Book Talk: REAL HAPPY FAMILY, by Caeli Wolfson Widger

Real Happy Family: A Novel
Caeli Wolfson Widger (Twitter)
New Harvest (March 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0544263618 / 9780544263611)
Fiction, 384 pages
Source: Publisher, for TLC Book Tours

There’s something trippy and “down-the-rabbit-hole”-ish about fiction that uses reality television as a backdrop, particularly if you accept that the “reality” of such television is, to a good degree, fictional. Seven years ago, Carolyn Parkhurst crafted her second novel, Lost and Found, around one season of an Amazing Race-like competition show; in the years since, being cast in a reality-TV show has become a competition in and of itself. Caeli Wolfson Widger’s debut novel, Real Happy Family, has a firm grasp on the current climate, and the made-up shows that its plot hinges on sound entirely plausible.

Widger’s characters are immediately recognizable–you’ve seen them on TV, in both reality and scripted forms, and if you live in or around Los Angeles, you may well have encountered people like them in everyday life, one way or another. (There are more people than you’d think in L.A. who aren’t directly involved with the entertainment-industrial complex, but in many, many cases, the degree of separation is pretty small.) For the most part, however, that familiarity skirts cliché, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Widger’s primary characters were less shallow than I might have expected them to be. While it may be wearing the latest style, Real Happy Family isn’t exactly telling a new story (see the plot description following this commentary), and if I hadn’t been able to connect with the characters, I doubt it would have made much of an impression on me.

Widger has a solid grasp of the absurdities surrounding the making of TV and movies in the 21st century, yet Real Happy Family doesn’t read like satire–that’s another aspect of the novel that I didn’t expect, but which I very much appreciated. It’s almost too easy sometimes to make fun of people who are driven by dreams of reality-TV fame, and of those who are along for the ride; Widger doesn’t entirely shy away from that, but she doesn’t mine its full potential of ridiculousness, either. This is a story that could have been much more breezily told about much less sympathetic characters, and I think it’s a credit to the author that it isn’t. Real Happy Family is a fast and not-too-fluffy read that engaged and entertained me.

Rating: 3.75 / 5

Book description, from the publisher’s website:

Part-time actress, full-time party girl Lorelei Branch isn’t famous yet, but she’s perfected a Hollywood lifestyle full of clubbing, fashion, and the latest juice cleanse. When Robin, her sister-in-law and agent, throws a plum job her way, Lorelei jumps at the chance and auditions to be the new girl on television’s hottest reality show, Flo’s Studio. 

Enter Colleen, Lorelei’s pill-popping mother, who wants nothing more than to see her daughter win the fame and glory she never had a chance to pursue herself. But Lorelei’s dream of becoming the next reality star is dashed when she loses the spot on Flo’s Studio to a stunning African woman. In an attempt to defend her daughter against what she calls a rigged contest, Colleen goes ballistic and delivers a racist rant on live television, sparking a national media frenzy. Lorelei flees the limelight, humiliated and broke, with her slacker boyfriend Don and heads for Reno where she begins to self-destruct. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the Branch family starts to come apart at the seams. Colleen and her husband, Carl, are quietly drifting apart. Darren, Lorelei’s older half-brother, is stuck in Florida working on a contentious film set while his wife, Robin, continues the tedious regimen of fertility drugs meant to help them conceive a child. Desperate to bring the family together again and make things right, Colleen hatches a plan to stage an intervention for Lorelei on the reality show Real Happy Family. Soon the entire Branch family is entangled in a mission to bring the prodigal daughter back into the fold.

From the Prologue:

"No one else in Reno was running on the sidewalk connecting downtown to the Truckee River, but Lorelei had no choice. Something hideous was behind her.

"She was still wearing her Lucky Bastard uniform, the tight black skirt and fitted white shirt unbuttoned too low. The plasticky high heels unsuited to waiting tables, much less running at top speed. Blisters blossomed on both feet and her ankles throbbed, but she pushed on.

"The pain was nothing compared to the fear.

“She was afraid to check over her shoulder, to see if the bartender was following. Up ahead, Reno glittered under a moonlit dome, the Sierra Nevada turned to black M’s on the horizon. Something was different this time; something was wrong. The euphoria and the go-go-go were there, but they weren’t pure. They were cut with panic. The stuff she’d smoked was letting in the feelings it normally stamped out. Not just letting them in, but amplifying them. And the perfect heat that usually suffused her whole body seconds after the drug hit her bloodstream was missing. In its place was a prickly fever in her face and icy sweat in her clenched fists. Her heart was slamming.”

  

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Sunday Salon 3-30-2014: What's What In the Post-Birthday World

What I’m reading

• in print / on screen

I still have two days left of Birthday Weekend, and two blog-tour posts due up the week, so I’ll be reading and writing for both of those today and tomorrow, and then preparing for my spot on the tour for Going Over. It’s nice not to have much of anything else in the works for a couple of days, to be honest, especially since April looks to be pretty busy. I also need to get going on May reading for Shelf Awareness–I’m down to just one review a month for them until my “real” work slows back down–and if there’s time for it, I’ll read some more Fic.

• on audio

Since I’m in the middle of a few days off from work, I’m also having a few days off from my audiobook, but even so, I should finish the (unabridged edition of) A Short History of Nearly Everything this week. I’m really glad I decided to listen to this one right after the abridged version–science can be so entertaining in the right setting.


What I’m watching

We already have tickets for Captain America: The Winter Soldier next weekend, which is no surprise at all if you know my husband.


