spoken but clever, honest about criticism he's received, and, heck, he just seems like a cool guy. It's hard not to be in his corner.

In the second section, On Writing, King gets into advice for aspiring writers. He covers everything from grammar to dialogue to editing, with some nifty examples included. His biggest piece of advice is simple but undoubtedly true: if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. (I don't have the book with me right now, but I believe King stated he read 50-60 books a year; a list of his reading in the years he was working on this book is included at the end). I first heard the advice about reading more to write better from my 9th grade English teacher. As a voracious reader since childhood, I could always handle the "read a lot" part. "Write a lot" is harder. King recommends at least 1000 words a day (he himself writes 2000 daily). Whew. While not impossible in the least (you have to average 1700 words a day to make it through NaNoWriMo), it's a definite commitment. Which is good, really—you should be committed to something if you want to get better at it. But coming up with the words yourself is harder than reading them, that's for sure.*

The third section of On Writing is the most affecting. In it, King covers the 1999 accident in which he was hit by an out-of-control van. As someone who has been in the hospital pretty recently, I was wincing in sympathy. The extent of his injuries is actually difficult for me to fathom. I know how awful it is to break your leg in one place. King broke his in nine places; his doctors seriously considered amputation. Plus there was the broken hip, broken ribs, collapsed lung, etc. Really horrifying.

King was in the midst of writing On Writing when the accident occurred, and—unsurprisingly—it took him a while to get back to it.  Thank goodness he was able to. I enjoyed On Writing thoroughly. It even left me open to idea of trying a little more of his scarier works in the future—Misery, for one, sounds pretty gripping. It might be a good Halloween-y sort of read...

Up next: Continuing on the memoir kick: Lit by Mary Karr, whose book The Liars' Club is said to have started the memoir craze.

*This entry (minus the excerpt and this aside) is 610 words, just as a point of comparison, and took me a good hour to write.

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

-All the President's Men 

When I was in college, I took a course on the coming of the Civil War. The professor of that course always emphasized how different the war was to the people who lived it. Today we are able to keep the outcome of the war in mind even when we're talking about Fort Sumter, and it's easy to view everything with the advantage of hindsight. But no one in 1861 said, "Alright boys, it's time for the Civil War. We expect to be at it for the next four years. Those of you in the gray coats...don't get too excited."

Similarly, Bob Woodward had no idea that that phone call he received the morning of June 19th would help to set into motion an investigation that would eventually lead to the resignation of the president. In retrospect: well, that's a pretty momentous phone call.

Everything in All the President's Men is like this, and with good reason. The book was published in June of 74; Nixon didn't resign until August. Even at the end of the book, at that time, it must have been difficult to believe that it would come to that. I can see why—it's really hard for me to imagine a presidency falling apart like that (even remembering back to the '98 scandal).

It's such a gradual process. There's about a billion people involved—the robbers, the people who paid them, the people who approved the payments, the people who covered that up, the people who hired the people who covered that up, etc. Thankfully Woodward & Bernstein provide a handy list of characters to refer back to, as well as photos of some of the key players. As someone who had a astonishingly poor grasp of Watergate* prior to reading the book, I must say that was pretty helpful.

All the President's Men wasn't the quickest read, but I think it was a pretty important one. Coming into this book, I only had very basic facts at my disposal: there was a break-in, Nixon had some incriminating tapes, he resigned. I had no sense of the timeline. (Look back up there if you're not so familiar with this point in history: The break-in was in June of '72, Nixon resigned in August of '74—that is a long time for that whole thing to play out). I think I learned a lot. It says something to me that those incriminating tapes, one of the few bits of the period I was aware of, were not even mentioned until the last ten pages of the book—that's how much was going on and that's how long it took to really get Nixon implicated in things. Crazy story. You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Up next: Stephen King's memoir On Writing, which is very enjoyable so far.

*I only just recently learned, for instance, that Spiro Agnew resigned from the vice-presidency for reasons unrelated to Watergate. D'oh.

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs

After Julie and I watched the John Adams miniseries on HBO, I had two reactions. The first was unsettling: if I'd been alive in Colonial times, I would not have been on the side of the patriots. This is an unpleasant epiphany for someone who's always considered himself moderately patriotic. But I'm convinced of it.

