I had the good fortune to encounter Trader Joe's Roasted Gorgonzola crackers at a Christmas party recently. I tried them eagerly, because I love crackers and I love Gorgonzola. The crackers were tasty, but they had only the faintest hint of Gorgonzola flavor when they first hit the tongue. After that it's all salt and cracker.

I am a bit conflicted about cheese crackers anyway. (Breaking news, area woman conflicted about cheese crackers.) Even the cheesiest of cheese crackers still taste mostly like cracker. And I am never clear about the function of a cheese-flavored cracker. Are you supposed to eat it by itself, or with cheese? The crackers above are pictured with cheese, but is that a hint about what the crackers are supposed to taste like or a serving suggestion?

I did a bit of research and discovered that, in fact,these crackers are not exactly what they seem:
http://garlicgulch.com/blog/false-advertising-trader-joes-gorgonzola-crackers-contain-no-gorgonzola/

The dark underbelly of the cheese cracker reveals itself. I may never be the same.

Conversion by Katherine Howe

I've always been fascinated but by what used to be called hysteria and now is called conversion disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_disorder). It's a kind of collective delusion. Some people think that's what was happening during the Salem witch trials. But there are many other examples of schoolchildren, often girls, falling ill with a sickness that later turns out to be all in their heads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria).

I remember hearing about the real-life case this book is based on and reading every article I could get my hands on just trying to get to the bottom of it. When I heard there was a novel written on the subject I couldn't wait to read it. And I finally got my chance today. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the book didn't live up to my expectations.

This is one of those cases where the real story is so interesting that any fictionalized version would just be a shadow. The narrative is juxtaposed with a parallel narrative taking place during the Salem witch trials. This element seems a little bit too on the nose.

But the subject itself is still fascinating and I admire the author’s effort to make sense of it.

An Abundance of Katherines

I loved John Green's latest novel The Fault in Our Stars as so many other people did. So I was interested in reading some of his other novels.

I picked up his 2006 novel An Abundance of Katherines at the library. I had a bit of trouble getting into it. I had trouble warming up to the protagonist whose main features seem to be that he was a very smart and that he’d been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine. That wasn't enough for me to really empathize with or understand him and I struggled several times just to keep reading. Things improved a bit when the protagonist, Colin, and his best friend, Hassan, embark on a road trip. They meet some interesting characters along the way and the plot picks up. The less time we spend with Collin and his heartbreak the better, for me at least. In fact, my favorite part of the novel wasn't even written by John Green. It’s the appendix, where a mathematician friend of the author’s explains Colin's search for a mathematical formula that will predict the length of a relationship.

I'd love to hear your opinion on these two books or your suggestions for new types of crackers! Please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions of other books to read or crackers to eat. Thanks!

The Lucy Variations

I was at the library recently, browsing the "New in Young Adult" shelf, when I came across  The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. The title and author sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember why.

I checked out the book, took it home, and read it with zeal. It's about a teenage girl, Lucy, who had a promising career as a concert pianist. She was a prodigy, but the pressure got to her, and she quit performing. In fact, she quit playing altogether. In the course of the book, she's mentored by her younger brother's piano teacher, and she discovers her love of playing again.

When I finished the book and read the acknowledgements at the end, I learned why the title and author had sounded familiar. Julie Scheina, my colleague for a brief time, was the editor! She'd told me about the book, I realized. Luckily enough, I had lunch with her scheduled for the next week, so I could ask her something that had been worrying me about the book. Was Lucy's relationship with her brother's piano teacher inappropriate? He was 30, she was 16. Her feelings for him were not just platonic--but what about his for her? In one of their last conversations in the book, he says to her, "You're beautiful, Lucy. Inside and out. And that hurts, too. It hurts more specifically. More personally." I asked Julie if he was supposed to be a creep--if that was what the author intended. She said no, he wasn't supposed to be a creep. He was okay, just sad and a bit misguided (I'm paraphrasing--I don't remember exactly what Julie said). But there is a limit to an author's power. Not everyone has a chance to consult with the editor to find out what the author intended, so the reader's interpretation stands. And I think he was a creep.