What I’m writing/blogging

I had a short to-do list for this weekend’s Spring Bloggiesta (which runs through tonight), and spent Friday afternoon working on that:

• Updated my Review Archive spreadsheet
• Combed the archives for possible Throwback Thursday posts, and set up a spreadsheet to schedule them (picked 35 posts, assigned possible dates to some, and won’t consider others this year unless prompted by related events!)
• Evaluated my blog design and made some minor changes (sidebar items, colors, and links)–I was a little dismayed that this involved actually changing to a new version of my template, but I like the brighter new look–and if you’re getting this post in your feed reader or email, click on over to the blog and see it for yourself!

What caught my eye this week

The first place on the Internet that sucked hours from my life was Television Without Pity, and I’ve always loved it for that. Although I haven’t regularly read the site for a while, I’ve followed members of its original team as they’ve brought its sensibility to new online homes, and I’ve continued to appreciate the way it’s informed my pop-culture worldview for over a decade. News broke last Thursday that TWoP will be shut down this week:

"For me, the April 4 end of TWoP isn’t just the loss of another time-sucking, iPhone-accessible fix of entertainment. It’s a sign that the times are shifting away from the kind of writing that informed who I am (as a journalist) today…the site’s archives will be saved ‘in the digital ether,’ but publicly inaccessible–its content virtually disposed in a last gasp of bitter irony (or perhaps I should call it cosmic snark?). TWoP blazed."

–“Television Without Pity: A personal EWlogy”, at Popwatch

What Else is New?

I’m composing this post in the Byword app on my big birthday gift to myself, an iPad Mini, which I am very pleased with so far! It’s smaller and lighter than my iPad 2, but equally capable of everything I want to do on a tablet, including writing and photo-editing.

Panel tickets for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books will be available next Sunday morning at 9 AM, so I need to make some time to comb the schedule this week…and get the guest room ready for Kim’s visit! I’ve been in touch with a few area book bloggers about meeting up with us during the Festival, but if I missed you, give me a holler!

Gratuitous Photo of the Week

A drive to Santa Barbara, a meeting with a friendly Golden Retriever (as of there's any other kind) ,and a stop at Chaucer's--Paul made my birthday just what I wanted! (And yes, I did already read Fangirl, but Rainbow Rowell is coming to LATFoB and I can't ask her to sign an Audible download!)

Happy Sunday! What's up with you?

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Throwback Thursday: Fear of Fifty, Revisited

I am now two days away from the milestone I wrote about in this post from October 2012, so it was the obvious choice for this week's Throwback Thursday. For the record, I'm somewhat less fearful of it now than I was then...and no matter how I feel about it, it looks like it's about to happen anyway.

Fear of Fifty; Or, Before I Forget

Exactly 18 months from (September 29, the day I gave this reading), barring any unforeseen events, I will turn 50 years old, and I’m beginning to get anxious about it--but for very different reasons than what made me anxious, 10 years and 18 months ago, about turning 40.

The verge-of-forties fears were mostly that they’d be more of my late thirties--which pretty much sucked. At 38, I was on my own for the first time in my adult life--not that I’d chosen to be-- following the “official” end of my 18-year-long marriage (which had “unofficially” ended about 2 and a half years earlier, but that’s another story). And 2000 miles away, my son went off to college. I had my job, my dog, and my books--and visions of a small and lonesome life stretching out indefinitely, except for when I considered cutting my losses, as it were.

And given that I was (eventually diagnosed as) clinically depressed. my forties did start out the way my thirties ended. But I got (long-overdue, obviously) treatment, and I started getting out--and my life got bigger. My forties have included a new family, new friends, new places, and new world-expanding pursuits. Overall, they have been good years--and I’ve tried not to let them be darkened by the fear they could be my last good ones, which is the one I’m approaching fifty with.


Three years ago, I read a book called Still Alice by a neuroscientist-turned-novelist named Lisa Genova--a book I’d resisted for well over a year at that point. It’s the story of a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and it’s written from her point of view. It's a very well-done novel, and it's one of the scariest books I've ever read.

Genova does a remarkable job of truly getting inside the mind and emotions of an Alzheimer's patient. She includes facts about the disease and its effects without interfering with the story, and she effectively captures its disruption and alteration of family, career, and daily life, but the fact that it's all told from Alice's perspective makes it unique and unforgettable. The instances where the author "loops" an episode by repeating its opening paragraphs at the end, and when she frames Alice's behavior with someone else's response to it, are particularly affecting.

Three years ago, my sister and I read Still Alice together. Last weekend, we participated in the Walk to End Alzheimer's, as we do every year. (Our team helped raise more than $105,000 this year!) We're involved with it because our mother, who passed away in 1999 after seven years in a nursing home, had early-onset Alzheimer's.

Still Alice gave me a lot of insight into Alzheimer’s, particularly its early-onset form, which can manifest with symptoms in people as relatively young as 50. Alice was 50. My mother was just a few years past 50 when it started for her. I have a better understanding of it now--not just the medical details, but some idea of how it may have felt for her. It was terrifying, and as I get closer to 50, it doesn’t get any less scary.

This is a case where “the more you know” isn’t necessarily all that helpful, and knowledge doesn’t afford much power. Alzheimer’s remains incurable and unstoppable; the treatments now available can only slow its terrible progression. There’s a test to determine whether someone has the genetic mutation associated with developing it--but with no means of prevention, what can you do, going forward, with any result besides “no”? At this point, I’m choosing fear of the unknown over certainty of doom--but either way, I’m afraid.

Among people in my age range, jokes about Alzheimer’s are pretty common--when we can’t find our keys, or think of someone’s name, or remember what we meant to do in the kitchen thirty seconds after we walk in. I don’t make those jokes. I’m afraid to tempt fate. I’m afraid those lapses might caused by something besides menopausal hormones or “normal” aging processes. A relative with early-onset Alzheimer’s unfavorably increases the genetic odds.

I fear that turning 50 will flip a switch, or start some sort of countdown clock. I saw what became of my mother in her fifties, and through Alice, Lisa Genova gave me a sense of what it must have felt like for her to experience it. It scared the hell out of me.

