Last Month in Review: October 2012

Audio books and some vacation reading make this month's reading list longer than usual, despite reading very little in the second half of the month; most of the physical books listed were read in the first half of the month and some of them begun quite some time ago. In chronological order:

1. This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz.  Started this one back in the summer and lost my copy of the book.  Found it just in time to get it signed when Diaz read at my bookstore.  The next day he was awarded the MacArthur genius award, and shortly after that, this book was shortlisted for the National Book Award.  I think Yunior is, perhaps, in ascendence.

2. Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (yes, as in that Downton Abbey guy). This was a long-ass audio book that took me over a month to complete. Good reader, pretty good story, though I'd have preferred it to be edited down quite a bit. A richer-than-Bill-Gates berk on his deathbed asks an old college chum to track down all of his former lovers from his university days to see if they might have borne his children. He's dying without any, you see, and thus wants to pass his humongous fortune on to somebody. There's a lot of talk alluding to the big bad that happened in Portugal back in the day, so when we finally get to the scene near the end of the book, it's mostly a let-down. Still, if you like reading about Britain's upper class (and if you watch Downton Abbey, presumably you do), this is worth a go. Fellowes has the perfect turn of phrase every now & again that makes reading this worthwhile.

3. Safekeeping by Karen Hesse. This is a YA book I read on vacation. Review here.

4. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell. This is another book I read on vacation, and though it's for adults, it pretty much read like a YA. Review here.

5. The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison. Definitely NOT a YA book, but still read on vacation. Review here.

6. The Dinner by Herman Koch. Man, was this book ever good. Totally sneaked up on me, which was easy to do as the copy I read was an advanced reading copy with not even one sentence dedicated to plot summary.  Came in to it blind and was therefore blindsided. Review here.

7. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. This was my favorite book of the month. Fun romps through the history of bookmaking, from the incunabula to e-books, with secret societies and code breaking thrown in for good measure. Plus, the cover actually glows in the dark. Review here. . M

8. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan. Alas, couldn't quite finish this one, but since I read over 200 pages of it, it counts. McEwan is one of those writers I wish I could like but I somehow just cannot. Book started off great then quickly petered out. And as for the big reveals that come at the end of every one of his books, most of the time I don't care enough to give a damn.  Too bad, as I think he's an excellent writer and fine stylist.

9. Love is a Canoe by Ben Schrank. You know how sometimes you keep reading a book because you just know it's about to get better?  This was that book for me, except it didn't. There is almost nothing I can find to praise about this book. The characters were largely two dimensional, the dialogue was stilted, and other than the sections immediately dealing with infidelity or job anxiety, very little felt realistic to me. I think I mostly kept reading because (1) the book was published by FSG, a publisher whom I usually respect, and (2) the author is involved with Razorbill.

10. Fairytale Interrupted by RoseMarie Terenzio. One of my sales reps passed this audio book to me and I finally gave it a shot.  As someone who had almost no interest or knowledge of JFK Jr. (I'm not sure the "master of your domain" episode from Seinfeld counts), much less Caroline Bessette, I didn't think I would like it much but it was okay. Read by the author, who is far from professional, but it did give it that my-girlfriend-is-dishing kind of feel.

11. Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal. Sequel to Mr. Churchill's Secretary. Lots of fun, though once the U-Boat hits center stage, it stretched beyond even my credulity.

12. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. This is a YA audio book that a friend let me borrow since I'd loved the author's other book, Revolution. Although I felt it ended rather abruptly, this was a great story and a good audio production, read by Hope Davis.

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel by Hope Larson. Loved the original book as a child and thought this was a decent adaptation, though I wasn't crazy about the illustrations or the palette.

14. Nocturne by Dutchy. This is a novel-length Harry Potter fanfic. It's a darker one than the kind I usually read, set after Voldemort's victory, featuring HG/SS. Generally well written and very satisfying overall. You can read it here if you're interested. 

Book Reviews: Vacation reading!

Image not mine. Found here. 

So many of my recent posts have been dedicated to travel that it feels really good to get back to a few old-fashioned book reviews. Here are the books that I started and/or finished reading while on vacation earlier this month:

1. Safekeeping by Karen Hesse. My coworker, Marika, gave me an ARC of this one with the suggestion that I might like it, and she was mostly right. It's the story of a girl named Radley, an only child who has almost everything, who is volunteering in Haiti when there's a presidential assassination and a coup d'etat back home in the US. She flies back home to New England right away, but when her parents don't show up at the airport to pick her up, she decides to make her way there on foot. It's a martial law scene of rampant looting and pillaging, and it's illegal to cross state lines without papers. Radley finally makes it to her parents' house but nobody is there and she's too scared to trust anybody enough to ask what happened. Eventually she starts walking north to the Canadian border and she meets another young girl on the run, and they form an uneasy alliance.  They make it to Canada with several near-misses and take shelter in an abandoned school house, where a lonely widow looks out for them without being too obvious about it--she doesn't want to spook the girls into running again.  After a few months, Radley sees news that the situation in the US is better and she gets safe passage back home again, where she discovers her parents have been dead since before she left Haiti.

