West of Mars

Whoa. Six weeks now we’ve been playing. Hope you’re having fun and meeting new people — remember to invite your friends along!

By now, you oughta know the drill. In case you don’t, here are the rules:

1. Leave a comment here, on this post. Say hello to me, tell me what you’re reading, what song you’re jamming to, which is your favorite Easter candy… You pick, just say SOMEthing! Leave your link (I can’t get Comment Luv to work regularly) to your blog.

2. Go visit the blog link in the comment above you. Tell them “I’m from West of Mars” and hopefully something nice about their post.

3. When three people have left a comment since your last one, you may play again. If no one’s commented for two hours, you may play again. This is the ONLY time you may visit someone other than the person above you.

4. If you’re new here, your comment will go into moderation. I’m going to try to keep on top of that, but do check back to make sure no one missed you. If you were skipped, leave another comment — even if you break the three-person rule.

5. Be nice. Have fun. Make new friends — that’s what this is all about. And, of course, I operate on the Commutative Principle of Friendships, whereby any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Which means anyone and everyone is welcome to play.

6. Game ends Sunday night, even if I post something again in the meantime. I’m overdue for some fiction, I know.

If you’re thinking I’m on a tear of reading great stuff, you’re right. A scant ten days ago, I was raving about Joanne Rendell’s third novel, Out of the Shadows.

And now, it’s time to rave about Chris Bohjalian’s 2008 release, Skeletons at the Feast.

Wow. Just… wow.

Okay, let me try to be coherent here. It’s not easy.

This is a Holocaust book, no matter how much we want it to not be. That’s because we have one character — and this isn’t a spoiler; you guys know me too well to think I’d spoil a read for you — who jumps out of one of those cattle cars the Germans used in to transport the Jews to the concentration camps. And it’s also because we have another secondary character who is a prisoner.

But the heart of this book is what makes it. The heart is a young woman named Anna. Raised in Prussia on a sugar beet farm, she’s as close to gentry as it gets. But she and her family are on the run; the Russians are coming, and the Russians (sigh) aren’t nice people. Atrocities abound when Ivan gets near. It’s sad. It’s scary.

Anna’s family has a secret: a Scottish POW. They’re hoping he’ll come in handy when they get to the West and find the British and American troops.

Anna and the POW have another secret. Bet you can guess what.

What makes this book so fascinating is the tale — based on true events — of their flight and the hardships THEY have to endure. Think about it. When we talk about WWII, we focus on the Jews and what happened to them. It’s hard not to. Six million people is an awfully huge number.

But lately, I’ve been reading books that focus on more than the Jews. Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us is one of them. Her character named Anna (and no, we’re not going there… I’m quite sure Anna was a very common name) was trying to keep herself and her daughter alive in a time of uncertainty and deprivation.

To be honest, I like that. I like what our escaped Jew does. I like how the woman prisoner survives. And I love this Anna. She’s got a heart and a worldview that Blum’s Anna lacked. Not because Blum’s Anna wasn’t a good character. Oh, my, is that Anna a phenomenal woman.

It’s that Bohjalian’s Anna manages to rise above. Of course, she has less to rise above than Blum’s character did. It’s not even fair to compare the two women.

Go read both books. Not back to back; that much Holocaust will kill anyone.

Eew. Pun NOT intended. Yikes. Sorry about that.

***
(My book club told me Tuesday night that Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife is another. I haven’t read it yet. Sounds like I need to.)

A year or so ago, my book club finally read Those Who Save Us, Jenna Blum’s debut novel. I liked it quite a bit; didn’t love it, but most of my book club did. (What held me back? Personal shit. Don’t ask. I won’t answer.)

Somehow, I was snoozing when Jenna put out her second book, The Stormchasers.

This is a good thing, because in the meantime, we’ve chatted via Twitter quite a bit. She’s exposing me to a brand new world: that of the real, actual, honest-to-goodness stormchasers.

This is also a good thing because my son and I got sucked into last season’s Stormchasers TV show on Discovery Network. I’m now following series star Reed Timmer on Twitter (and, okay, Facebook) and am learning LOTS about weather. It’s actually quite fascinating. And it definitely has given me a new, better approach to the power and beauty of thunderstorms. I’d love to go chase storms with people as smart as Reed and his gang.

You see how all of this has come together into a perfect storm of sorts.

So… with the news that The Stormchasers, that book Jenna wrote that somehow slipped under my radar, is coming out TODAY in paperback, I asked if she wanted to drop in and tell us what song makes her think of this new gem of a book. (Really, I am DYING to read it!)

Here’s what she said:

That’s a tough one in a way, because the book has a whole soundtrack. Its twin hero/ heroine come of age in the 80s, which as far as I’m concerned is a Golden Age of music (this is coming from someone whose hair on just one side of her face used to be bigger than her whole head). So while I was writing the novel, I’d listen to its soundtrack on my iPod during my evening walks (sometimes, I’m afraid, conducting).

The STORMCHASERS soundtrack is available on my blog.

If I had to choose just one, I’d say it’s Copland’s Appalachian Spring, the allegro movement. It’s bold and beautiful and strange, with some majestic crashing discordancy that to me is reminiscent of Charles Hallingdahl’s manic episodes, followed by a tender coda that reminds me of his sister, Karena. THE STORMCHASERS is a quintessentially American book, and the Copland piece sums up everything I love about the wild beauty of this country, its people and their bravery in the face of their struggles, and its weather.

(And, hey, this YouTube video that I linked to? It was posted by someone named playingmusiconmars. I TOLD you this was a perfect storm!)

The Stormchasers. Jenna Blum’s follow-up to her monster hit, Those Who Save Us. Available today.

I hope you’ve been wondering why I’ve been silent about a rock and roll collection of short stories winning literature’s biggest prize, the Pulitzer. The book I’m talking about is A Visit From the Goon Squad, written by Jennifer Egan.

I mean, hello? What could be better exposure for the genre than the Pulitzer Prize? Right there, isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that give the genre the credibility I’ve long been seeking for it?

Yes and no.

Yes because hello? Here’s a book about rock and roll that’s getting huge exposure and selling like mad. As I’m typing this, it’s the number one seller at Powells.com, and I’m sure it’s number one at Amazon, B&N, and every indie store on the planet. Winning the Pulitzer tends to raise a book’s profile and make people think they want to read it. You can call them bandwagon jumpers if you’d like. I call them people in search of something good to read. (I just wish they’d experiment a little more!)

No because this book isn’t identified as a piece of rock and roll fiction. It’s identified as brilliant, interlocked short stories that just happen to be about an aging record exec.

If you follow my Rocks ‘n Reads blog, you know what I thought of Good Squad.

What you may not know is what I thought of Ms. Egan’s dismissive comments about chick lit. Reading it for myself, I don’t think it’s so terrible. She’s encouraging women to shoot high. There’s nothing wrong with that. And frankly, I don’t see her cutting down “that Harvard student” for plagiarizing chick lit so much as plagiarizing BAD fiction. (It’s the last paragraph on the page. Go read it.) Maybe the authors “that Harvard student” ripped off are the best in the genre. I don’t know. I don’t overly care for a lot of chick lit, myself — although I do keep trying. The chick lit books I’ve read that I’ve liked are books that I’ve REALLY REALLY liked. For me, there’s not a lot of middle ground.

So I can’t totally vilify her. I CAN wish she’d won an award for a book that didn’t bore me into deleting it off my iPod. (It was a library book, thank goodness!). I CAN wish the profile of rock and roll fiction (or maybe we should rename the genre Music Fiction, since there’s nothing rock and roll about some of the books I’ve identified as great reads) was higher, so that Ms. Egan had been recognized for not only what some considered to be a great book, but a great ROCK AND ROLL book.

Keep reading, folks. We’ll get to the point where people recognize the brilliance in the Rock Books genre. One day.

Yep, it’s the weekend. Easter weekend for you who celebrate (as you noticed from my last post, I do not). I wish you all many many chocolate bunnies, with ears just waiting to be bit off.