Then again, I could take after my dad--83 85 years old and still a piece of work. Like my divorce, that’s another story, and it raises another set of fears entirely. But in the meantime, I have 18 months two days before that switch flips, and I don’t want to be afraid to make the most of however many days will come after it does.

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Spring Blog Tune-up: Little Projects for Bloggiesta

Spring Bloggiesta is happening during Birthday Weekend, which means two contradictory things:

• I have some time off to spend on blog maintenance
• I have some time off for my birthday and I don't want to spend a lot of it on blogging-related stuff

I'm resolving the conflict by limiting my Bloggiesta projects to Friday, March 28, so my to-do list is an appropriately short one:

• Update my Review Archive spreadsheet
• Prepare templates for upcoming reviews
• Comb the archives for possible Throwback Thursday posts, and set up a spreadsheet to schedule them
• Evaluate my blog design and make some minor changes (sidebar items, colors, and links)...and try to restrain myself from going from minor to major!
• Check out the Mini-Challenges and see if they suggest anything else I'd like to tackle!

On balance, it's good timing, because I can join the fun and get a few things done...but not too much! Are you Bloggiesta-ing? What are you hoping to get done this weekend?

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WW: "Over My Head"

...pretty much describes everything when you're under five feet tall.

Clockwise from upper left: Arch at Hollywood & Highland, Los Angeles; Ceiling detail at the New York Public Library (42nd Street); Cables on the Brooklyn Bridge; Mast of the U.S.S. Constitution, Boston

An InLinkz Link-up

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(Audio)Book Talk: FANGIRL, by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell (Twitter) (Facebook)(Tumblr)
Audiobook read by Rebecca Lowman and Maxwell Caulfield
St. Martins Griffin (September 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 1250030951 / 9781250030955)
Fiction (YA), 448 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio, 2013, ISBN 9780804121286; Audible ASIN B00E9YYT64)

It doesn't happen often--at least, not for me--but sometimes you go into a book just knowing it's going to hit some of your sweet spots. Like so many other readers, I fell hard for Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. I already knew how vividly and realistically she could render characters, and as a self-professed, late-blooming "fangirl" myself, the premise of her most recent novel was a real hook for me. In addition, Fangirl's audiobook was read by Rebecca Lowman, who has become on of my favorite narrators. I expected a good reading experience from Fangirl, and it surpassed my expectations.

Up until a few weeks before she left for college, Cath Avery largely defined herself in three ways: a twin, a fan, and a girl without a mother. Her foundation is shaken when she learns her sister Wren doesn't intend to share a dorm room with her at the University of Nebraska. Her world is rocked when she finds out that her mother--who left their family when Cath and Wren were in third grade, on September 11, 2001--has been in contact recently with both her father and her sister. And the story of young magician Simon Snow is just months away from its final installment--what will Cath's life be without the series of books and movies that she's not only grown up with, but which has allowed her to explore her own creativity through writing fiction inspired by it?

Eleanor and Park was an unconventional high-school love story; Fangirl is an unconventional coming-of-age college story crossed with a first-love story and flavored with modern Internet-based fan culture. I think that's a pretty ambitious undertaking, and I think it succeeds at just about every level. I spent a few months lurking around a Harry Potter fanfiction site a few years ago--reading only, never writing--and based on that brief experience, it seems to me that Rowell really gets that angle of the story. Perhaps she could have said more about fandom, but I think she's employed it appropriately for the story she really wants to tell--and the fact that Fangirl has inspired a fanfiction archive of its own strikes me as a most appropriate accolade to that.

But even more than "getting" fandom, Rowell gets what makes characters fully realized and deeply human, and I especially appreciate her ability to depict complicated relationships in dialogue that rarely rings false or calculated. Rebecca Lowman (literally) gives voice to it all perfectly, although there were fleeting moments I forgot I wasn't listening to her reading of Sisterland, another Midwest-set novel involving twins. She and Rowell are quickly becoming a go-to pairing for me, and Fangirl made for a delightful week of reading by ear.

Rating: Book and audio, 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher's website:

Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan, but for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving. 

Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere. 

Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to. Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

Opening Lines:

"There was a boy in her room. Cath looked up at the number painted on the door, then down at the room assignment in her hand. Pound Hall, 913. This was definitely room 913, but maybe it wasn’t Pound Hall—all these dormitories looked alike, like public housing towers for the elderly. Maybe Cath should try to catch her dad before he brought up the rest of her boxes. 'You must be Cather,' the boy said, grinning and holding out his hand. 'Cath,' she said, feeling a panicky jump in her stomach."

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Sunday Salon: Birthday Week Begins!

My mother-in-law is visiting from Oceanside this weekend to help us celebrate my birthday a week early (Spencer is with his mom next weekend, so we planned around that). That celebration turned out to be a surprise Saturday-night birthday dinner with my sister's family and my dad at our favorite special-occasion restaurant, followed by a return to our house for one of my sister's famous cakes. It was all orchestrated by my husband, and I neither expected nor suspected any of it.

Today is my dad's 85th birthday, and we're all meeting again for breakfast in honor of that occasion (which is not a surprise event, and which is part of why this week really IS "Birthday Week"). The whole thing wraps on Saturday with my Big Milestone Number Day. However, having my birthday fall on a Saturday is no reason to bend my "No Work on My Birthday" rule, so I'm taking vacation days this Friday and next Monday.

As for what I'm doing with those days...no clue, really:

• Maybe some Bloggiesta-ing,
• certainly some reading,
• probably a bit of writing,
• and as few chores as I can get away with.

And there will be a birthday dinner with Paul, of course--just us, this time.