I wouldn't be a king-loving Loyalist, mind you. I'd be somewhere in the middle. John Adams estimated that a third of the country was patriots, a third loyalist, and a third neutral. That'd be me: neutral. 

I don't have a revolutionary nature. I'm not confrontational enough. I'd probably grumble about the tax on tea, but in the end, I'd cough up the money rather than putting on a feathered headdress and storming a ship. I mean, I've shelled out $3.45 for a tall pumpkin latte without declaring war on Starbucks. That's truly intolerable.

-The Guinea Pig Diaries

So I was doing a little research on The Guinea Pig Diaries, for my own personal edification—or perhaps because I was having trouble getting started with this entry—and I stumbled across a couple of interesting pieces of information. 1) In paperback, this book has a new name: it's now called My Life as as Experiment. I've Googled the reason for this change without success. (Frustrating! It's so stupid, yet I must know.) 2) Jack Black's production company has bought the rights to turn The Guinea Pig Diaries/My Life as an Experiment into a TV show. Intriguing.

Anyway, what's this book all about? Anyone who's read A.J. Jacobs' previous books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, knows that he is game to completely reorder his life around a certain goal or idea. (Perhaps that's why the title changed. My Life as an Experiment does sum that up pretty nicely). His latest book includes nine essays that cover some of the other projects he has taken on, from living his life according to George Washington's principles to outsourcing everything he does to India. Naturally, there are consequences to all of these decisions: some funny, some aggravating, and some that actually lead to lasting  change.

The Guinea Pig Diaries is a quick, funny read, but it's ultimately less satisfying than either of Jacobs' previous books.  Because each experiment is short, it can never be as absorbing as one of his longer projects—for either him or the reader. I'm not sure that any of these projects could have been sustained for that length—so good for Jacobs for not trying to stretch something that shouldn't have been—but I am eager to see him get back to such a project. Jacobs really excels at taking things on that benefit from in-depth exploration, and making those projects both informative and funny. The Year of Living Biblically even had an unexpected profundity, when Jacobs realized how his challenge to himself had changed his life. (In The Guinea Pig Diaries, he notes that he still is devoted to the concept of thanksgiving, which he first practiced in the previous book.) I did enjoy The Guinea Pig Diaries, but I don't expect to return to it the way I have with The Know-It-All, or the way I feel I could with The Year of Living Biblically.

Up next: Watching Frost/Nixon, I discovered I have some serious gaps in my 70s American history knowledge. Thus, All The President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I had spent my whole life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly's absence. The thought of that lump of scar tissue vanishing had sent me so light-headed and off balance that I ended up doing gobsmackingly moronic things like getting hammered with my siblings, a concept that just two days earlier would have sent me running screaming for the hills. I felt it would be a good idea to get my bearings back before I did something dumb enough to end in amputation.

-Faithful Place

Readers first met Frank Mackey in Tana French's novel The Likeness, where he was introduced as an Undercover detective and former mentor of our heroine, Cassie Maddox. In Faithful Place, the story becomes Frank's when he's called back to his childhood home in inner-city Dublin, a place he long ago fled. The reason he returns? A forlorn blue suitcase, shoved up the chimney in an abandoned house more than twenty years earlier, only recently rediscovered. It once belonged to Frank's first love, Rosie Daly.

After dating secretly for months, they decided to run off together, Frank and Rosie, away from the hardscrabble Faithful Place. Frank waited hours on the night they were supposed to meet, eventually finding an unaddressed note from Rosie in which she said she'd gone to England. Frank assumed it was for him, that she'd decided to leave on her own. He didn't go home, though. He went ahead, not to return to Faithful Place until the suitcase brought him back. He'd never thought that Rosie might have met a bad end. It's a shattering idea.

Frank begins sniffing around the old neighborhood, asking the questions he'd never thought to ask: who might have known he was dating Rosie? Who could have seen her that night? He can't be part of an official investigation, of course. But he's soon drawn back into the rhythm of Faithful Place, where every resident knows exactly what's going on in every other home and is pleased as punch to keep that information from the pigs. His own home is worse: his brothers and sisters never got out, his alcoholic father still has everyone walking on eggshells.

