The Nanny by Gilly Macmillan

It does feel weird to just write a regular book review on here without expressly saying that things are so topsy-turvy right now. As I'm writing this, I'm on day eleven of social distancing. I have not left the house except to walk/train the dog, go to the grocery store or dog park, or do yardwork. But this also means that I'm reading a lot. So, here's just another book review. 

 The Nanny by Gilly Macmillan is a pretty good thriller.  Set in an old manor in the English countryside, it tells us the story of the Holt family and their eponymous nanny.  Jocelyn is devastated when her adored nanny disappears one night.  But many years later, when Jo is forced to return back to her childhood home with her own daughter after both she and her mother become widowed, the nanny returns to town.  Is this just luck?  Or is there something sinister lurking in the background?

So, let's go back to NGS's trifecta of evaluation of novels: setting, characters, and plot.  I'm sure there are literature buff out there screaming about theme, point of view, metaphor, and other elements of a novel, but I'm just going to focus on these three because it seems like those are things that I pay attention to the most. 

This is a great modern Gothic, really. The tense, gloomy atmosphere of Holt Manor is the major driving force of the entire story. It's the basis for the relationship between the villagers and the Holts, the way the detective treats the woman as he interviews them, and the class dynamics that exist even among members of the Holt family themselves. It makes you want to avoid the pond. You wrap yourself into a snug blanket because the iciness of the setting makes you chilly.

The characters are sort of caricatures of themselves, what with the evil nanny, the woebegone aristocrat's child who tried to leave, but is forced back when life circumstance prevail, the pre-teen sulkiness, and the uptight elderly dowager.  But what prevents this novel from falling into a boring abyss of pre-packaged melange is that the characters interact in interesting, real ways. The grandmother allows her preteen granddaughter to put on her clothes and makeup while they bake cookies and watch videos on YouTube. Those images and scenes make the sort of typical character types stand out.  The details make the characters in a specific, important way.

The plot is a bit lackluster, to be honest. I rarely figure out mystery plots; I think I would be a horrible police detective.  In this case, I pretty much knew the ending about 2/3 of the way through, but the biggest mystery was whether or not Jo would figure it out.  I thought that Macmillan did a good job of building up the suspense about Jo's own detecting skills.

So, while I did not find this to be a perfect novel, I did find it to be something that transported me to another place during a time when I definitely needed to be transported somewhere else. 

Nine Months with Hannah

This last month has been a challenging time in our household.  There have been lots of schedule shifts and it's been a constant rotation of new.  Hannah has handled it like a champ.  

We finished up Hannah's first session of obedience classes in mid-March. She was really getting good at letting people come up to us without jumping on them, letting strangers pet her, and approaching dogs without freaking out.  She has learned a bunch of new tricks, including lots of hand targeting with a box (all four paws in a box, front paws in a box, back paws in a box, sit in a box, stay in a box, walk around a box, etc.).  

Her ears go completely flat when she's concentrating and I think it's so charming.

Sometimes, someone else gets jealous of training time.

But the schedules. In early March, I got a surprise job interview and after frantically updating my resume and practicing my interview questions, I started that job on March 11.  I went into the office for four days before my boss told me to work remotely.  I don't know what I'm doing really, but sure, yeah, I guess I'll work remotely.  Meanwhile, Hannah is used to someone being home about 75% of the time and suddenly it was only 50% of the time and now it's like 95% of the time. I'm worried that she's going to suffer from serious separation anxiety when/if we return to work.

Then the order to maintain social distancing came. We tried to keep things as normal as possible for Hannah. We still took her to daycare. I open the trunk of the car and Hannah runs to the daycare person (who could be fifty yards away) and there's no need for us to have any contact. We still try to take her to the dog park as often as we can.

Daycare aftermath. We'd been home for about two minutes.

She got sick around mid-March (loose stools culminating in an accident in her kennel overnight). Then she hurt one of her legs. Despite us trying to maintain social distance, there was a trip to the vet's office.  Our February run of no vet trips was ruined, but she seems like she's in good shape now.

So we're social distancing.  It makes me kind of sad.  But Hannah likes the additional walks. She likes the people home all the time. She likes the extra training that comes because I feel like she needs extra mental stimulation.  She's also learning some terrible lessons. Since we cross the street when we see people now, she thinks people are dangerous and she barks at them.  She wouldn't have done that a month ago. I worry that all our progress about people approaching her and petting her will be for naught and we're going to have to start at ground zero again.

Social distancing is fun! More hikes with my people!

Meanwhile, there have been some successes.

