Jan Karon: The Mitford Series

Read this series by Jan Karon about a diabetic Episcopalian rector in a small town in North Carolina whose fat happy female parishioners cant stop baking him pies cakes and cookies. Very very funny scenes with neglected husbands eating unthawed church sale  cakes the minute their wives aren’t looking, a big dog who settles down only upon hearing Scripture,  a bossy secretary with a drawer full of Little Debbies, a perky wife-artist who likes to move the furniture around, and a parish full of souls in need of interference…

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane read by Jonathan Davis (with a limping Boston accent)

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First create a pattern. A pattern creates an expectation. Then, disappoint the expectation.  So Lehane gives us a prostitute who turns into a decoy who turns into a very pretty woman who wants to take her detective-investigator boss to a hotel room, and does. But  she is his wife.

Lehane’s title is from a Rolling Stones song, and his investigator is aging. He does piecemeal work for a 100 year old security firm that doesn’t advertise and into which he doesn’t fit. The investigator has a chip on his shoulder called   class struggle.

The investigator used to be bad and rich; now  he and his wife are good, but in debt. They miss being bad. They have a daughter.

6/1:23  ”After my daughter was born I considered buying a shotgun to ward off suitors 14 years or so up the road. Now a I listen to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language I considered buying a shot gun to blow my own fuckin head off.”

Deadly Descent by Charlotte Hinger read by Karen White

Lottie, Director of the local Historical Society, is assembling the memories and diaries of the townsfolk into a local history.  She is also stirring up the dust of very old emotions, old enmities, old wrongs.

The old families get hysterical and the hysteria turns to one murder, then another. Things get frayed and violent and personal. Lottie becomes the sheriff’s deputy, and begins to investigates the murders as both cop and historian.

Jane Green, The Beach House read by Cassandra Campbell

Nan localizes Nantucket. Charmed, beautiful, slightly eccentric, she is at that age  where she can get away with mostly anything:   trespassing or swimming naked or wearing scarlet lipstick everywhere.

Nan lives in a huge old house where she has decided to run a bed and breakfast for summer guests. It is this  house which  brings together a handful of curious, complicated personalities: Michael, Nan’s son, Bea and Daniel (a soon to be divorced couple), Daphne (a divorced real estate agent) and her hormonal and horrible daughter.

Nan eases and re-invents the lives which assemble around her; she couples, amuses, and converts her guests, into friends, into family.

The Wildwater Walking Club by Claire Cook read by Kimberly Dakin

Fiction that doubles as a helpful manual for out of work women, full of unemployment management tips and personality re-development exercises. Noreen, for example, is asked to say something about herself without reference to her job. She cannot. She can, however, use the fancy sneakers which she purchased at an ex-employee discount to find herself. Noreen is a very sensible girl, so it is not surprising that she spends the next month walking.

First she walks by herself. Then she meets up with a neighbor, and then with another neighbor. Each day, they walk and talk and learn about and from each other. Each day they count their steps.

The Wildwater Walking Club thus embarks upon a curious sort of benchmarking, with the footstep of an 8 1/2 inch sneaker as the only unit of measure. At the end of the month, they add up their miles and ‘trade them in’ for a trip to the Lavender Festival.

The Gatecrasher by Madeleine Wickham read by Katherine Kellgren

Like Grace in Warren Adler’s Mourning Glory, Fleur seduces very wealthy widowers at funerals. Fashionable, flamboyant and sexually gifted, she moves in to Richard Favour’s estate, charms his family, and plays out her usual scam. First, she borrows an American Express Platinum Card which draws on the widower’s bank account, but has her name on it. Then she buys lots of lovely elegant presents for everyone. Then she withdraws larger and larger amounts of cash, which she re-deposits; withdraws and re-deposits, establishing a credibility so that she can eventually withdraw a very large sum of money, without a re-deposit. But this time, things are different.

Phillip Margolin, Fugitive, read by Jonathan Davis

Charlie has been a guest and a prisoner of the dictator of Batanga for 12 years when he has an affair with the dictator’s favorite wife. After the wife is tortured, Charlie extradites himself to America, and stands trial for an old murder. The crime is investigated, reconstructed and solved, with a twist.

The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Arielly

How is it possible to account for irrationality in a scientific way? What kind of a science, what kind of a scientist studies the the irrational side of human behavior? How, moreover, can irrational decisions be measured, explained and controlled? Arielly describes experiments which do just this.