For me, in all honesty, a mini-staycation doing some of my favorite things is a pretty good birthday plan. I do wish it included more of my favorite people...but maybe it can? If you're local, you know how to find me, and I'd be very happy if you did--and if you're not, I know I'll be seeing quite a few of you later this spring. Can I stretch out my birthday celebration till May? Hey, I'll only turn fifty once!


What I'm reading

• in print / on screen

I'm reading Real Happy Family, a debut novel by Caeli Wolfson Widger, for a TLC Blog Tour date next week, and will need to get going on Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl shortly, as I'm touring that one just a few days later. And a few days after that, I'll be hosting the blog tour that Chronicle Books has put together for Beth Kephart's Going Over--many of you already know how much I adore Beth, and I'm thrilled to help support her latest YA novel.

And yes, I'm still reading Fic. It's fascinating to see how much about the fanfiction/fandom culture it describes mirrors internet culture in general. Or maybe it's the other way around? Perhaps that's what the book's subtitle, Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, is really referring to.

• on audio

Let's just say A Short History of Nearly Everything really isn't. It is fascinating, however, so I don't begrudge the length of this unabridged audiobook at all.

What I'm watching

I didn't turn on the TV at all while Paul was out of town this past week, so I foresee some pretty serious "catch up on the DVR" time in our near future.

What I'm writing

I spent most of Saturday writing and prepping book reviews and other posts--once this one is done, the blog should be set for most of this week, and I will feel accomplished.

What caught my eye this week

"Why You Should Keep a Journal (And How to Start Yours") on Lifehacker:

"Even if you don't think anything special has happened to you, the very act of keeping a journal can help you brainstorm. How often have you caught yourself writing about something that seems dull on the surface, but led you to a spiderweb of other thoughts, ideas, and memories as you were processing it? Regular writing opens the door to those opportunities every time you sit down."

And if you need even more encouragement, Tif has a "Journal Circle" Challenge for April--you can find out all about that at Tif Talks Books.

Now this is how you do a negative book review--or, at least, how my friend Jane does it:

"There’s no losing myself in the story because the story is beyond predictable. In fact, I’m reminded of the fanciful plot lines my girl friends and I used to come up when we were pre-pubescent and playing with paper dolls or Barbies.
"But lots of books that fit that description are published today–most of them sold in airport bookstores and/or under the Harlequin imprint–so why does this one make me so mad?"

No one has bought me a book as a gift in years--because they know I'd just rather buy them myself anyway. What about you?

"But when reviewing the gift-buying figures, it’s also interesting to consider another theory, one surprisingly overlooked when one considers what we know is common to all book lovers: greed. Although the figure has dropped slightly, readers continue to buy books for themselves."

--"Books make great gifts, but don’t underestimate the greed of readers", via MobyLives

Gratuitous Photo of the Week

Birthday (week) flowers came yesterday--another surprise! I'm not fooled, though. Even though the card says "David Tennant," I know they're from Paul.

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Throwback Thursday: Nothing Else to Do

During my first year or so of blogging, I was a semi-regular participant in a meme called "Ten on Tuesday." It may even still be around, but when the prompts started getting repetitive, I stopped playing along; I've found that eventually happens with most memes, which is why I rarely do them now. (This Throwback Thursday thing's a little different, though--it's repetitive by design.)

But I digress. I originally posted this list on September 18, 2007, when this blog was just six months and two days old. Let's see if much has changed since then, shall we?

10 Things You Do When You Have Nothing Else to Do

Not to get all "busier-than-thou" about it, but I rarely have "nothing else to do," so I guess I'd approach this topic as more as "10 Things I Do When I Have Nothing Else I WANT to (or HAVE to) Do." Some are definitely procrastination practices, some are things I save for when the work gets done, and some I would actually consider to be things on the "to-do" list, just not high-priority ones.

1. Read (part of) a book--always my #1 leisure activity, but enough time to go start-to-finish in one seating almost never happens (Still doing this, of course. Still at the top of the list...)
2. Catch up on my blog feed-reading (...except when this is at the top)
3. Join my husband on the couch to see what's been recorded on the DVR, and watch some TV 
4. Play with the dog (Sadly, I have not been able to do this since January of 2010, but we'd like to change that this year, if we can.)
5. If it's a weekend when the kids are at their mom's, go for an old-fashioned "Sunday drive" with my husband
6. Re-organize my closet, my dresser drawers, or the pantry
7. This is more like 6a, really--GET RID OF STUFF that I don't use/wear/need so I have less to organize
8. Bake a batch of brownies, cookies, or some other treat (I don't really bake anymore except at the holidays. Maybe that's for the best.)
9. Computer cleanup--delete old files, run scans, defragment the hard drive ("Defrag the hard drive"? Yeah, I originally wrote this back in the pre-MacBook days...)
10. Visit a bookstore (see #1) (...which were also the days when we still had a Borders in town. Sigh.)

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WW: Wearin' o' the Green

This week's Wordless Wednesday prompt is "emerald"--I assume that's as in "Emerald Isle," as in Ireland, as in St. Patrick's Day. I just read it as "green."

An InLinkz Link-up

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Sunday Salon: Seven Years a Blog!

This blog is seven years old today, and while that milestone hasn't made me quite as reflective as some previous ones have, I can't let it go by without a few remarks for the occasion.

There have been times when the very idea of a blog--let alone my blog--lasting this long seemed ludicrous, and times when the idea of not having it seemed equally ridiculous. There have been times when what I've done with this blog turned out to be...well, let's not say "ridiculous" here, but just acknowledge that there have been missteps and mistakes and backtracking along the way. The course of true blogging never did run smooth. (If you're going to steal, and paraphrase, quotes, steal from the best).