Hannah's scared of people wielding sticks. She loves playing with sticks with other dogs, but as soon as a human picks one up, she tucks her tail and tries to make herself small. I'm going to gloss over how sad this makes me and focus on successes.  I have a cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels and she no longer hides when I pick it up and sort of thrust it about in her general direction.  But the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper is a whole different story. For weeks she wouldn't even be in the same room as it - she'd just run away. Then she'd be in the room, but she'd do huge circles around it.  In the above photo, you can see the day she would actually face the tube and stay in position.  A few days ago, I got her to walk over it!  

In obedience class, she handled someone walking with crutches okay.  So we're definitely making some progress!

I don't know what the next months are going to look like. Even before the social distance order and the looming threat of COVID-19, things were going to change.  But I think that Hannah will be fine no matter what happens.  And I know that adopting this dog was one of the best things we could have done last summer.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

It seems so weird to just write a normal blog post about just a regular book. I don't even really think of myself as a social person, but social distancing and being told that I can't just go the store willy-nilly when I realize we are short an onion has really taken its toll on me. There's also a crank on our local Facebook pages who keeps telling everyone to STAY INSIDE and he's really gotten in my head and I feel like I'm committing a crime by walking the dog. Our governor has told us that we should go outside (really!) because it's good for our mental and physical health. So here you go. This is book  number two of the four library books I have. As soon as I hit publish on this post, I'm definitely going to check into getting books digitally from the library.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is a heist novel set in a fantasy world.   It reminded me of The Lies of Locke Lamora in that they're both tales of rule-breaking do-gooders who live in a world with magic and great social inequality and the plots are both byzantine and wonderful with characters who have interesting stories, interesting reactions to events in the story, and interesting interactions with one another.   So, what I'm saying is I thought this book was absolutely riveting.

A couple of caveats. The book starts off slowly, but I also thought Lies had a slow buildup. A certain amount of scene setting and character introduction had to take place and while it wasn't as fun or diverting as it was in, let's say, Harry Potter at Diagon Alley, it was serviceable and after the first handful of chapters was excellent. It's also told from multiple points of view, which is not necessarily a literary device I'm loving these days, but I thought Bardugo did an excellent job of picking the correct character to tell the story (although I wish Bardugo had trusted us more to figure out who was telling the story, the way Lynch did in Lies).

Other than those nitpicks, I have to say that I thought this was such a thoughtful book. It deals with heavy themes, including stereotypes and racism, human trafficking, sexuality, and disabilities, but it doesn't deal with these heavy themes in a heavy way. Bardugo has such a deft hand at examining complicated topics and the fallout from these topics that you don't realize that you've essentially been given a crash course on international trade in people smuggling until it's over.  I would describe this book as a fun romp, and it is, except it's also not. There's humor and silliness, but there's also a lot of examination of the human experience and all its ups and downs.

I'm going to try to and continue on with this series, which reminds me that I definitely need to read more of the Lies series, too.  Come at me, digital library books!

NGS on Lockdown, or, COVID-19 Prevention

A Day in the Life During Strange Times

7:00am - The alarm rings.

7:00 - 7:30am - I walk the dog around the block, train, and feed her while Dr. BB empties the dishwasher, makes tea, and feeds the cat.

7:30am - 8:00am - Shower and get dressed in clothes that I won't be embarrassed to show if a conference call suddenly happens.

8:00 - 8:30am - Check my email while I eat breakfast. I also allow myself to check social media and the news at this time.

8:30 - 10:30am - "Work"

10:30 - 11:30am - This depends, but most days we try to get some sort of workout in during this time period. It's also when we go to the store if we have to.

11:30am - 1:30pm - This is a bit variable. During this time, I take the dog for a walk (30 - 60 minutes), eat lunch, and goof off.

1:30 - 3:30pm - "Work"

3:30 - 5:30pm - Do something around the house. I reorganized the pantry on Sunday. I cleaned my desk off and wrote this blog post on Monday. I plan on doing some small sewing projects on Tuesday (sewing on buttons and tacking down the back of one of Dr. BB's ties that he may never wear again if we're social distancing for eighteen months).

5:30 - 7:00pm - Make and eat dinner. If dinner is quick and/or a crockpot thing, we might watch an episode of some comfort television (Buffy and Great British Bake-Off right now). At 6:00pm on the dot, we train and feed Hannah and then feed Zelda. If this begins any later than six, the cat might murder us.

7:00 - 8:00pm - Television time.

8:00 - 9:00pm - Walk the dog.

9:00 - 10:00pm - Get ready for bed, take out the cat's litter, brush pets' teeth.

10:00 - 10:15pm - Go to bed.  Read in bed for as long as it takes to pass out.

