Author Archives

Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

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First of all, the depth of research required to pull off a novel like this, filling in the blanks between the birth of Christ and the point at which we pick up his story again, when he’s in his thirties, is incredible, and even if many of the scenarios in this novel are preposterous, Christopher Moore deserves kudos just for that.

Second, this is parody at its best, and while, yes, it’s controversial, the best comedy comes from darkness and controversy. Parody serves a purpose, it makes us examine the truths we hold close, but non-threateningly.

Third, this novel is hilarious. Completely hilarious. Biff is the perfect foil for the world’s only perfect person, and the notions expressed – What if Jesus studied Buddhism? What if he knew kung-fu? – are delightful to ponder.

As the author points out, it’s fiction, and if reading fiction causes you to doubt your faith, it’s your faith that should be examined, not the novel that caused your doubts.

Read LAMB.
Laugh a lot.

Booking Through Thursday: Gold Medal Reading

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From Booking Through Thursday:

First:

* Do you or have you ever read books about the Olympics? About sports in general?
* Fictional ones? Or non-fiction? Or both?

And, Second:

* Do you consider yourself a sports fan?
* Because, of course, if you’re a rabid fan and read about sports constantly, there’s a logic there; if you hate sports and never read anything sports-related, that, too … but you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a good sports story.
* (Or a good sports movie, for that matter. Feel free to expand this into a discussion about “Friday Night Lights” or “The Natural” or whatever…)

I vaguely remember reading books about the first modern Olympics, but I think it may have been a movie as well.

The only sports I really follow are horse racing, figure skating and (very casually) hockey, so unless Dick Francis novels, and that one Sara Paretsky novel about the hockey player named Boom-Boom, count, I haven’t read anything about sports, either.

I do love a good skating movie, though. Like the original The Cutting Edge.

Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston

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I have to confess, I only bought this book because the titular story, Cowboys are My Weakness, was assigned reading for a writer’s workshop I just attended. I didn’t even like it the first time I read it!

But then, after the first couple days of the workshop, when I was alone in my hotel and desperate to read something, ANYTHING, less depressing than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest I picked the book up again. I wound up finishing it on the plane flight back home.

Houston’s style isn’t fussy, and moves between first, third, and sometimes even second, person depending on the needs of each essay or story. Her characters are vivid. Her tales of love, lust, dogs and horses are tales that almost any woman will enjoy.

Goes well with a burger, and a cold beer.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

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Water for Elephants was recommended to me several years ago when it first came out, but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me at the time, or I passed it over for some other reason. A couple of weekends ago, we were at the library, and I noticed it. In fact, the library we visited was so depressing, that it was one of only three books I bothered to check out.

I finished it tonight, having chosen to savor it and make it last, because once I started reading it, and realized it was about the circus, I was hooked.

This novel is both a behind-the-scenes look at traveling circuses in the 1930s and a love-letter to the art form. Told in flashbacks by the main character, Jacob, who used to be a vet “on a show,” we glimpse the dirtier aspects of circus life, including the often brutal treatment of workers, performers, and animals, the way acts were formed, and the competition between different circuses.

I’ve been telling my husband I want to see the circus for my birthday (Ringling Bros. will be in town), and the fact that this book fell into my lap a month before that event seems to be a favorable sign.

Goes well with caramel corn.

I keep meaning…

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…to post reviews here, of The Maidenstone Lighthouse and Little Earthquakes and Pink, and, and, and, but right now I’m so depressed from reading “Miss Lonelyhearts,” which is quite possibly the bleakest and saddest novella EVER, that I just…can’t.

GonnaBe a Star?

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I’ve been singing and acting in some fashion ever since I learned to talk, and I grew up watching the FAME tv show, even before I ever attended a performing arts school, so when I heard about Gonnabe, I was actually a little jealous – WHY couldn’t this have been around when I was a kid?

But I grew up in the pre-internet days, when we learned to type on actual typewriters, and the computer class we did have was stocked with TRS-80s, and PONG was a cool game. Yes, I’m THAT old. Of course, I also no longer live in California, and I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d want them to know about Gonnabe.

Of course, you’re probably wondering – what is it? Well, it’s a production company and networking opportunity headquartered in Emeryville, CA, and it specializes in entertainment for and by kids. By joining, bright talented youngsters and their families will be provided with information about auditions, classes, and local shoots, as well as be able to network with professional casting directors, singers, dancers, actors, and models already in the business.

There’s a common adage that it’s not what you know, but who. GonnaBe helps kids who don’t already have those connections, but do have drive and talent, get the WHO.