It’s spring break here, which means kids are underfoot along with the foster cat. I’ve been toying with the idea of a post about Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad winning the Pulitzer; it IS a rock and roll book, after all. I just need time to write it.

And it’s the NHL playoffs! You know I’m glued to the TV… editing some new stuff for you. I hope Mannequin set the bar high for you.

By now, you oughta know the drill. In case you don’t, here are the rules:

1. Leave a comment here, on this post. Say hello to me, tell me what you’re reading, what song you’re jamming to, which is your favorite Easter candy… You pick, just say SOMEthing! Leave your link (I can’t get Comment Luv to work regularly) to your blog.

2. Go visit the blog link in the comment above you. Tell them “I’m from West of Mars” and hopefully something nice about their post.

3. When three people have left a comment since your last one, you may play again. If no one’s commented for two hours, you may play again. This is the ONLY time you may visit someone other than the person above you.

4. If you’re new here, your comment will go into moderation. I’m going to try to keep on top of that, but do check back to make sure no one missed you. If you were skipped, leave another comment — even if you break the three-person rule.

5. Be nice. Have fun. Make new friends — that’s what this is all about. And, of course, I operate on the Commutative Principle of Friendships, whereby any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Which means anyone and everyone is welcome to play.

6. Game ends Sunday night.

Those of you who’ve been here for any length of time know I’m Jewish. It’s not as big a secret as my birthday, and you’ll notice I’ve even come clean about THAT of late.

I’m a parent now, myself (as you know if you hang out here regularly). And that means that along with alternating years with each side of the family (that’d be MINE and HIS, and yes, I suck at that “alternating regularly” part, so let’s not focus on that but on the story that’s about to unfold, okay??), on occasion — always the MINE years — we wind up making holiday meals.

This year, we’re doing Passover for the four of us and my parents.

So, of course, the latent baker in me, the one I had to bury while I built the strength back up in my back so I could actually complete baking something without handing it off to my husband to finish — well, that latent baker is back. I baked cookies to take to a friend’s house for dinner over the weekend. Okay, fine. I made cookie dough and took THAT over to their house and baked it there. Same diff.

Six people, of course, means two desserts. Both baked from scratch. The husband wanted the cheesecake I’ve made him in the past. There’s no chocolate in that cheesecake, and since my middle name should have been Chocolate, not Helene, that meant … well, it was a joint decision. The Girl Band liked the picture in Passover By Design. So the Chocolate Mousse Pie it was going to be.

This cookbook came to us because I agreed to review it for Front Street Reviews — back in 2008. At that time, I didn’t make anything from it. It wasn’t Passover, and that was when my latent baker was off, waiting for my body to heal. I loved the book. It looked great. The food sounded like something we’d make around here. And a quick perusal of this Chocolate Mousse Pie made it seem like it’d be easy.

I am one who can’t do more than give a quick skim to a recipe before I dive in. I’ll get the ingredients out — usually — but I tend to take recipes step by step. Otherwise, I get confused. I do things out of order. I get ahead of myself, and disaster happens. Know that NOW.

I should have aborted when the directions for “6 tablespoons sugar, divided” didn’t mean 3 tablespoons used in two different spots. Nope. It meant one, then two, then three.

And where it says to “set a metal bowl over a pot of barely simmering water to form a double boiler,” it does NOT say how big that bowl ought to be. It never dawned on me to use anything but my smallest All-Clad sauce pan — I’ve been melting chocolate long enough that I don’t do the double-boiler thing. I’m trying to cut down on the numbers of dishes I wash at the end. It’s all about the back’s endurance, you know… Besides, All-Clad is freaking HEAVY. Even this small pan I’m using will be weighing my arm down, and it doesn’t help that today was a Boot Camp day. 30 minutes of push-ups and sit-ups. My arms are toast. Yep, I’m all about this little saucepan. It’s perfect for the sugar/chocolate/butter mix.

(Mark those words about the numbers of dishes I have to wash at the end. We’re just getting started.)