NOTE: I really do work most of the time I have "work" in quotes. It's just that everything I'm doing seems so far removed from actual reality...

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Note: Right before our public library closed, I checked out four books. This is the first of the four and I don't know what I'm going to do for reading material once I've read them. I anticipate trying to get electronic copies from the library, but I also anticipate everyone else doing the same thing and the waits to be daunting. I might buy more from the Kindle store or actually pony up for a Scribd membership. I can't imagine social isolation without a steady stream of books, so while I understand and fully support our library's decision to close, it hurts my heart that the thing I will be relying on the most to get me through the next (months? year? more?) is not available.

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner tells the story of Toby and Rachel Fleishman, a New York City couple with two kids and a troubled marriage. The kids are shuttling back and forth between their parents' apartments a few blocks away from each other. Toby is on dating apps and is having pseudo-anonymous sex and thinking about his newfound sex life when he's not taking care of his patients in his job as a doctor or his children in his job as a father. Meanwhile, Rachel suddenly drops the kids off at Toby's apartment and disappears, not answering her phone and seemingly never in her apartment.

This was a readable book. I thought Brodesser-Akner did a great job of really getting into the characters' minds. You could absolutely feel the anger, tension, and roiling emotions just emanating off the pages. I had a knot in my stomach the whole time I was reading this novel, just watching the marriage crumble, watching the children unravel, and watching mental health decline.  I thought the writing was transparent and effective.

The novel was a compelling critique of a certain class of New Yorkers, social climbing, and the race to the top.  Basically what this meant was that each one of these characters was kind of terrible. Tob was self-absorbed, horny, and thoughtless. Rachel was overly ambitious and neglectful of her husband and children. And the other characters were equally flawed. That made it challenging to want to hang out with them, but at the same time, it was riveting because none of us are perfect people. If you could see inside my head, it would not make me look good, either!

I don't love reading about divorces. It just makes me so sad because I think marriage has been a good deal for me.  But I also think that it's useful to think about what makes marriages fail. And my life is about as far removed from the Manhattan private school, yoga going, bagel eating life that was portrayed in this novel as it gets, but there are still lessons to be learned. Mainly, don't be a jerk to the ones you love.  Check in on them. Show them affection. Listen to them. 

Let's all take a moment to realize that this is going to be a long haul and if we don't love each other, this fictional novel will become our lives.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I picked up the annotated version of The Big Sleep with annotation done by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto.  The novel is a noir classic, with our gritty PI Philip Marlowe getting himself further and further ensnared in the hijinks and dangers of the Sternwood family. If you don't know your literary history, you might find yourself thinking that this novel falls back on literary tropes and cliches, but as you read it, consider that Chandler was creating these tropes, as much as anything else.

I found the annotated version to be exactly what I wanted my literature classes to be like in college, but never really were. The annotations contain personal correspondence from Chandler, comparisons from works Chandler had previously published, movie stills, photos from California during the time period of the novel, and a variety of interesting lexicographical notes. I was absolutely riveted by the notes, and kept interrupting my husband's reading to ask him what he thought of particular controversies. Does it matter if the slang used was in use in "real"life or if it was created for these novels? Does it count as self-plagiarism if Chandler cannibalized his works from pulp magazines?

I don't think I would have enjoyed this book near as much with the editorializing, so I recommend the annotated version strongly.  I also recommend you settle yourself in for some great metaphor and simile work from Chandler. I enjoyed the absolute ridiculousness of his comparisons, while also acknowledging their uniqueness and accurateness.

Thumbs up from me!

The Weirdest Week Ever

I'm transitioning jobs.

Last weekend I cleaned out one office.

Then I spent Monday desperately trying to get everything ready in case we had to stay home for weeks on end because *waves hands desperately* COVID19.

Then, despite increasing concerns and calls for social distancing, I went to Madison for a conference on Tuesday. There were folks from  several University of Wisconsin schools, from Oshkosh to Parkside  to Milwaukee. Was that a mistake? Who knows?

On Wednesday I started my new job.

It's so much new information. I'm just reading, absorbing, making new contacts.  And it's exhausting. I have a new schedule. Dr. BB and I have texted more about animal feedings and food preparation in the last four day than the last two months.

Meanwhile, the University where both Dr. BB and I are employed decided on Tuesday to begin Spring Break a week early and move all of its classes to alternate formats (online, I guess?) until April 17 at the earliest. We employees still have to show up for work, though, so that's a thing. We're working in a ghost town.

At the same time, Hannah got sick.