I am not sure what to make of this book (The Lost Daughter) I just read by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. I checked the novel out from the library because I'd read an article about Ferrante in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elena-ferrante-liking-like). What I discovered after reading The Lost Daughter was that it wasn't part of the series of novels about female friendship discussed in the New Yorker article. Instead, it was about a middle-aged woman reflecting on her relationship with her ex-husband and her distant, adult daughters. The story of her relationship with her daughters is told in back story, while the present action places the narrator at the beach for a solitary vacation. The narrator (and main character) is a bit unusual in that her actions are fairly unlikable and incomprehensible--she steals a young girl's doll, for example, for reasons that are not clear to us or to herself.
 The New Yorker article touches on this issue of likability--how important is it that we like the main character of a novel? I was both repelled and entranced by the narrator. Her feelings and actions are both hard to understand and deeply familiar. Describing a moment when her daughter, Bianca, was lost at the beach: "She was crying when they found her, when they brought her back to me. I was crying too, with happiness, with relief, but meanwhile I was also screaming with rage, like my mother, because of the crushing weight of responsibility, the bond that strangles, and with my free arm I dragged my firstborn, yelling, you'll pay for this, Bianca, you'll see when we get home, you must never go off again--never." The narrator's ambivalent feelings about her daughters--how much she loves them, but how suffocated she feels by them--made me uncomfortable because of how much I could identify with them.

I've been trying to cut down on the quantity of crackers that I eat, but what to replace them with? Lately I have been eating these seaweed snacks that I found at the international market near my office. They are deliciously crunchy.The brand is paldo and they look like this:

Deenie and Meet the Austins

I was inspired by the Fine Lines feature on Jezebel to revisit as some of my favorite books from my youth.

I went to the library and checked out Deenie, by Judy Blume. I remember reading this book for the first time when I was in third grade. I’m not sure if I’ve read it since then. I think I was too young to read it when I was in third grade, but I read it because Amanda Swann told me about it. For some reason, although I can’t remember why, I looked up to Amanda Swann, and I thought if she was reading it I should be reading it too. I remember very distinctly that she told me about the main character, Deenie, and how pretty she was and how was gonna be a model, and after her braces were off, she was gonna go out with Matt Kinsey. Matt Kinsey was this kid in our class who everyone liked, so I wasn’t surprised that Deenie would want to go out with him, but occurs to me now that it’s weird to think a fictional character would want to go out with a real kid in our class. When I actually read the book, I discovered that Deenie didn’t have braces on her teeth like I thought, she had a brace on her back or on her whole body, I actually didn’t really understand what the brace was all about. I did that a lot, as a kid, I read books that I wasn’t really old enough to understand and then wandered around with a lot of misconceptions.

I also checked out Meet the Austins by Madeline L'Engle. I don’t remember how long ago it was when I first read it, but it’s certainly been a long time, because I barely remembered it. At first I wasn't even sure if I'd ever ready it. Its the first book in a series about the Austin family. I know that at one timeI owned some of the books in the series--The Young Unicorns and a A Ring Endless Light—and read them several times. But I don’t think I ever owned Meet the Austins, so it’s probably been two decades since I read it. I don’t remember what I thought of the book when I first read it, but I was surprised upon this recent reading by how much I’d disliked the narrator. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I disliked the narration, not the narrator. I’m sure the narrator herself would’ve been a fine person if I met her, but the way she narrated the story seemed really pretentious to me and I don’t think it was supposed to be. I feel like we’re supposed to like Vickiy Austen, but then she says things like Uncle Douglas is “an artist and lives in New York, and we all love him tremendously.” It’s in the first paragraph of the book and I’m already annoyed---by the word tremendously. It just sounds affected. I feel like the whole book seems to be straining to prove how special and wonderful the Austins are—particularly Vicky. Instead of letting us draw our own conclusions about Vicky, the other characters are used as mouthpieces to tell us what to think. For example, Vicky asks her Uncle Douglas why she’s having such trouble showing her Aunt Elena how sorry she is about her about the death of her Aunt Elena's husband. (Sorry this is confusing--Aunt Elena was married to Uncle Hal and Uncle Douglas actually not an Uncle, he's just a family friend.) But anyway:

“Uncle Douglas,” I said, “why is it that John can show Aunt Elena how sorry he is about Uncle Hal and I can’t, and I’m so terribly, terribly sorry?”
Uncle Douglas put his arm around me and his beard rubbed gently against my cheek. “Aunt Elena knows you’re sorry, dear.”
“But why does John know what to say, and how to say it, and all I can do is act stupid, as though it doesn’t matter?”
“Just because it matters too much. Have you ever heard of empathy?”
I shook my head.
“John can show Aunt Elena how sorry he is because he has a scientific mind and he can see what has happened from the outside. All good scientists have to know how to be observers. He can be deeply upset about Uncle Hal and deeply sorry for Aunt Elena, but he can be objective about it. You can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you have an artistic temperament, Vicki, and I’ve never seen you be objective about anything yet. When you think about Aunt Elena and how she must be feeling right now, it is for the moment as though you were Aunt Elena; you go right inside her suffering, and it becomes your suffering too. That’s empathy, it’s something all artists are afflicted with.”
“Are you?”
“Sure. But I’m older than you are and I can cope with it better.”

In this passage I am somehow simultaneously annoyed with Vicky, John, Uncle Douglas and the author at the same time. Is it just me?