It's a pretty grim situation for Frank, but very well realized by Tana French.  Her characters, from Frank's sharp Ma to his sly brother Shay to a chavvy old friend of Rosie's, are vividly drawn. I think her writing is up to the caliber she's maintained in previous books, certainly. All the same, I found Faithful Place slightly less satisfying than I did In The Woods or The Likeness. Partly, to be fair, because I hoped for an update on Cassie and/or Rob when none was forthcoming; that was a bit disappointing. However, I wasn't entirely happy with the resolution to the mystery. I can't put my finger on it exactly, I just didn't care for it. I'm still quite curious to see what French tackles next, though. This book only came out in July, so I suppose I'm in for a bit of a wait. (Still hoping for a book from Sam's point of view!)

Up next: The Guinea Pig Diaries, a collection of essays by A.J. Jacobs, who has written two excellent non-fiction books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse. But in the tournament room, Scrabble has nothing to do with vocabulary. If it did, I – an Ivy league-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud – would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.

-Word Freak

I love Scrabble. I've played it since I was kid and I consider myself to be a decent living room player. But I'll never play at the same level at Stefan Fatsis and, honestly, I wouldn't want to—I get hung up on the whole "real word" thing he discusses in the passage above. Nevertheless I love love love Word Freak.

Word Freak chronicles journalist Stefan Fatsis's journey into the world of competitive Scrabble. It's a weird place, populated by all varieties of social miscreants.  Stefan begins at the bottom of the heap, playing the blue hairs—and not always winning, either. He begins studying words, which means memorization, and lots of it. Can you imagine memorizing a list of two-letter words that are valid in Scrabble? And then, when you've finished that, three-letter words? And four, five, etc. There are more words on each list, naturally. It's a Sisyphean struggle for Stefan, although he does make slow progress.

Word Freak is not all about words, though there are certainly plenty of them. Let's get back to those social miscreants, the real heart of the story. It takes a special kind of person to be an expert Scrabble player. Dedicated would be one word for it. Experts could doubtless think of many more, a fair amount of which might be less flattering. But while Stefan's new Scrabble friends may be single-minded in their devotion to the game, they're also pretty fascinating. There's the friendly but ever-ailing "G.I" Joel Sherman (the G.I stands for "gastrointestinal"). There's the funny, hot-headed Matt Graham, who takes smart pills by the handful in order to boost his performance. Matt's friend, Marlon Hill, a smart, temperamental player out of inner-city Baltimore who is working on a book about race in America. And there's Joe Edley, who has mystical approach to Scrabble and coaches Stefan on the psychological aspect of the game.*

There's many more, besides. Some of them, to be fair, seem perfectly well adjusted — but they also get less face time in Word Freak. Stefan is not condescending, although he is honest about the weirdness level, as are many of players. As time wears on, though, and his obsessiveness about the game grows, he finds he has more and more in common with his Scrabble comrades. It might have been a frightening realization to have, but Stefan often finds himself happy with this crowd, playing Anagrams and rehashing games past. They love the game, they truly do.

And I love this book. I enjoy spending time with people who are happy and successful in a way that might not make sense to the rest of the world.  Good for them. And I especially love that this revolves around language, even if many tournament players might not know (or care about) the definitions of the words they play. There is something exciting about finding the perfect word — be it in writing or, when the universe smiles upon upon you, in the mishmash of tiles on your Scrabble rack. I enjoyed celebrating that in Word Freak. It also really, really made me want to play a game of Scrabble.

Up next: For whatever reason, this entry took me forever to write, so I've already finished Tana French's Faithful Place; I imagine I'll be back to write about it soon. I'm planning on starting The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs later this evening.

*If you're curious to see these players in action, the documentary Word Wars covers at least part of the same time period and features many of the same people.

Moonshine by Alaya Johnson

So I'd been on my bicycle all day and my tailbone felt like someone had been smashing it with a mallet and I had a dead boy—the kind you're never supposed to let turn, if you're an ignorant Other-phobe like Troy—who could double as a vampire pincushion draped across my neck, and damn if I wasn't getting some odd looks as I huffed my way through the busy Canal Street intersection. Why did things like this always happen to me?