She was sick in her kennel overnight and the poor baby just looked so miserable. We immediately called the vet and since she's such a frequent flyer, the vet just wrote her a prescription without even seeing her.  She took a few days to get back to her usual self, but I was literally just bragging about how healthy she'd been and this felt like a real setback.

Anyway, we finished up her first obedience class session on Tuesday night and she's going to be bumped up from Basic Obedience to Intermediate Obedience in the next session because she's such a good, good girl. 

Zelda the Cat doesn't care an iota about COVID19 or new jobs or sick dogs or changed schedules. She's mostly just pissed that her eating schedule is slightly off.  FEED HER OR ELSE.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a classic sci-fi novel. Adams is the snarky uncle sitting at the dinner table with his stodgy sci-fi brethren that includes Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, and Herbert. They're all discussing philosophy and great questions of humanity, and Adams is making puns and inserting snide comments as he wolfs down pecan pie.

I have actually written on this very blog about how brilliant I find this book to be. I stand by this assessment. There is a laugh a minute. Every page finds some underexplained scientific or futuristic concept. The characters are paper dolls who have no inner thoughts, but perform admirably in the face of frequent impeding death. Every object is described in simple but evocative prose. You find yourself not so secretly wishing you could read the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I understand that many hard-core sci-fi fans think Adams is belittling and bringing down the genre. To them I say, at least there is a woman in this novel. A woman who speaks.  Admittedly, this is a pretty low bar (I could go for TWO women, for example), but Asimov and Heinlein have never considered this as a writing convention, so yay! for Adams. In terms of the lightheartedness casting a shade on the genre, I suggest that some levity is necessary in the often dire future dystopian worlds sci-fi focuses on.

I do not believe this is life-altering literature. I do believe it's a romp in the park. 

Hypothetical Sprained Thumb

I'm not saying that you, fine reader, would ever sprain your thumb.  I'm not saying that you would trip on a rug in your dining room and fall directly on your thumb. And I'm definitely not saying that said thumb would swell up and turn purple within minutes of said fall.  All I'm saying is that if this DID happen to you, and it happened on your dominant hand, here are some things you might expect to be a struggle.

1) Getting dressed and undressed. You can probably manage most of it, but buttons are challenging. Bra hooks are hilarious and may cause you to look like a contortionist. Forget about unhooking a necklace. And let's not even talk about shoelaces.

2) Typing. You know how your thumb is used on the space bar with surprising regularity? You're going to have to rely on the thumb on your non-dominant hand and it will slowly drive you insane.

3) Caring for injured thumb. Technically you should be icing your injured thumb when you're at home.  You put the splint on for things like walking the dog, working out, and meeting other people (shaking hands is awkward, but people don't squeeze hard with the splint). But you probably won't be able to put the splint on your own damn self without someone's help, so when that someone (hypothetically your spouse) goes somewhere all day (hypothetically to work), you just forget the icing and wear the splint.

4) Putting on the dog's harness and leash. Hopefully you have a patient dog who will watch you fumble and not say a word, although  she's probably looking at you with extreme pity.

5) Grabbing the cat when she runs upstairs, which she knows she isn't supposed to do, but still tries to do a half a dozen times a day.

And that's it, my friends.  Forewarned is forethumbed.

The Marco Effect by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Keeper of Lost Causes
 The Absent One
 A Conspiracy of Faith
The Purity of Vengeance

The fifth book in the Department Q series by Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Marco Effect tells us the saga of an international swindling scheme, along with some good old-fashioned murder to cover up the white collar crimes. Along the way we run into corrupt government officials, corrupt government officials with hearts of gold, and a teenager who is born into an abusive situation and desperately wants out of it.  Our Department Q heroes are but bit players in this expansive tale, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you want to look at it.

On one hand, when the perspective is in the hands of the abused teenager, the book is absolutely riveting.  He has a unique perspective and unique skill set and is just sort of fascinating to be with.  I found these chapters to be an interesting look at an angsty teenager.  I just couldn't put the book down when we were living his life.

But there are a lot of chapters devoted to fraud and covering up fraud and frankly, these got a little bit tedious after a bit. I was hoping we'd do more deep dive with Assad, Carl, and Rose over at Department Q, but we didn't really. There were a handful of scenes with them, but it was very much hands off with our traditional main characters. Carl was quite flat, with a few scenes in which he got emotional, but even those scenes would have played as absolutely confusing if you were a new reader.  Assad was so quiet he might as well have not even been there!  So, if you're going into this book with a thirst for the developing relationship of our trio, you're going to be disappointed. 