The book is scattered throughout with Hesse's photographs, but I thought they were more a distraction to the store than an enhancement. The writing is serviceable and Radley is largely believable, but the book feels like it is three incomplete stories jammed together to make a full-length novel.  Fleshing the three storylines out and using better transitions than the photos would create a more satisfying read.

 Attachments by Rainbow Rowell. This one I picked up because there's a distinct possibility that Reading Rambo would disavow all interwebs friendship with me if I didn't. It's a fun and light read of two friends who work at the same newspaper. Beth and Jennifer are smart and funny, and more than half of this book comprises their emails back & forth to each other. The internet is a newish thing at the time the book is set, which is why Lincoln also has a job at the paper. He's the IT guy who runs a crack programming team to avoid the Y2K problems and who is also the gatekeeper of all illegal email activity. Company email with suspicious words or phrases is flagged into Lincoln's email box so he can monitor it and give out warnings to employees who are abusing the no-personal-email rule.

Naturally he falls in love with Beth through her emails. He's a tall, dishy self-identified geek who lives with his mom and has a standing Friday night gaming date with his college buds. And Beth and Jennifer start to mildly obsess over Cute Guy, whom they spot from time to time at work but don't really know what he does. When he turns out to also be Nice and a Shining-Armor-Wearing-Knight, it's time to swoon. But wait--how can confess his love to Beth without seeming like a creepy, stalking-you-by-email loser? Ahh, good times.  A good beach read.

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison. It seems interesting to me that in the last few weeks I've read two books and seen one very fine film about caregivers and their patients.  While this book was pretty good and I'm glad I read it, it was the one for which I cared least among the three. It's the story of Benjamin Benjamin, a man who is no longer a father or a husband, and Trevor, the young man with MD entrusted to his care. The cover compares it to Little Miss Sunshine, so I was sold on it.

The last 50 pages or so really made the book worthwhile for me--that's where I finally really clicked with the story.  The big reveal behind Ben's tragedy, when it finally comes, is almost anticlimactic and not very revealing at all.  Tragic, to be sure, but since the narrator natters on and on about every single little thing, I was expecting more than just those 3-4 explanatory sentences about the car and the cliff.

The Dinner by Hermann Koch. Holy crap, but was I ever unprepared for this book! I read an uncorrected proof with NO book description whatsoever--the opening chapter made me think it was set in L.A., featuring famous bougie-type people.  Couldn't have been more wrong. This book defines "unreliable narrator" and while it gets off to a slow start, before too long, it pretty much knocks you over the head with disturbing images and plot. It was totally insidious the way this book worked on me.  To say more would, I think, do a disservice to the reader. It's an anti-beach read, so that might explain why it took me so long to work my way through this slim book, but I mostly read it at night before falling asleep, which was a better atmosphere than reading it on a sunny beach.

Not exceptionally written (or perhaps it was in the translation) but this book is dark and underhanded and extremely interesting. It's translated from the Dutch and will be published by Hogarth Press in 2013.

ARC cover

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. This one is tied with The Dinner for the best book I read on vacation. Okay, imagine if Jasper Fforde had written The Name of the Rose and placed it in a 21st century setting. Throw in a secret society of bibliophiles that dates back to Aldus and the incunabula. Now populate it with a mysterious bookshop owner, a brilliant Google maven who believes the secret to immortality lies in unlocking the codes to traditional knowledge, and a fantasy-reading, computer programming bookseller who discovers than a venerable typeface might be the answer everybody is looking for.

Seriously, it's a trip to read. Very funny and clever. If you're at all interested in the history of printing and bookmaking, typography & design, mysteries, pop culture, or Google, give this book a spin.

Finished book cover

NB: Check out the difference in the ARC cover from the finished copy. The actual book cover glows in the dark and is really, really cool. Another reason to buy the physical book and not the e-book!

NB part deux: All of the books I read were in ARC format, and I either requested them from the publisher or they were sent unsolicited. 

Virgin Gorda Day III

Sunrise over North Sound at Euphoria

Another day dawns clear and bright after a night of storms.  I had tried to lie awake to listen to the sounds of the rain, but the pull of sleep was too strong.  The tradeoff is that I'm able to bounce out of bed with an energy unknown at home and photograph the sun as it comes up. Then I make the coffee and find a quiet place to read until it's time to get ready for breakfast.