So okay. I’m melting the chocolate, the butter, and the sugar. I’m dividing the eggs. Break a yolk. Good thing the cheesecake needs four eggs; it was the third egg I opened where the yolk broke. Pour the separated eggs back together, add a fourth, put aside for the cheesecake. Okay. Not a problem.

But… I’d expected the egg whites to be beaten. Why the hell I put them in a cereal bowl, I don’t know. So I had to finish separating SIX eggs and then get out a bigger bowl, one I can whip the egg whites in. Not a problem. I whip away, as the directions say.

What’s this? Whip the yolks?? In the cereal bowl?

Really. I know better. Why I pushed the issue, I don’t know. Except it makes for a better story.

Okay… so we’ve got the yolks in a bigger bowl. They’re whipped until they are thick and lemon colored. What next?

Temper them. Okey-dokey. I’ve done this before. It’s no big deal. I take a ladle and have at it. It goes well.

I check the cookbook for the next directions and … what’s this? Add the eggs to the chocolate mixture?

I eye the saucepan I’m using. It’ll be tight, but… yeah. I can do it. I’ve got it.

Back to the cookbook. Fold large dollop of egg whites into chocolate.

Wait.

WHAT???

INTO the chocolate? Into THAT pan, the one full up to the brim? You’re kidding me, right?

So I grab my biggest All-Clad mixing bowl (oh, how I love the All-Clad twice-yearly seconds sale! Where the world’s best pots and pans only cost the equivalent of your first-born’s freshman year college tuition, instead of all four years of that tuition.) and hope it’ll be okay. After all, the saucepan is still warm. The mixing bowl? Not so much.

Go figure that as I add the egg whites, I notice… since I was directed to whip them before the yolks, they’ve already started to separate. And of course, I don’t notice this until I’m halfway through the procedure of folding them into the mousse.

By this point, I’m swearing.

And then we get to the “Pour 3 cups of the mousse mixture into the prepared pan and bake… Store remaining mousse in refrigerator.”

While this makes sense, we’ve got to stop and examine the contents of my fridge. It’s full-up with THE REST OF THE UPCOMING PASSOVER DINNER. Even the beer’s in the fridge downstairs and there’s no way I’m running downstairs with a bowl of mousse. Not when I’m going to need it to finish this puppy off in an hour or so.

I shift some vegetables around, stack the yogurt, cram the top shelf as full as possible. Toss some leftovers in the sink. Voila. Room for my biggest mixing bowl.

Okay… next?

Wait. WHAT THE FUCK.

Take the hot, fresh-out-of-the-oven pan and put it in the fridge? The one with GLASS SHELVES? The one with NO ROOM?

Yes, boys and girls. I made room. Somehow. I put potholders down on my glass shelf. I held my breath and hoped I wouldn’t find the cake had fallen into the fruit drawer and ruined itself AND my fridge. I sorta like my fridge.

It all worked out okay, except I’m still having fits about this damn recipe. Better prep instructions would have been nice. A note about needing to use a large saucepan, so I could fit everything in it. Whipping the yolks before the whites. And a note to reorganize the holiday-stocked fridge BEFORE starting.

In the end, I wound up with seven or eight bowls that needed to be washed. I haven’t tried the pie yet as of the time I’m writing this (it’s 4PM on Monday), but the batter was tasty enough…

Oh, and the cheesecake? Other than the eggs, which had been a victim of the mousse pie, you’ll remember, I used ONE bowl: the bowl of my big KitchenAid.

Maybe my husband’s on to something and next time, I’ll be content with a cheesecake. For all that it lacks chocolate, it’s really quite delicious…

(and this humorous story barely scratches the surface of why I hate Passover, but we’ll deal with all that later, okay? I’ve got dessert to go eat. And baking clothes to change out of, and holiday clothes to put on.)

We interrupt our irregular programming today ’cause I read a book that I just LOVED, and I NEED to tell you guys about it.

It’s Joanne Rendell’s third book, Out of the Shadows, and let me tell you… Joanne’s hit her writerly stride with this one. Okay, I haven’t read her second book, Washington’s Crossing, yet so maybe it happened there. And that’s not to say her debut, The Professor’s Wives Club wasn’t a good book, either. It’s that Out of the Shadows is an incredible read.