A parrot is put in a cage with two sources of food, one takes time and effort, the other is instantaneous. The parrot prefers the food on which it has spent a bit of time. “Contra-freeloading” describes this very phenomenon: many animals prefer to work (or play) for food, rather than eating freely accessible food. Read this against standard economic theory, which holds that rational economic agents always prefer to minimize their effort to produce maximal rewards. Yet we humans, (like parrots) are not always and already rational; we play, we interact with our environment, although our interactions ‘cost’ us more in effort and may not produce higher returns..

Arielly describes experiments which demonstrate how and how much human beings are motivated by meaning, over and above immediate rewards. Some of these experiments point to “the Ikea effect” and explain why we feel better when we own things that we assemble ourselves. Some point to “the egg theory” which explains why Mrs. Baker will buy a cake mix to which she must add some ingredients, rather than a mix which requires no effort at all. Some experiments point to the “Not Invented Here” bias, which is the bias against solutions or goods which we ourselves did not invent. (Also called The Toothbrush Theory because we only want to use our own.) The notion that a personal investment of labour results in an increase in value is not new; what is new is a science that can quantify this revaluation, or ‘over-valuation’. Behavioural economics concerns itself with how systems and institutions and designs make room for the irrational, and what happens when they don’t.

Information has an emotional weight, it is not free of its distribution method or its owner, or the order in which it is presented. Some information can be “primed” — preceded by a particular emotional charge — so as to control its impact. Arielly’s life story, for example. Arielly introduces his work by telling us about his traumatic, disfiguring, painful accident and his prolonged convalescence and rehabilitation. Is this information intended to influence our apprehension of his work? Does it?

Doomed.

I am reading three books, disrespectfully, carelessly, unthinkingly.

After finishing The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet’s Nest I decided that there was nothing more to read. Nothing else to read. Nothing to satisfy the specific hunger for more Girl. Nothing to rejoin the amorous journalist and the girl. What a pity. Out of all those beautiful, lithe, mythically wise women the journalist ends up with a weight lifter. Disappointing. Like all men, really.

Maybe it wasn’t really Larsson who wrote the whole thing. Maybe it was his girlfriend. Which would explain why the rest of the world is reading “Men Who Hate Women” and Americans, fat, hypocritical and prudish are reading about hornet’s nests. But now we have run out of hornets nests. What remains?

Something named “The Assassins of Athens” which rhymes, ridiculously. We stopped after three rich schoolboys bragged to a homicide inspector about the routine they routinely used to pick upgirls at bars which they were not old enough to drink in…..

The second begins with a Jewish wedding and progresses intellectually to a classic old fashioned domination of a good Jewish girl from Scarsdale by a cold English cad. She loves it. Then the plot turns limp and the Englishmen confesses his impotence, and the book dooms itself to the whining chic lit bin.

Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilting Series narrated by Christina Moore

It is not unusual for women’s books to lay out women in groups, like a plate of madeleines, a silver tray of cream cakes. But this circle of quilters is not a dainty or delicate array.

Chiaverini quilts stories about a dozen or so women who quilt, whose separate lives come together accidentally and on purpose at Elm Creek quilting camp, where women welcome women into an American tradition. Chiaverini’s women are full-bodied, irregular, problematic. Each one has stories full of children or mothers; Diane, for example, who shows up at the police station to bail out her son:

Well. it certainly does my heart good to know that the citizens of Waterford are being protected so heroically from skateboarders. Now if only you could do something about all those thieves and murderers and terrorists running loose, now I would be really impressed.

Diane is smart and sarcastic and argumentative, Sylvia is a grand old dame and a master quilter, Summer is a sleek hippy daughter of a single feminist academic, Judy is a practical, organized, rational type, Bonnie   industrious and busy shopowner-housewife, Sarah, the bitchy domestic manager   and co founder of the quilting camp. After eight quilting books, these characters are solid evidentiary structures and Elm Creek is a well elaborated structure of the imagination: safe, supportive, creative, cozy. It is problematic and fun. As fun as a summer camp for big girls who love little pieces of cloth.

It is of course the problems of everyday life that are shared among the quilters, not just the piecing and sewing and binding and basting.Perhaps  there is a kinship between these ladies and the medieval craftswomen or ‘spinsters’ who (like the wife of Bath) were good at ‘deceit, weeping and spinning’. Somehow, this medieval picture of women and textiles and discourse is comforting to female readers in 2010.