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Similar in flavor to Jim Mullen’s It Takes a Village Idiot–long-suffering, neurotic guy is won over by his wife to rural living/raising animals while retaining his snarky “only a hopeless fool would do this” attitude. Quite funny, and strangely touching. Tarte talks about his depression and how medication sort of helps, but it’s the bizarre, time-consuming routines imposed by the constant parade of needy, nutty animals that do the most to keep him happy. I really love animals, but reading this book reminded me why I would never consider owning a parrot. It also made me thankful not to have a whole menagerie to put up with and cry over. We used to own pet rabbits, and it was nostalgic to read about brothers Bertie and Rollo, who fight when together, but:

If Rollo lay against the right side of his cage, Bertie would press his body against the left, letting fur and flesh mingle through the wires. As long as they didn’t share a common space, they were inseparable.

When we had rabbits, we ended up with two bonded pairs of rabbits. When the male of one pair and the female of the other died, Eiffel and Ruffin, the survivors, had exactly the same relationship as Bertie and Rollo. I strung chicken wire inside the hutch, creating two triangular cages, and they clearly enjoyed living together yet separately. Like people who need to each keep their own apartment?

The Tartes devote their lives to making their pets happy–no effort is too great–and they adopt abandoned or injured animals. But the book does reveal a side of pet ownership that I sympathize with but which bothers me: the desire to collect, to sample, the drive to get a new type of animal the next time around, to try them all. And it’s exactly that which motivates the buying and selling of pets, and has a lot of unfortunate side effects. The monkey side of human beings coming out…

Many people have told me how good this novel is, but the clincher was my memory of the elderly beekeeper, a dignified, reserved man, who told me that it made him cry. Yes, it is a very, very good book, although not one of my favorites ever. It didn’t grab me as hard as some books can–too feminine? too Southern? too predictable? I don’t know. Maybe it’s my own mother issues, since the major theme is maternal loss and betrayal. And the magic of bees…that is well-done, though I preferred Beeing: Life, Motherhood, and 180,000 Honeybees by Rosanne Thomas. Too bad the illustration on the cover looks more like a wasp. I hate it when people call wasps bees. Even if I do understand, as an adult, how easy it is to make that mistake and how most people just don’t really care–it buzzes, it’s yellow and black, it’s a “bee”–it still drives me crazy because I feel that the poor bees are getting a bad rep!

“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside…. You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and resuce, and all the other things we need to get through life,” she said. “You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.“

I own all the sequels to Wonderful Flight and will probably give them away to my friend after reading them again. They just don’t hold up that well, alas. Horatio Q. Peabody, the meddling, egotistical young man who stows away aboard Chuck and David’s spaceship, is a funny character, but otherwise the story is not very interesting (aside from the briefly-mentioned, ominous “hole in space”–I hope it shows up again in the later books). There’s the same strange feeling that Mr. Bass and his Basidium counterpart, Great Ta, somehow know and control everything that happens. But now that I think of it, it does make David and Chuck’s experiences similar to those of a child–that feeling that grown-ups are omniscient and omnipotent.

A collection of pieces, most previously published, most autobiographical in one way or another. I like Tan’s writing a lot, and she can also be very funny (notably in the essay about singing for the Rock Bottom Remainders, which I had already read in the wonderful eponymous book, and her terrific commencement address at Simmons College). Especially insightful: “The Language of Discretion,” refuting the idea that language can be read as forming character (specifically the idea that “Chinese has no words for ‘yes’ and ‘no'” and therefore Chinese people are “discreet and modest.” She captures the unease I felt, but couldn’t put into words, when reading this story about French humor. The last essay is about her struggles with misdiagnosed Lyme disease–very sad. I hope she is doing better.

Can a family member say something to you that would seem perfectly innocuous to a stranger, yet sends you right up the wall, so furious you can’t see straight? Or do your innocent remarks make people in your family crazy, so you feel you can’t even open your mouth? READ THIS BOOK. Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand was a brilliant, non-judgemental description of the ways most American men and women communicate differently (John Gray of “Mars and Venus” must owe most of his large fortune to her, since his concepts are just watered-down and generalized versions of hers), so I figured this would be good, but it’s actually even better.

Tannen discusses communication between parents and children, spouses, siblings, and inlaws, describing the various obstacles that can cause people to talk in circles and increase each other’s frustration. The most useful concept to me was the continuum between connection and control. In YJDU she contrasted the frequent male conversation goal of figuring out who’s one-up with the frequent female one of connecting (and similarly, the styles of report-talk vs rapport-talk). Here she shows that both desires are frequently at work. One person makes a remark to establish connection (for example, giving advice) and the other person hears it as an attempt to establish control (telling me what to do), to be put one-down. Tannen recommends “reframing” (which seems in essence to mean looking at it from the other end of the continuum). A side effect of this book’s transcription of actual conversations is amazement that any real communication happens at all!

I can’t help reading it all the way through because I am a completist, but, man, this is a terrible book. This is the dregs of Yates’ writing I mentioned earlier. All his faults are on parade with nary a redeeming quality. The inside look at the British courts of the 20s could possibly be considered one, but it’s buttered with self-flattery, and Yates’ vision seems so clouded with sentiment and bigotry that I can’t even trust it’s an accurate representation of what he witnessed. Two particularly annoying aspects: A). Berry, Daphne, and Jill lapping up Boy’s (extravagantly dull) stories as though they’ve never heard them before (these people have supposedly lived in each other’s pockets since childhood). B) Frequent references to incidents too shocking to relate. Geez, tell or don’t tell, but don’t try to have it both ways.