This is the story of Clara, a woman who was raised believing she’s got some of Mary Shelley’s blood in her background. It’s the story of her fiance (of a number of years), Anthony. We don’t see much of him, but his story is pivotal. So is Mary Shelley’s, even though she’s long dead. (This is not a ghost story.)

I don’t want to say too much, other than this was a great read. Go get it. Joanne, who has become a friend of mine via Win a Book (see what you’re missing out on over there?), has penned a great tale. She gets her characters into jams and then back out again with a style and grace — and some very, very creative thinking. You may *think* you know what’s going to happen… but you don’t!

Just… go. Pick this one up. It’s a keeper.

I may or may not keep numbering these babies. I don’t know. Does it matter to you if I do or not?

By now, I hope you know what to do. But if not, here are the rules:
Here’s how to play:

1. Leave a comment here, on this post. Say hello to me, tell me what you’re reading, what song you’re jamming to. You pick it. Leave your link (I can’t get Comment Luv to work regularly) to your blog.

2. Go visit the blog link in the comment above you. Tell them “I’m from West of Mars” and hopefully something nice about their post.

3. When three people have left a comment since your last one, you may play again. If no one’s commented for two hours, you may play again. This is the ONLY time you may visit someone other than the person above you.

4. If you’re new here, your comment will go into moderation. I’m going to try to keep on top of that, but do check back to make sure no one missed you. If you were skipped, leave another comment — even if you break the three-person rule.

5. Be nice. Have fun. Make new friends — that’s what this is all about. And, of course, I operate on the Commutative Principle of Friendships, whereby any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Which means anyone and everyone is welcome to play.

6. Game ends Sunday night.

It’s been four, five days and it’s still hard to walk into my bedroom. There’s an old blue comforter, a reject from my bed, sitting on the floor in the far corner.

We used to call it The Cave. That’s because the cats would curl up inside it, turning it into a cave. They’d pick the end closest to the heating vents; Devon Rexes are notorious for getting cold quickly.

Now, we call it a comforter. Something we have to decide what to do with. Leave it there? Keep it? Give it away? Just trash it, since in their attempts to burrow, beat each other up, and who knows what else, it’s now full of holes?

I’m not ready to deal with it. I’m not ready to deal with the hole it’ll leave. Hell, I’m not ready to deal with the hole the litter pan left, or the food bowls, or the lack of an angry blue-cream tabby cat, standing at the top of the basement steps, yelling at me for going away without him. I still walk into my bathroom and turn to call them, one hand on the faucet so I can turn it on when they come running. I still get into bed at night, five months later, and have to remind myself that no, Chanterelle doesn’t need her medicine.

You may remember that I lost my Chanterelle back in November. I’d thought her littermate, Cooper, would hang out for a year or two more. But I don’t think he ever recovered from the way in which Chan broke his heart.

In fact, it WAS his heart that was his final downfall. Last Monday, I took him to the vet. He hadn’t greeted me when I’d gotten home the night before from a camping trip with my son. In sixteen and a half years together, he’d never once failed to greet me when I’d been gone that long.

They took an x-ray, but couldn’t get a good look at his chest cavity. They warned me there might be a mass in there. My oldest sister is a vet. This wasn’t news that was hitting me from left field.

I actually waffled about doing an ultrasound the next day to find out what the problem was. That’s because Cooper wasn’t eating. I’d been down this road with Chanterelle. If Cooper didn’t eat, it didn’t matter what was wrong with him. He’d die of starvation in a few days.

But at the last minute, I called the vet and went ahead. What they found surprised me. Cooper had severe dilated cardiomyopathy. In other words, heart failure. His heart would expand and fill with blood, but it wasn’t contracting and pumping that blood on through to the lungs. Fluid was collecting outside the sac holding the heart; it had collapsed part of his lung.

We *could* treat him, and I went home with medicine. But… a cat who won’t eat anything is a cat getting ready to join his littermate.