This time, DH makes French toast for us. Previous guests had left two kinds of syrup in the fridge and we had the mixings for everything else, including nutmeg and cinnamon to complete the island flavor.  It made me think of a wonderful breakfast I'd eaten on Virgin Gorda several years ago: bushwhacker French toast at the Flying Iguana.  Puck, the owner/chef (I think both), entertained us with stories and with his parrots in between courses, while DH and I had joked that vacationing in New Orleans and the Caribbean were the only two places where we can spend more on alcohol than food during breakfast!

Savannah Bay, looking left

Savannah Bay, looking right

Anyway, we soon packed up our beach bags, chairs and snorkel gear and hit the road to Savannah Bay, a beach that DH and I had visited in the past to make photographs but hadn't spent much time, for lack of shade. That's one reason I was pushing to get out of the villa so early. There is a carpark area immediately off of the main road, but it's easier to follow the rutted road closer to the beach, where there is parking and turnaround room.

We settled into a shady spot under a cluster of sea grapes and were quickly joined by the local beach fowl. DH and Mom decided to read for a while, so Melanie and I went snorkeling.  The water was cloudier here than it had been at Spring Bay the day before, so visibility was probably only about 15-20 feet or so.  Melanie quickly got nervous at how deep the water was getting on the far shoal (probably around 20 feet), plus her fins were still giving her issues, so we turned around and snorkeled closer to shore.  For the first time ever, my mask wasn't cooperating and was continuously leaking water and I couldn't fix it, so all in all, it was a frustrating excursion into the water. We stayed out there for about 45 minutes, though, and it was as fun as it could be while having to pause every couple of minutes to clear my mask.

Savannah Bay: again with the crowds 

Warning sign on the far end of the beach

Mom and Melanie reading

My book was calling to me before too long, so we got out of the water and walked back to where we were set up--we had drifted almost all of the way down the beach. We spent the next few hours reading, sunning, and hanging out in that gorgeous, gorgeous water, and right before we left, DH and I walked the beach. We were starting to get a likkle peckish around 1:00, so we packed up everything and were headed to the car when minor disaster struck.

Double self-portrait on Savannah Bay

The skin on my husband's forearms is so very thin and easily damaged, that when the beachbag he'd been carrying on his shoulder slid down, it sheared off two sizeable flaps of his skin. We'd been planning to eat lunch while we were out, but instead, we had to make a beeline back to Euphoria to patch him up.

His arm, two days later. Would have been too gross to post an earlier photo

Thank goodness that the villa had a first aid kit on hand!  We travel with most of the things we needed, like non-stick gauze and some self-adhesive ACE-bandage-like tape, plus some Neosporin and bacitracin. What we didn't have was something to gently cleanse the wound. We poured some bottled water over it to clean away the blood, but that stung like billy-o. We had some gin we thought about using, but DH was adamant about not wasting good alcohol. Luckily there was some sterile saline solution in the kit that we used. I did "waste" a little gin to sterilize my tweezers so I could pull the skin all the way back to get any air bubbles out, then laid it back gently into place, smoothing it down with the bacitracin. Mom and Melanie could barely watch.

Outdoor dining at NailBay's Sugar Cane restaurant

Since this happens on a regular basis to my DH, we weren't particularly fazed by it, other than feeling hungrier than ever by the time we were ready to leave. I proposed that we head towards Nail Bay, a suggestion that met with universal approval, and off we went to seek a late lunch.  It was a little after 2:00 when we arrived at Sugar Cane, Nail Bay's restaurant, and we were relieved to hear that they were still serving lunch.

Sugar Cane

DH and Melanie at Sugar Cane

Mom and I  at Sugar Cane

It was a very pleasant oasis, nice and breezy and pretty to look at, but unfortunately very buggy. The server was aware of the insect problem and she warned us of it before taking the outdoor seating, but we preferred to sit out under the large umbrellas rather than under the roof by the bar. I'd swear that it was sand fleas nipping our ankles and lower legs, but I can't imagine that they'd be up there.  We applied rounds of insect repellent, but that didn't seem to do much good.

Passionfruit daiquiri: one of my favorite frou-frou beverages.

So clearly having a round of drinks while we decided on lunch would be the only way to cope. We settled on three different appetizers to share, since the drinks did a good bit to fill us up: chicken satay, coconut cracked conch, and nachos. The chicken was pretty good, and you'd have to work pretty hard to mess up nachos, but the conch was very tough. We've been spoiled for conch ever since our first trip to Grenada, where we had it served up so tender you'd swear you were eating a scallop instead. Mr Boots serves up amazing lambi (as conch is known on that island), and no conch we've eaten anywhere else will compare. But I digress.  Bug bites aside, it was a pleasant interlude.