This blog's full name is, as you know, The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness, reinforced by the tagline "It's not just a title, it's a mission statement." If there's a philosophy underlining them both, I think "true blogging" would sum it up pretty well, and here's how I'd define that:

• blogging about what you care about
• blogging with your own voice,
• blogging when, and how, it works for you

"To thine own blog be true," as the saying goes (well, not really). In seven years, over nearly 2100 posts, a few hundred pictures, and more words than I'd ever want to count, through meanderings and missteps and occasional good ideas, I'd like to think that "true blogging" is what I've been doing, and I know it's what I mean to do going forward.

On this seventh blogiversary, I'd like to thank you for coming along on this blogging journey with me, and I hope you'll stay around for whatever comes next.

(This week's Gratuitous Photo was created using my newest photo-editing app acquisition, Handy Photo, available for both iOs and Android devices).

(What comes next now are the weekly updates, since I tweaked the post format a bit today.)

What I'm reading

• in print / on screen

I have three blog tours coming up during the first two weeks of April, and I suspect my print-reading time will be pretty well occupied with all of those. I'm still reading Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World on the iPad, and I don't think I've highlighted so many sections of a book since college. I'm eager to talk about this one, although I'm still planning to tie it to when I post my thoughts on Fangirl.

• on audio

After finishing the abridged, author-read audio of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, I immediately bought the unabridged version and started listening to that. It was a good call. The shorter version was almost like an abstract, but now I get the whole thing--and even if it's not in Bryson's actual voice, I'm getting much more of his writing this time, and liking it even more.

What I'm watching

I probably won't be watching much at all this week. My husband's going out of town for work, and I don't really turn on the TV when he's not around--I expect to spend my evenings with my books.

What I'm writing

I need to get a couple of reviews written this week--when I'm not reading during those three nights on my own, I'll be working on those (if I don't get them done today, which is probably a safe assumption.)

This week, I revisited a post from my archives for Throwback Thursday, and I'm planning to make that a regular occurrence. Everything old is new again.

What caught my eye this week

At Beth Fish Reads, the start of a series on her own "eMergence" as an eReader:

So after wasting my money on unused gadgets and being frustrated with my book choices, I lost interest. That is until last fall when I finally found the magic combination of devices, software, and sources that turned me into an eMerging eReader.

The World Wide Web (you know, "www.") turned 25 this week, and you can still access the very first website. The Internet itself is older, but these days we tend to use the terms interchangeably. Among 25 reasons to celebrate the WebNet, via BlogHer:

Storytelling: Thanks for giving people a means to tell their story; one that doesn’t have a gatekeeper. There are reasons the internet needs to remain a free space and this is a HUGE one. 

Access: Thank you, internet, for making people accessible – whether they are company owners, organizations, actors, news rooms, etc. The barriers to conversation are knocked away by your powers (and everyone agreeing to take part). 

The Biggest Brain in the World: I mean, Mother Earth certainly trumps it, as do the secrets of the universe, but the internet is growing everyday as people have the opportunity to add their knowledge. That’s cool. So thanks for being cool. 

Hilarious Cat and Dog Photos: I needn’t say more. Thank you, internet!

What are you up to this weekend?

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Throwback Thursday: Blogging Midlife Crisis, Revisited

I'm jumping on the Throwback Thursday bandwagon, inspired by the "show an old post some new love" linkup hosted at Mom's Small Victories and the way that Suey tweaked the idea by updating one of her old posts. As my seventh blogiversary approaches this weekend (as does Suey's--our blogs were born on the same day!), this post from September 2012 still feels relevant.

Opportunity, community, and blogging's midlife crisis: Reflections

You might think that after doing something for four or five or seven years, or even longer, you’d have a pretty good sense of how it works and how you’re doing with it. You might even feel pretty sure of yourself in comparing yourself with your peers. Or you might not. Even with all your experience, you may feel uncertain of your place in the landscape. Then again, maybe the landscape itself has changed, which means you may have to reconstruct your place within it...or reconsider how much you even want one.

In some contexts, we might call this a midlife crisis. And based on the public reflections and re-evaluations I’ve been seeing for a while, I’d say blogging--at least, blogging as I’ve known it since early 2007--is deep into one. It crosses topical fields and has affected even the most well-established bloggers.

Many of us who consider ourselves “veteran” bloggers recall when it was a smaller world. We were interested in openness and honesty and thoughtful self-expression, no matter what we were expressing ourselves about. And because there weren’t nearly as many of us expressing ourselves, we found each other much more easily, and connections and community grew pretty readily as we did. We were figuring it all out as we went along, and when we did occasionally catch the attention of those outside our realm, they weren’t really sure what to make of us.

But the outside world caught on, eventually, and they saw opportunity--a new market. And in return, they offered opportunity--and when opportunity knocked, many of us answered, eagerly. And the doors of opportunity opened wider, and more bloggers came for the opportunities. Most of the later arrivals shouldn’t be called “opportunists,” in all fairness; plenty still came for the self-expression and stayed for the community. But still, opportunity expanded all around, and the balance of give-and-take began to shift back and forth at increasing speed. A free-for-all began to sort itself into winners and losers--and although it’s never been entirely clear how the cuts are made, the marketers (and the self-marketers) seem to come up on the winning side more often than not.

Certain events can crystallize the feeling that it’s all gotten out of hand, and few events do that like an off-line gathering of bloggers. The aftermath of BlogHer 2012--attended by 5000 bloggers--brought on the customary round of post-conference reflections, and one of the recurring themes was long-term bloggers questioning whether the conference--and by extension, the world of blogging as it is now--is a place where they still have a place. I’ve collected some of those reflections into a Readlist I've titled "Blogging vets and the midlife reassessment." (The link still works, but I can't confirm that all of the links within it are still alive.) (And BlogHer'14 is capping attendance at 2500, by the way.)

