Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Apr
27
Just Read It: MOONDOGS by Alexander Yates
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Published March 2011 by Doubleday
I know we’re not even through the first third of the year yet, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that Moondogs, Alexander Yates’s debut novel, will find a spot on my best of 2011 list. I can’t remember the last time I had quite this much fun reading a book. And that whole “smells like first novel” problem that haunts so many debuts? Moondogs is totally, blissfully, beautifully free of it.
I wrote my own synopsis of Moondogs, but it was wicked long (there is A LOT going on here, people, but it’s all good), so I’ll spare you the logorrhea and share the jacket copy instead.
Mourning the recent loss of his mother, twentysomething Benicio—aka Benny—travels to Manila to reconnect with his estranged father, Howard. But when he arrives his father is nowhere to be found—leaving an irritated son to conclude that Howard has let him down for the umpteenth time. However, his father has actually been kidnapped by a meth-addled cabdriver, with grand plans to sell him to local terrorists as bait in the country’s never-ending power struggle between insurgents, separatists, and “democratic” muscle.
Benicio’s search for Howard reveals more about his father’s womanizing ways and suspicious business deals, reopening the old hurts that he’d hoped to mend. Interspersed with the son’s inquiry and the father’s calamitous life in captivity are the high-octane interconnecting narratives of Reynato Ocampo, the local celebrity-hero policeman charged with rescuing Howard; Ocampo’s ragtag team of wizardry-infused soldiers; and Monique, a novice officer at the American embassy whose family still feels feverishly unmoored in the Philippines.
Yes, you read that right. Wizardy-infused soldiers. Sounds crazy, right? But in Yates’s capable hands, Reynato Ocampo, whose magical skill is essentially the ability to recognize others’ magical skills, and his special ops gang are engaging, entertaining, and completely believable. The meth-addled cabdriver (accompanied by a fighting rooster) is a bungling but still frightening villain. The tension in Howard and Benny’s relationship plays through both of their perspectives, and Yates uses them (and the crumbling marriage of a junior ambassador and her depressed husband) to explore the complications and complexities of family and relationships.
Moondogs is infused with Filipino culture and the kind of genre-bending playfulness that makes a book a hell of a lot of fun to read. I think of it as literary fiction with a hint of magic and a bangin’ sense of humor. Yates skillfully juggles multiple points of view and a deliriously non-linear narrative, and he pulls off the very special—and very important—trick of making readers feel like they are always in on the joke.His characters are larger than life and unforgettable, and if Moondogs is just the start, then LOOK OUT, WORLD. Alexander Yates is here, and he won’t be leaving soon.
Bookrageous Episode 17: e-Reading
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Now that we’ve all had e-readers for a while, Josh, Jenn, and I got together to dish on devices, format, quirks, and why I will always want to be able to smell a book.
Enjoy, subscribe, and hit us up with your comments and ideas.
Joe Yonan, Pineapple Butt Chicken, and Me
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, so Joe Yonan gives the dish a classier title (“Pineapple-Juice-Can Hen and Baby Potatoes”), but let’s be real. It’s a little chicken with a little can of pineapple juice shoved up its bottom. And you know what? It. Is. Amazing.
Like, eat-with-your-hands-and-lick-your-fingers amazing. Which is perfect if you’re cooking for yourself, and if you happen to be cooking with a friend (as I was, with my favorite partner-in-crime ever, Kelly from Fountain Bookstore), and you don’t feel like you can do the eating with hands and licking of fingers thing, well, then, you need to find new friends. For reals.
Yonan (who happens to be the food & travel editor for the Washington Post, how’s that for a kickass day job?) has written a fabulous cookbook filled with grown-up food for grown-up people. Because, you know, most of those “cooking for one” books are basically college food, and that’s really not so great once you’re, erm, out of college. The recipes in Serve Yourself are designed to be made for one but can easily be adapted if you’re cooking for two (as Kelly and I did), and let me tell you, it was really refreshing to not have to do crazy math involving fractions of fractions just to figure out how to cook for two people.