A youth librarian from Clarks Summit recommended this to me, saying she wanted to adopt all the boys and take them home. I did like it very much, but it verges on what’s become excellent-YA-novel formula: a narrator wise beyond his years and wonderful in every way except for a temper (he’s smart, handsome, and a natural athlete too! plus he has the absolute perfect girlfriend!); nastier than nasty villains; a motley team that comes together and helps each one feel better about himself. Reads very much like Jerry Spinelli, Joan Bauer, or Bruce Brooks. T.J. (The Tao—his given name) Jones is mixed-race in a racist town, and a battered wife & abused child are a subplot; I can’t say these issues aren’t handled well, but there’s just something that rings a little false. Maybe it’s that TJ, despite his desire to beat up the thugs, ultimately is remarkably saintly (let alone his adoptive dad, who dies a Christ-like death at the end). Maybe it’s the (black) counselor’s name being “Georgia Brown” and actually referred to as “Sweet Georgia Brown.” (The copy I read is advanced uncorrected proofs, so maybe an editor convinced Crutcher to change it). Maybe it’s the father figure who ends up coaching TJ’s rag-tag swim team—he lives illegally in the gym so he can send his son to college, works double shifts at fast food joints, yet is perfectly happy to get by on 4 hours sleep a night so he can coach in the early AM and drive them to all the swim meets (hours in each direction). But these are relatively minor gripes—it was a compelling read and I rooted for all the boys.

Got off to a great start but let me down at the end. Linden introduces himself as someone who understands and appreciates hard science, recognizes that animal intelligence is an area where not a lot of unambiguous data exists, and yet argues for the importance of even anecdotes to spark our understanding. By the end, when he’s rehashing quantum mechanics as possible grounds for telepathy, he lost a lot of my respect. (Especially with this sentence: “Indeed, after [9/11], American intelligence agencies reactivated a program of drawing on ‘remote viewing’ and other paranormal abilities in their search for Osama Bin Laden…” OK, now I’m convinced!) The anecdotes also declined in interest as the book continued, as though he ran out of material. My favorite one is right at the beginning. Koundo, a gorillla at the Lincoln Park zoo, found a $50 bill that his keeper, Eric Meyers, had dropped. Eric, as keepers often do, bribed Koundo with some peaches to hand over the lost property. Koundo ripped off a corner of the bill, clearly hoping to eke out a bigger reward. Eric, trying to convince the gorilla he’d get more by returning it intact, brought out a huge array of treats and laid them out. On seeing this, Koundo deliberated and then ate the $50.

I remember hearing how intelligent giant octopuses are, but there was much more about orangutans (the engineers of the great apes, who excel at breaking out of their enclosures). Apparently, they are ingenious tool-makers in the wild but their skills are often overlooked because they don’t make separate objects; instead they weave together branches, etc. Also interesting to be reminded how chimpanzees are very aggressive towards each other and actually have what could be called wars between neighboring tribes.

Linden’s book of course doesn’t cover the very recent research showing that dogs’ brains are hard-wired to understand human signals. I think it’s clear that dogs are also gifted at communicating non-verbally in ways humans can understand. Just a few weeks ago, in Key West, I was enjoying a custard ice-cream cone (coffee and caramel twist, yum!) A large dog (very handsome, looked like a Shepherd/Husky but a short light brown coat) approached and asked me to give it some, as clearly as any human could possibly do so even with language: polite stance, beseeching eyes fixed on mine, cocked head, smiling but salivating.

I’m sending this off to a friend–I think it matches his description of a childhood favorite he’s been looking for for his eldest son–so of course I had to re-read it first. Books that I loved as a child fit into 3 categories: A) great literature, I love them even more as an adult and find more in them than I saw then (eg The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell); B) still a good read, “comfort food” that I revisit half for the book itself and half for nostalgia (most of my childhood favorites); C) I can’t recapture what was so good about it, all the magic has vanished (no good example springs to mind right now). This is sort of B-; it’s not bad, but has some major drawbacks (condescension, a little cutesiness, plot problems, unsettling mix of SF and fairy tale–important events seem to be either dreams, hypnotism, or pre-determined somehow). It’s better in my memories than on the page, but I do love the sturdy little rocket, the nifty varnish that protects it in space, the oxygen urn that goes Phee-eep! This book must have formed some of my ideas about inventions. I used to fantasize about creating a kind of solid light that would have the texture of those cubical light-brown erasers that crumble; it would be a cool light like a firefly’s, and you’d have to actually cover it to create darkness. Mr. Bass, the mysterious child-like man who turns out to be the descendent of Mushroom folk, is more cook than scientist, and his inventions (which he can’t re-create) have a hand-made, organic quality to them.

Very enjoyable–an unusual blend of science fiction and general-fiction-bordering-on-romance. The time traveler is Henry, punk-rock-loving librarian (how could I not read this book?), who has Chrono-Displacement Disorder; when he’s stressed, he vanishes from the present and re-appears, naked, in another time (often one that’s meaningful to him, seldom more than a few decades away). His wife is Clare, who first meets Henry when she is 6 and he is 36; he first meets her in real time when he is 28 and she is 20. Niffenegger ( I love that name!) brings out both the strangeness and the normalcy of this tangled, predestined?, deeply loving relationship. It’s not particularly good SF qua SF (although much better written than most), but as straight fiction it’s terrific. One of the things Henry does when back in the past, aside from hanging out with his younger self, is going to rock concerts he missed the first time around. I can’t think of a concert I particularly regret off the top of my head, but I would go see Ursula LeGuin speak in 1983–can’t believe I was foolish enough to pass that up the first time around.