The book-blogger sector went through this self-assessment after the first BEA Bloggers Conference in May 2012. There was a strong sense that the conference (officially run by BEA for the first time that year) offered very little to veteran book bloggers for whom being the object of marketing has lost its allure; we’ve learned that “free books” do have a cost. We’ve also learned that “working with” publishers and PR folks (and trying not to work directly with authors, because that can get overly personal and awkward) leaves us less time to do things with each other. But there are so many of us now, fragmented into ever-more-specialized niches, that there are times when it’s very difficult to see us as one single “book-blogger community” doing things together any more.

And there are times I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The whole community may be too much for one individual blogger to navigate, but within that whole, most of us manage to find our tribes--and once we do, it's the tribal bonds with other bloggers that keep us doing what we do.

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WW: Run, Jump, Flip--ZIP!

The prompt for the Wordless Wednesday Link-Up this week is 
"Run. Jump. Flipped." This involved some of everything.

Father and Son Zipliners--June 2013, Wiscasset, Maine
(text applied with Over for iOS)

An InLinkz Link-up

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Book Talk: THE PERFECT SCORE PROJECT, by Debbie Stier

The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT
Debbie Stier (Twitter) (Facebook)
Harmony (February 25, 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0307956679 / 9780307956675)
Nonfiction: memoir/self-help/education, 304 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (March 4, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

The Perfect Score Project chronicles Debbie Stier’s year of exploring a variety of test preparation strategies as she sat for the SAT seven times, with the goal of learning how to help her son Ethan prepare for his own college-entrance exams. Stier knew that Ethan’s ability to obtain merit-based financial aid would depend on high scores on the standardized tests, but she didn’t know how to help him prepare for them. Her last experience with the SAT had been nearly thirty years earlier, and an extensive test-prep industry had sprouted since then. Ethan’s mom was going to have to do a lot of homework herself before Ethan got anywhere near the SAT.

Stier tried a different study method before each test, from personal tutoring to online learning to self-directed practice using official College Board materials. The Perfect Score Project discusses the pros and cons of them all, with the verdict on each method's effectiveness rendered by the test scores she got after using it. The book offers many helpful insights about the testing process to parents of the college-bound—few of whom are likely to go to Stier’s lengths, honestly—as well as to prospective test-takers themselves.

Stier’s own evaluation of her SAT experience weighs its effects on her personal growth and relationship with her son at least as heavily as her test scores, and the story in The Perfect Score Project rests in that. While what she did comes across at times as a particularly intense example of “helicopter parenting” and readers might not agree with either her tactics or her conclusions, she offers them some very useful information in a rather unusual package.

A more enthusiastic review of The Perfect Score Project from Vasilly at 1330v

Book description, from the publisher's website

The Perfect Score Project is both a toolbox of fresh college-prep tips and an amusing snapshot of parental love and wisdom colliding with teenage apathy.

It all began as an attempt by Debbie Stier to help her high-school age son, Ethan, who would shortly be studying for the SAT. Aware that Ethan was a typical teenager (i.e., completely uninterested in any test) and that a mind-boggling menu of test-prep options existed, she decided – on his behalf -- to sample as many as she could to create the perfect SAT test-prep recipe.

Debbie’s quest turned out to be an exercise in both hilarity and heartbreak as she took the SAT seven times in one year and in-between “went to school” on standardized testing. Here, she reveals why the SAT has become so important, the cottage industries it has spawned, what really works in preparing for the test and what is a waste of time.

From Chapter One:

"I’m a forty-eight-year-old mother of two teenagers, and this whole crazy 'perfect score project' started out as a scheme to rescue my kid from . . . sliding by. I thought maybe I could motivate Ethan to care about the SAT, just a little, if I climbed into the trenches myself.

"Initially, though, the number of test-prep options left me agog (over a million on Google). My original idea was to try out twelve different methods of test prep the year before Ethan would be taking his first SAT. But as I saw how vast and complicated the realm of SAT prep appeared to be, I kept adding layers to the idea. What was at first simply the notion of taking an official SAT at school with the kids mushroomed into a vow to take the test every time it was offered in 2011 (seven times in all). And I’d try out different locations for each test, which turned out to be a total of five. (I didn’t anticipate the issue of test centers booking up early and ended up having to repeat a few). I wanted to see if the location played any role in the test experience, so I chose schools ranging from an elite private school in the suburbs to an urban public school in the Bronx.

"My journey would start with the first SAT of 2011, on January 22, and Ethan would take his first SAT exactly one year after me--in January of 2012. We’d overlap in our preparation about halfway through the year because (a) juniors take the PSAT in the fall (October of 2011 for Ethan; SAT No. 5 for me), so he’d need to study; and (b) I know my son well enough to realize he does better with some spare runway to build momentum.

"In spite of the escalating nature of the project, I was excited about the 'study together' part and assumed that by halfway through the year, with four SAT experiences under my belt, I’d have my bearings and be able to adroitly show my son 'the SAT ropes.'"

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What's What: Sunday Salon, 3/9/2014

What I'm reading

• in print / on screen

I've moved on to April reviewing for Shelf Awareness, starting off with New Life, No Instructions: A Memoir by Gail Caldwell. I really liked Caldwell's 2010 memoir of friendship--human and canine--Let's Take the Long Way Home, but this one may be even more affecting--it's feeling like a perfectly-timed choice for my milestone-birthday month.

Have you heard that this is Read an E-Book Week? I'll be continuing with Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World from last week in iBooks.

• on audio

I finished Fangirl, the audio that spurred me to read Fic, early last week, and have very much changed direction. My current listen is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything--and it's shorter than I realized. This was one of my very first Audible downloads--it's been in TBLT (To Be Listened To) Purgatory sine the summer of 2011--and I made a rookie mistake with it: I bought the abridged version. However, the full version isn't read by the author, and I wasn't that much of a rookie--I knew that if at all possible, I wanted to hear Bryson read Bryson. Maybe it wasn't that big a mistake, come to think of it...