There’s a reason I’m a book person, y’all, and if you’d seen my math scores on the SAT, you’d know what it is.
So back to this chicken. I have to admit that I was skeptical. I’m relatively new to roasting chickens (I know—it’s a cooking basic, but it just always seemed somehow magical and difficult to me), and I prefer mine savory and crispy (and by crispy, I mean coated in butter and kosher salt because, come on, the skin is the best part), and I didn’t really know what to think about chicken cooked with something as sweet as pineapple. But fear not! There is rosemary and salt a-plenty.
And there is sauce made of pineapple juice, lime juice, and—you guessed it—butter, and the sauce gets thick and tastes delicious and is totally what makes the dish. Well, except for the potatoes, which are roasted in the pan with the chicken and are drizzled doused in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and are so completely fantastic that you’ll eat most of them straight from the roasting pan while you wait for the sauce to simmer. True story.
But first, first you have to wash the hens and giggle uncontrollably when one of you (*coughKellycough*) accidentally creates chicken porn while arranging them back on the prep plate. Because that’s what grown-ups do when they cook together.
Then you put the hens in the oven (after you make lewd jokes about lubing up pineapple juice cans with cooking spray) and wait for ‘em to do their thing. Oh, and you drink wine. The good stuff, like this one recommended specifically for this dish by our friends at River City Cellars.
Then you twiddle your thumbs, talk about books, drink some more wine, check on your chicken babies, and rejoice when they come out looking like this.
(Okay, we helped them with the whole putting-their-wings-around-each-other thing, but we’re just cool like that.)
Devour, contemplate going face-first into the plate to get all of the saucy goodness, finish your wine, and think about how you wish the camera on your phone lent itself better to taking pictures of food.
Want a taste for yourself? Check out Joe Yonan at Fountain Bookstore next Tuesday, April 26th or hit up his website for more info and other appearances.
P.S. This post is part of my Fountain 360 in 365 project, for which I am attempting to read one book from every section of the bookstore, recommended to me by its booksellers.
The Itteh Bitteh Bookshelf Kitteh
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
This is the first–and probably the only–time I’m posting a cat video. But it’s Wednesday, and we all need a break, right?
Can’t recall where I first saw this, but Waldo the bookshelf kitty (who is totally bookrageous) has become my happy place this week. (Yep, he edged out that fracking adorable giggling penguin.) Enjoy.
Book Review: SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Published April 2011 by Grove Press
In 2007, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman lost his wife Aura Estrada, herself a promising young writer (she was in her mid-twenties when they married, he well into his forties), when she broke her neck while body surfing just a few weeks shy of their second anniversary. Aura’s family blamed Goldman for the accident, a possibility that made him near-suicidal, and rather than compartmentalizing, or hiding his feelings, or trying to move on, he wrote.
In Say Her Name, a novelization of his experiences, Goldman writes Aura back to life, remembering the passion with which they loved (and fought), resurrecting the unexpected joy of finding love when he had long given up, and mapping the geography of grief and loss in searing detail. Say Her Name is devastatingly sad and breathtakingly beautiful, the kind of testament we all hope our loved ones will want to write about us when we are gone. Goldman’s pain is so palpable and his struggle with his potential culpability so arduous that the reader can’t help but insert herself into his situation and wonder, “What would I do?”
And that level of introspection? It is valuable, but it hurts like hell. It also makes Say Her Name a book that must be approached in pieces and processed gradually. This is an unforgettable read, and it is absolutely a case in which it doesn’t matter at all which bits actually occurred and which are fictionalized, forthe truth of Goldman’s emotions and the depth of his pain are apparent on every page. And isn’t that kind of tapping-into lived experiences why we read (and write) after all?
Don’t miss Say Her Name….and don’t forget to keep a hankie nearby.