The bar and "inside" dining at Sugar Cane 

The very pretty pool on the opposite side of the bar

While waiting for the check to arrive, Melanie and I got up to explore the sugar mill ruins. I was completely taken by surprise by how awful the mosquitos were swarming, so I didn't stay long. It was sunny and breezy and more than two hours away from the time when the mozzies usually descend; I have no idea what circumstances were converging to make the bugs so terrible at Nail Bay that particular day. I can't imagine that it's like that all the time.

After settling the bill (btw, 15% service charge was already added, so we added a little additional tip), we headed back to Euphoria for either a nap or a swim before cleaning up for dinner. On our previous trip to Virgin Gorda, our best meal by far had been at The Rock Cafe, so we decided to make reservations there for dinner, requesting an outdoor table near the waterfall for the ambience. (Inside, it's nothing special AND the music is really, really loud, so this was important.) But first we went to a new place called CocoMaya so that we could have cocktails and watch the sunset.  If we liked what we saw, we'd come back another night.

On the beach at CocoMaya

Mom at CocoMaya 

Some more outdoor seating at CocoMaya

Melanie and DH at one of the outdoor cocktail areas

Well, we liked what we saw.  I'd read reviews of CocoMaya online before coming and knew to be prepared with insect repellent, and boy, was it ever needed.  The sand fleas were awful, and of course the mosquitos hit at twilight like they do everywhere.  But it was a fun place, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a menu of more creative cocktails. Between our two visits, we tried almost all of them:

We arrived just in time for sunset, and what a difference it makes between my little phone camera and my husband's camera he uses for work.  Check it out:

We enjoyed our cocktails immensely: DH ordered a Pimm's cup, Mom had a Cinnamon Girl, Melanie had the Strawberry Mule, and I had the Cohiba. I liked mine best, of course. Really, though, it was well mixed, quite refreshing, and not at all too sweet.  For someone who loves her desserts with an unparalleled passion, I'm not all that crazy about sweet cocktails.

My Cohiba

Once the sun went down, we climbed up to the bar to order another round of cocktails. I'm not kidding--the bar was so tall we all had to hoist ourselves up. DH and I opted to be just a swangin', which was a lot of fun but also challenging for those who are not the height of Scandinavian basketball players.

Hard to tell here, but we're on a very high porch swing

Blurry shot of Josey in mixology action

Here was where we met Miss Josey, our wonderful bartender, and we had a blast chatting with her while she helped us pick our next beverage. DH reverted to his usual gin, while Melanie went out on a limn to try the tamarind & chile margarita, Mom had the Utopia champagne cocktail, and I had the ginger-lychee champagne cocktail. They were all good, but Melanie's was definitely the most interesting!

Check out how high that bar is!

It's a salt and cayenne-lined rim for this margarita!

Soon it was time to head over to the Rock Cafe to make our dinner reservations--it's very close to CocoMaya and easily could have been walked, but we drove instead rather than leaving our car at the bar.

Pretty setting, but too dark to get a better photo

I'm sorry to say that in comparison, Rock Cafe was disappointing. It was also very mosquito-y there, which means it was an island-wide problem and not endemic to one area, and there was a very drunken young man seated at the next table who wanted to make lots of conversation.

We requested a second lantern just to read the menus!

The location is, admittedly, very pretty, but the food, with the exception of my mom's chicken picatta, was mediocre.  DH and I had each ordered the snapper in a caper & butter sauce, and the quality was not in line with its Anguilla-like price. When we're in Anguilla, we're happy to pay those prices because the food is, almost invariably, outstanding.

Mel's seafood pasta

The snapper

Mom's chicken

Dessert wasn't much better, I'm afraid.  They had two choices: chocolate cake or vanilla ice cream, so we asked for a little of both.  The portions of each were ample, but the cake was stale. Since we were celebrating my birthday, DH agreed that he would drive home that night, but it was his first time behind the wheel on the trip, so the ride home was an adventure for everybody.  The roads are super-dark, and unless you know them well and know when it's going to bottom out or turn sharply to either side, it's a little challenging, to say the least. Speed bumps and dips seemingly came out of nowhere, so it felt not unlike Mr Toad's Wild Ride. Home again, home again, piggledy-pop!

We tried to stay up chatting about this, that, & the other, but I promptly fell asleep on the sofa before dragging myself to bed.  After all, I had to maintain my strength for our next day's adventure: the Baths.

Sunset from CocoMaya