This book also adds another member to Department Q, a young officer who is there basically to be a spy for his dad's best friend, the new boss, who has a definite dislike of Carl and the Department Q crew.  Carl somehow manages to convince this kid to take his job seriously and stop reporting back to the boss all the ethically dubious actions the trio take in the course of their duties.  I am a bit interested to see how this new character interacts with our original team in future novels.

So, of course I'm going to be reading more. I like to think that this was Adler-Olsen's attempt at experimenting a little bit with the format  from a traditional cop solving mystery to international thriller and that it was a bit of a failed attempt. Fingers crossed that the next book in the series goes back to the old standby. 

February 2020 Podcast Roundup

Last month I talked about the collaboration between Death Sex + Money and Code Switch in which they did episodes about interracial friendships. The minisode "Who Are Your 'Quick and Deep' Friends" from DSM explored the results of a survey about interracial friendships with a psychologist. It definitely forced me to examine some of my own social circles.  It turns out that I don't really have close friends who are of a different race than I am. Some of this is because I live in a small town, but it's not like we don't have ANY minorities here - it's that I don't know these people because our town is segregated.

Pop Mom! is one of my favorite podcasts. I always bump it to the top of my playlist because I find the relationship between Bonney and John Teti to be life goals.  They are playful and loving and I am utterly charmed by this mother and son pair.  Their podcast is normally lighthearted fare, although sometimes we get glimpses that things are sometimes hard, with Bonney's health woes and John's depression.  But there was an exchange in the recent episode "Super Bowl LIV" in which Bonney makes a smart-ass comment about John's wife Anna and it quickly devolves into one of the most uncomfortable moments that could ever take place between a mother and her son. I laughed SO HARD.

Don't be alarmed by the title. They only talk about the Super Bowl for a few minutes.  Most of the podcast is devoted to general chitchat and admiration of Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

Reveal is, as usual, doing excellent work that often falls to the bottom of my playlist only to have me regret not listening to it first thing because the episodes are SO GOOD. In the episode "Don't Count on the Census," the Reveal team takes a look at how the 2020 census rollout is a fiasco and how undercounting is going to be a huge problem. Then it looks at how a couple of states are trying to fix the problems.  I'm borderline obsessed with the census, so I love these types of episodes.

Reveal also looked at organ transplants in the episode called "Lost in Transplantation." For a podcast that uses the word "logistics" multiple times, this was surprisingly fascinating to me. There's a limited time frame between when an organ is removed from its donor and when it can be considered viable for transplant. How often to organs miss this window? How can we prevent organs from going unused? A strange world of organ tracking exists and I had no idea how complicated these questions would be to answer.

If you had asked me what I thought of polygamous marriage before listening to "Polygamous Marriage in Modern Malaysia," I would have told you that it was a bad idea because it simply subjugated women and was a form of oppression that rarely benefited anyone - women, men, or children.  I also would have said that I struggle with the topic because I try really hard not to judge people for their "lifestyle choices," but that the ideas behind polygamy are not normally about happiness, but about maintaining power for the patriarchy.

And listening didn't really change my mind, but it did let me hear some voices (of women!) who believe that polygamy might be the answer for them. And so my viewpoint wavered. A tiny bit. The Documentary provides glimpses of people around the world who have different life experiences than I have and I found this episode to be quite enlightening.

Nate DiMeo, the creator of The Memory Palace, is a national treasure. His writing is the best writing in podcasting. In ten minutes, he creates images that will never leave your mind.  In "The House of Lowe," he tells the story of a fashion designer in such a haunting manner that I've been researching the designer for weeks.  "Life's Work," the most recent episode as of when I'm typing this, nearly made me cry as it recounted a horrendous tragedy in American history. Mr. DiMeo, you are my intellectual crush.

I end up deleting a lot of Longform episodes before the end of them because I find a lot of the stories repetitive and kind of boring. So when Ashley C. Ford came on and was giving actual numbers of how much money she made and talking about how even though she had all this money, she didn't feel like she had all this money, and just was so honest and open, it was a breath of fresh air. THIS is what I listen to Longform for.

The Moth is a storytelling podcast and, as such, it's quite hit or miss for me. Sometimes people just aren't good public speakers, you know?  But the episode called "Jury Duty, Walking Tests, Pepsi, and NOLA" had four solid (SOLID!) stories and was quite impressive. In the first story, a woman is forced to confront her own biases and stereotypes while she's serving on a jury.  It was hilarious to listen to, while also being quite moving.  In the second story, a man tells a story about how his physical limitations forced him into learning how to accept help.  In the third story, a woman tells a story about sweet, sweet passive aggressive revenge.  And the last story, a father tells the story of his relationship with his son and how it changed over time.  They are all really, really good.