What I'm watching

The new series--a remake of the show that made Carl Sagan a household name--Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey kicks off tonight. We have it set up on the DVR. It dovetails nicely with my audio read, although the timing is coincidental, honestly.

What I'm writing

Next Sunday will be this blog's seventh birthday. I'm planning to write something to commemorate that, but the week ahead is probably not going to be the best for productive blogging, so I may be sending myself a belated blogiversary card.

What caught my eye this week

I shared this on social media a few days ago, but it's worth mentioning again. Blog posts with pictures tend to get more noticed, but sometimes you just don't have one of your own that's a good fit. Getty Images has made 35 million images from its archives available, free of charge, for embedding online. The photos and illustrations can't be modified or edited, but even so, this is a fantastic resource for images to enliven your blog posts--like this one, which is now officially non-gratuitous (but is also officially gratis): (EDITED TO ADD: I've discovered that this photo may not show up properly in your feed, so you may have to click through if you want to see it. I'm guessing that's something about the nature of the embed code.)

"I think along the way somewhere book blogger became synonymous with book reviewer and I definitely found myself willingly put on that hat. Certainly a good majority of book bloggers identify as book reviewers. But I don’t necessarily think book blog has to mean you need to be a book reviewer. A book blog can be SO many things and honestly they could be completely devoid of book reviews."

--"In Which I Hang Up My Hat as a Book Reviewer" (The Perpetual Page-Turner)

What Else is New?

Some of you know that I'm not a practicing Catholic now, but I do still make some effort to observe Lent. On Ash Wednesday, I recorded my intentions for Lent in my Day One journal, including this one:

• wish-listing ebooks, audiobooks, music, and app downloads–my current self-indulgent impulse buys–until after Easter

The last one is a variation on my annual resolution to "give up book-buying for Lent" Between the steady stream of review copies and the lack of a good local bookstore--Barnes and Noble just hasn't been doing it for me recently--I haven't bought a print book for myself in months, so committing to not doing it for another six weeks isn't as painful as it once was. Resisting the instant gratification of an ebook or audiobook download will be a sacrifice, however.

Please visit Friday's post for the Summer-Cation Blog Hop for this week's "Gratuitous Photo"...and comment to enter the giveaway while you're there, why don't you?

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Summer-Cation Blog Hop: Sharing My Sunshine!

I love the idea of Sheila's Summer-Cation Blog Hop--

"Everywhere I look in Minnesota there is SNOW SNOW SNOW. We are having wind chill warnings weekly, snow storms, and more school closings this year then I remember in my entire life. :shock: Then I go on-line and read other book reviewers in the same boat – unusual cold temperatures, winds, snow in states that normally do not get snow…

"I am calling an emergency Summer-Cation. We need to talk sunshine people!!!! I am looking for people to write posts of a great summer experience (sun is not optional… I repeat sun is not optional! )"

--but I feel like a bit of a fraud participating in it. While so many of you have been bearing up under a winter for the record books, here in Southern California, it's been mostly sunny, dry--we're actually setting records for that, as opposed to snowfall--and pleasantly warm. These photos were taken earlier this winter in Ventura, California, about 35 miles west of where I live. The surf wasn't up very far, but it was up to something...

The beaches out here are more crowded when the calendar actually says it's summer, but other than that, they won't look much different in July than they did in January. And the forecast won't look all that much different, either:

Don't shoot me, I'm just the weather messenger.

It's not so much that this is the land of the Endless Summer--it's that we basically have one season that feels endless because it doesn't vary all that much. It can get very hot--well above 90 degrees--for days at a time from May through October, but it's the proverbial "dry heat"--and having spent nearly 80% of my life in the humidity belt between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, I'm here to tell you that the dry heat really is easier to handle. And because our summers really are the dry season--not that our winters are all that wet--we get used to making outdoor plans without even considering a rainy-day backup.

So, my contribution to the Summer-Cation is sharing some of our warm California sun...and a little touristy giveaway. Leave a comment on this post, and after this Blog Hop Weekend ends, I'll choose one commenter at random and send you two refrigerator magnets depicting scenes from Sunny SoCal--hopefully they'll brighten your kitchen, at least, if not your winter!

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WCWW: Smoky Mountain Spring

Today is a "Wild Card" Wordless Wednesday with no specific prompt, but the suggested theme is "spring forward" (since we set the clocks ahead this weekend!). I'm springing backward instead, to May 2007.

Collage assembled from photos taken in and around Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Tennessee and North Carolina), Spring 2007

An InLinkz Link-up

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Book Talk: THE RACE UNDERGROUND, by Doug Most

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
Doug Most (Facebook) (Twitter)
St. Martin's Press (February 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0312591322 / 9780312591328)
Nonfiction: history, 416 pages

A version of this post was previously published as a Starred Review in Shelf Awareness for Readers (February 18, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

As industrial innovation and waves of immigration drove the dramatic 19th-century growth of New York and Boston, both cities needed to find new ways to move people around. Constrained by geography, they were running out of space for pedestrians, horses, carriages and street railways to coexist, and eventually, they looked in the same direction: below street level. In The Race Underground, Boston Globe editor Doug Most recounts the remarkable achievements in civil engineering that transformed two cities, along with the political and financial intrigues that accompanied them.

The Race Underground shifts its narrative between Boston and New York from one chapter to the next, and while Most doesn’t minimize the technological developments that made the subway possible, he’s more interested in the people responsible for bringing it to each city—and, sometimes, in the ones who stood in its way. The human-interest angle allows him to play up the competitive relationship between the Northeast’s two anchor cities as each tries to be first to take its transportation problems underground. (Spoiler: Boston does it sooner, but New York does it on a much bigger scale.)