I had to laugh, and saw my breath float away in the glare of the electric lamps. Because I'm certifiable.

-Moonshine

Meet Zephyr Hollis, resident of Prohibition-era New York City. She's an all-around do-gooder: night school teacher, blood bank volunteer, champion of women's and Others' rights. Others, of course, being vampires and other such fantastic beasties. They call her the Vampire Suffragette.

Zephyr hails from Montana, the daughter of a renowned vampire hunter (known as a Defender). She was a promising Defender herself, until she decided that Others deserved tolerance, not death. She's a progressive girl, our Zephyr; she's also a vegetarian.

As a night school teacher, Zephyr meets a lot of interesting characters. One of them, the smoldering, mysterious Amir, offers her a proposition: 200 dollars to locate the notorious vampire Rinaldo, overseer of much of New York's fang-friendly underworld. Zephyr's intrigued by Amir, and, generous as she is, she's always hard up for cash. She accepts.

Life, unsurprisingly, gets a lot more dangerous quite quickly for Zephyr. With some trepidation, she works on infiltrating the Turn Boys gang, a group of young vampires who, under Rinaldo's supervision, is responsible for turning children (such as the boy mentioned in the passage above). It's her best bet at getting to Rinaldo, but it's a risky move, particularly once a new vampire intoxicant known as Faust floods the market. Young, volatile vampires? Bad. Young, volatile, drunk vampires? Well, it's certainly not better. And time is running short, as it tends to do in these situations.

Alaya Johnson has created a wonderful world for her characters to inhabit. There's the period itself, which allows for flapper dresses, speakeasies, and some delightful slang. The fact that it's New York makes it doubly fun to me, and I enjoyed envisioning where Zephyr went. (Johnson helpfully includes a map of lower Manhattan if you're less familiar with the area.) What I really liked, though, was the conceit that vampires are just there: no secrecy, no mention of coming out. They're a persecuted, feared minority to be sure, but no one doubts their existence. Considering how commonplace vampire/human stories have been in recent fantasy, this is a nice way of shaking things up.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and would have undoubtedly finished it a lot sooner had I not been in the midst of moving. (I also stretched it out knowing I had no other new books at my disposal). I love Zephyr and I feel that the ending is open-ended enough that a sequel would be welcome. Here's hoping!

Up next: Almost finished with my reread of Word Freak, one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction. And I just received the new Tana French from Amazon today, hooray!

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you're making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don't think that's asking a lot—and I don't ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you're putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as "meat."

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I've eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I've eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I've eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to "tastes like chicken" than space-age polymer.

-Medium Raw

I recently moved halfway across the country and—perhaps this goes without saying—it's been stressful. The day before I flew out, I was looking for the perfect book to accompany me on my trip. It needed to be light and entertaining but also totally absorbing—something that would take my mind off of what I was doing. I stumbled across Medium Raw and was relieved immediately: I couldn't have asked for a book that better fit the bill.

Medium Raw is Anthony Bourdain's followup to the bestselling Kitchen Confidential. Since that book's publication, he's gone from a journeyman chef to a household name. In that time he's been on about a million international adventures, divorced and remarried, and reconsidered that whole "no fish on Monday" thing. (His new rule is to use your discretion, keeping the chef in mind: you're fine at Le Bernardin; think twice at TGI Friday's.) Medium Raw is discursive, touching on everything from the consideration of meat (as in the excerpt above) to a slightly terrifying encounter with Sandra Lee.

I read the bulk of the book in the airport and in flight; I was definitely disappointed when it came to a close. Bourdain is a devilishly good travel companion, funny and knowledgeable, but self-deprecating at the same time. I would have picked up another book of his immediately had I had one in my possession at the time. Instead I read New York magazine, which was fine, of course, but not particularly informative about Vietnamese cuisine, Top Chef, or the art of cutting fish*. Sigh.

Up next: Moonshine by Alaya Johnson, a vampire novel set in Prohibition-era New York City. Great so far!

*I'm once again forced to lament the passing of Gourmet magazine, gone before I ever got to snag an issue on the newsstand. Thank goodness for back issues!