Two days later, it was time. I knew it before Cooper would admit it. After I called the vet, I went to look for the old man. He had gotten out of his green Polartec bed and made it to his pan (thankfully. At 5:30 that morning, with him asleep on my stomach on the family room couch, we hadn’t been so lucky.). But he couldn’t manage the steps back upstairs.

Right there, like that, as he huddled on the bottom stair and waited for me to come rescue him, the fight went out of my cat. Not all of it, but enough. It was time.

It was also time to leave for the vet.

Unbelievably, for a cat who was dying of heart break and heart failure, his spirit left before his heart stopped beating.

***

I can’t tell you how much I miss him. That I’ve never spent a night in this house without a cat in it. That I sit on the couch and hold one of The Girl Band’s stuffed animals even though it can’t come close to being my cat. He was a kneader, my Cooper. Before I had The Boy Band, he’d drool on me as he kneaded: cat behavorialists will tell you that’s a sign that the cat thinks you’re his mom. He was trying to stimulate milk flow from the crook of my right arm. After I was a mom to human children, he’d keep kneading. But he never drooled again. He knew Mom had had a new litter.

It’s not that Cooper was my cat so much as I was Cooper’s. That’s why this void is so damn hard, and why I’m struggling so much. Yeah, part of it is that it’s harder to go from one cat to none than it is to go from two to one. When you lose one of a pair, you’ve still got a companion. And it helps that Chanterelle loved everyone the same. Her void, while large, wasn’t quite as unbearable as Cooper’s is.

But… I’ve got the shelter where I volunteer. Someone there will adopt me. I’ve got more room now for a foster kitty; I’m thinking of putting them here in my office with me instead of in the Boy Band’s room. And it’s kitten season, or it soon will be.

We’ll find more cats. My kids will get to experience the fun of a couple of kittens; they are exactly the right age for this, and they’re experienced enough to know how to handle a kitten or two. (Not three. Of course, watch those be the words I later bite.)

It’ll never be like the two small Devon Rex kittens my sister brought me back in 1994. Those kittens won’t adopt me the way Cooper did. They’ll adopt the kids, and that’s the way it ought to be. I had my time. Now they get theirs.

***

Our final night together, I kept telling Cooper that it was okay, that he should go join Chanterelle. He wouldn’t. I’m not surprised. As I texted my sister, she was probably up there waiting for him, ready with a growl, a hiss and a paw swipe, just like she did whenever one of them had been to the vet.

Now that she’s gotten that out of her system, I know they are curled up together once again, just like always, a little puddle of blue and blue-cream, yin and yang in their bed.

And I miss them. Oh, how I miss them.

Ever since I put The Demo Tapes: Year 1 out, back in November of 2008, I have asked for one simple thing for my birthday: royalties.

Okay, I ask for iTunes gift cards, too.

But I can hardly ask you guys to buy me iTunes gift cards, any more than I can ask family and friends to buy yet more copies of my books. If I do that, I turn into one of those loser authors who sells more copies to family and friends than to actual readers, even if the family and friends hand those books over to people who become actual readers.

This year, I decided to make it easier for y’all to grant my birthday wish.

This is the Super Secret part of the day’s event. Because until now, I’ve been coy about my birthday. “Pick a day in April,” I’d say. That would be it. You’d never be wrong and I could continue on my merry way, absolutely loathing my birthday.

It’s not the whole getting a year older thing that inspires such disgust and hatred in me. Nope. It’s that no matter how low my expectations, they are NEVER met.

I’m changing that this year. I want royalties for my birthday (and the rest of the year, but let’s start small and special, shall we?) and so I have thrown up a charming little short story at Smashwords and Amazon. It’s called Mannequin. It’s the story of Lynne, whose dad takes her shopping with him at a high-end men’s boutique. Lynne likes to sit at the feet of the mannequin in the window and dream of what he’d be like if he were real. One day, a stranger walks in. For Lynne, nothing will be the same ever again.

You may recognize the stranger. You may not. But you’ll have to read the story to find out if you do or not.

C’mon. 99c. I bet it’s the cheapest birthday present you’ve ever bought.

Besides, how many birthday presents let YOU keep the goods?