As challenging as it can be to get around New York, Boston, and other major American cities where mass transit is part of everyday 21st-century life, it’s staggering to imagine what it might be like without it. (Actually, if you live in Los Angeles, you don't have to imagine very hard.) The Race Underground tells the story of how we got there, and it’s an enlightening—and surprisingly exciting—ride.

Book description, from the publisher's website: 

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew more congested, the streets became clogged with plodding, horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 crippled the entire northeast, a solution had to be found. Two brothers from one of the nation's great families—Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York—pursued the dream of his city digging America's first subway, and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, life-changing innovations, class warfare, bitter political tensions, and the question of America’s place in the world. 

The Race Underground is peopled with the famous, like Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison, and the not-so-famous, from brilliant engineers to the countless "sandhogs" who shoveled, hoisted　and blasted their way into the earth’s crust, sometimes losing their lives in the construction of the tunnels. Doug Most chronicles the science of the subway, looks at the centuries of fears people overcame about traveling underground and tells a story as exciting as any ever ripped from the pages of U.S. history. The Race Undergroundis a great American saga of two rival American cities, their rich, powerful and sometimes corrupt interests, and an invention that changed the lives of millions.

From the Introduction:

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities. In Boston and New York, there were too many people and no safe, reliable way for them to move from one neighborhood to the next. In the summer heat, carriages inched forward until the animals reared up their legs in frustration, and police had to come out swinging their clubs to restore peace. During the winter it was no better. Horses struggled to get their footing in the snow and ice and were driven to exhaustion or sometimes death. When a solution to the problem finally emerged--a subway--it was rejected time and again, either by corrupt politicians, selfish businessmen, or terrified citizens."

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What's On in the (Sunday) Salon, 3/2/2014

What I'm reading

• in print

As I mentioned last week, given the assorted work-related time limitations I'll have for the next couple of months, I'm keeping my print reading focused on review commitments. This week, I need to finish Exodus, make my April choices for Shelf Awareness, and get going on a blog-tour read for the end of this month.

• on audio

I should be done with Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell in the next day or two, and I'm utterly loving it--maybe even more than Eleanor and Park. But I may delay posting my review for a little while, since I started reading the Smart Pop Books essay collection Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World as a companion read in iBooks--I'm thinking there will be a "Thoughts From My Reading/A Fan(girl)'s Notes" discussion involving both, and those take more time to put together.

What I'm watching

The Academy Awards are on tonight, and one advantage to having them air live on the West Coast is that we don't have to stay up till nearly midnight to watch them. We actually havem't seen all that many of the big films this year, but that's never stopped us before...

What I'm writing

This section will mostly be a placeholder until audit season is over, since I just won't be writing much that isn't book discussions or Sunday Salon posts. However, I do have a couple of other things in the works that are mentioned in the "What Else is New?" section below.

What caught my eye this week

"Being friendly with people is easy; being real friends is difficult. 

"When someone says, 'Hey, we should see that movie sometime,' I don't know if they are just being nice or they would really like to hang out. So I say, 'yeah! I would love that!' and then I wait for them to set it up because I am afraid if I try to set it up, I will look like I am pressuring them to do something they maybe didn’t want to REALLY do in the first place. Maybe they were just being nice.

"So I wait for someone to make the first move, and when someone does go through with setting up legit plans with me, I get so anxious that half the time I end up cancelling because I am so paranoid and overwhelmed that I will be a complete letdown."

--"Unfriendable" (Katie on Sluiter Nation)

"But sometimes, it's the 'smallness' that allows the blog to be a great thing. Contrary to how we often feel as bloggers, 'smallness' isn't always a bad thing; it might be the thing that makes us great. (Not necessarily big, but big doesn't always equal great -- and vice versa.) 

"In a hunt for blog tips when I first started, I came across this advice: 'Don't peak too early.' In other words, don't try to artificially grow your blog. Let it grow steadily. Slowly. Naturally. That is the growth that will mean something long-term. That advice has stuck with me."

--"On the Pursuit of Blogging Fame" (Katie Landry, featured on BlogHer.com)

"I’ve pulled off a hat trick—three for three. They’re all readers. Good, really good readers. My five-year-old is reading Magic Treehouse and Ivy + Bean. My seven-year-old reads The Familiars and Roald Dahl and The Time Thief. My eldest, the nine-year-old, is reading the Star Wars books, the ones written for older teens and adults. They’re incredibly strong readers, although they do at times walk into inanimate objects. 

"People ask me all the time, 'How do you do it? How do you get your kids to read? Mine are just not interested.' I’ll tell you...I don't know. 

(skip to the tips...) 

"2) Buy books. Someone once told me that growing up, her parents had said 'no' to toys all the time but never to books. That seems to be where we’ve landed, as well. I can’t even say 'no' to books for me. I cannot walk out of a bookstore without several items in hand. How in the world will I look my kids in the face if I get books and they don’t? We’re fortunate to have the means to be able to buy books, but we also get a lot out of the library. We don’t like to limit ourselves."

--"Read Across the House" (Emily Rosenbaum)

What Else is New?

Sheila--who comes up with the most fun ideas!--is hosting a "Summer-cation Weekend Blog Hop" this coming weekend (March 7-9) to help shake off the blues of this LONG winter. I've signed up to post about something summery on Friday, so I need to start thinking about what to write. (This would not be the time to post some of those photos from the snow at Mammoth Mountain, even though they were taken in June...)

Mini-Challenge Hosts are needed for the Spring edition of Bloggiesta. There are some suggestions posted at that link; go and see what you might like to do, and let the hosts know! I'm signing up for one, but am not yet sure what it'll be.

Gratuitous Photo of the Week

IT RAINED IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. (Yes, this qualifies as news.)

What's on with you this weekend?

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