If I were a kid in this decade, and I knew about GonnaBe, I’d be pestering my parents. If I had kids who were interested in the arts – I mean REALLY interested – passionate, even – I’d be signing them up.

As a production company, GonnaBe is already responsible for Kids Unlimited and Say What. As a networking community, I suspect it’s gonna be even bigger.

Reading with Mom

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As I’ve been reading and writing about auto insurance quote all week, and today is Mother’s Day, I thought I’d spend a moment talking about reading with my mother.

When I was very young, before I was entirely comfortable reading long novels without pictures, my mother used to read to me, doing all the voices. I especially remember reading Fletcher and Zenobia with her, and I blame this book for my dark tastes, because the illustrations were done by Edward Gorey.

A bit later, she began to read Little Women to me, but by then I was a voracious reader, and our “chapter a night” system was beginning to chafe. That was the last book she read TO me, but several years later, when I was nine or ten, she began to read WITH me.

One book I remember reading together was a collection of Katharine S. White’s garden essays from the New York Times, a year of them, one for each week, I think. It was thick with a lovely color, and we would take turn reading the essays aloud to each other during a hot Colorado summer – there was actually a drought that year, but I didn’t realize it til long after. I’m not certain, but I think the title was Onward and Upward in the Garden. (Katharine S. White, btw, was married to E. B. White, who gave us Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

That was the year I began stealing her Ms. magazines and reading them before she could. That was also the year I discovered Judy Blume.

We haven’t read together since then, I don’t think, though we’ve often passed books back and forth, fought over who was going to read one first, or spend lovely Saturdays going first to the library, and then out to lunch or a cafe.

While I can only handle my mother’s forceful personality in small doses, those sorts of days, where were together, but not necessarily engaged in conversation, are very comfortable, and one of the things I miss most when she goes home to Baja Sur, where she retired about seven years ago.

IF you’re reading this, I’d like to know when you stopped reading with your parents, or when they stopped reading TO you.

Booking through Thursday: What Do You Do?

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Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

While I don’t own cats, I have enough friends who do to know that being alone without a book is somewhat akin to feline friends being locked in a house without a scratching post or cat tree…not a pleasant situation.

Since I have my wallet, I’d probably hit the airport bookstore and see what was on the best-seller list, or indulge in a few girly magazines of the sort I generally only read at the salon, because it makes them special, and they seem to GO with the salon.

Failing that, I’d look around for a stray newspaper or cast-off book – airports are popular drop points for Book Crossing, after all.

(And yes, I know, yet again, I’m participating on Sunday. Guess I’m not much of a joiner these days, is all.)

Rocket Tunes – MP3Rocket.com

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MP3Rocket.com

Okay, so I just got a stylish new RED iPod NaNo, my first real foray into true iPoddy goodness, and now I have to fill it.

My 30 GB Zen is mainly full of free podcasts and Napster tunes, but Napster to Go, their subscription service, doesn’t work with Apple products (why can’t we have ONE standard for this stuff?), and iTunes has never been my favorite service.

This is why I tried out MP3Rocket.com for free music downloads. Similar to Limewire, it’s a subscription service interface for Gnutella, but it’s a lot more robust, and user friendly – I didn’t even have an issue running it in Vista, which is notoriously twitchy.

Top Five Downloads

Downloading the software is a piece of cake, and searching for songs is simple – type in the track name or the artist, and, if you really want to limit your finds to mp3s, and not videos or other media, specify “audio” before you start the search function.

The basic version of the software gets you instant access to music but for a more robust connection, quicker searches, and different file types, it’s better to join the service. Membership ranges from 1.64 / month for a year to $34.44 for a lifetime subscription, and an additional $14.95 gets you access to downloadable DVD movies as well.

It’s a pretty sweet site, offering services like the top five downloads, as well as a user forum, and a way to meet other music fans.

Goes well with an mp3 player and dancing shoes.

Listing

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Six years ago, I had Lasik surgery on my eyes, and went from not being able to see the big E at the top of the chart to 20:20 vision, though it wasn’t instant – it takes time for eyes to settle.

People always ask what having the surgery impacted the most, and they generally expect grand answers like, “I can scuba dive without a special mask,” but the reality is, it’s the little things that you really notice, things like being able to see to shave your legs in the shower, or put on make-up, being able to read the numbers on the alarm clock when you wake in the middle of the night, and being able to read in bed without fear of rolling over on your glasses, or forgetting to remove your contacts and harming your eyes. (Ditto falling asleep on planes)

It is with this in mind that I present the following meme, in honor of the first 48 hours after surgery, in which I was forbidden to read anything at all.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as unread by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers