The virtue of standing still is that change is all that easier to see.

For those of you wondering, I still don’t have a cell phone. There was a recent article in The New York Times discussing us conscientious resisters , or whatever term they coined. According to the newspaper piece, about 85 percent of American adults have cell phones. The rest of us are either too poor to afford them or have made a conscious decision not to have them. While I’m probably a member of the latter group, I feel like a member of the former group as well because I can’t just see shelling out a hundred-plus dollars a month for another telephone.

More . . . .

Sometimes I feel for women authors. George Eliot had a point. I think a lot of women authors would be more successful if they just ‘branded’ themselves as men.  I read a statistic this year that 90% of men don’t read books by women authors.  If the content is the same, the readership is the same.  I think this is part of the problem that leads to a number of women readers being ‘turned off’ by suspense.  They see a frilly cover and a women’s name on the bottom of the book and expect rainbows and sunshine.  Then these sensitive flowers are offended by a few murders and a bloody crime scene.  Publishers are falling down at the job of managing expectations.

Bad Girl reads like any police procedural written by the  male authors that I like.    On top of that, it was a really good book that keeps one guessing until the end.  You have your usual crazy serial killer, and minor romance/family time. But the cover of this book looks like a chick-lit cover or romance novel (and bad ones at that). Despite the fact that this book came recommended from someone who’s judgment I trust – it sat on my TBR pile for many months, because, it turns out, even I judge a book by its cover.  I even ordered the other book in this ’series,’ Loverboy – but I’m going to be honest – that cover is even worse.

The Duke of Shadows, by Meredith Duran, could have been better,  but it could have been worse. I have mixed feelings about books that attempt to tackle the horror that was European colonialism (this time the Brits in India). I appreciate that the hero has ties to his ‘native’ land, but unfortunately he falls in that ‘acceptible’ 1/4 non-white range that romances use to avoid dealing with a character of color. Like past 1/8 native American heroes who treat softly, and 1/4 Asian heroes with hair as black as a jet wing, Duran weighs in with her not to native Lord/Duke hero ready to save the day. The romance was okay, the subplot seemed to inject false intrigue into an otherwise mundane story.

Blackwater, by Jeremy Scahill is single-handedly the best book I’ve read on warmongering, capitalism, and Christian crusading (all masquerading as promoting democracy and freedom) that I’ve read in years. While the book is, on the surface, about Blackwater (now Xe), it tells a horrifying thirty to forty year tale of the America’s warmongering and how it continues to perpetuate unabated. Recently a survey asked what was the country most dangerous to the United States. Before I had a chance to study the multiple choice answers, I blurted out, the United States. This book shows you why that is the answer – and not any axis of evil perpetuated by right (or left) wing propaganda.

Get Your Sexy On by Kimberly Kaye Terry Another DNF.   How many books are there in print where the stripper heroine is being held captive by the club owner?  Too many, in my opinion.  This is my second this year.

Mmm, stripper, almost being raped at every turn – and in this book engaging in degrading (but in theory consensual) sex at on every other page  – in the 100 or so pages I did read – no thank you.  And at about the forty fifth reference to her lip as a ‘rim’ almost drove me crazy.  I wanted to run out and by the author a thesaurus, and myself another book.

Mishna Wolff’s I’m Down starts with a sensational premise – white girl grows up in black neighborhood and tries to fit in. What was so very disappointing about this book was the author’s two-dimensional portrayal of African Americans. Her white father, doesn’t hold down a job, doesn’t feed his children, and sells weed – but it’s the black people who are portrayed as mean and shftless – the children ready to throw down and fight, or play the dozens at a moment’s notice.

The white folks who will be her saviors, have money, and drive to make the magic leap into upper-middle class lifestyles.

Yet, the author fails to acknowledge that the people who have let her down the most are white, her mother who never stood up for her, and her father, who never stood up for his family. At every turn from the cover photo to the inside flaps, we’re told this is supposed to be funny – but I’m still looking for the humor.

I want my money back.

What I thought I was getting has turned out not to be as advertised. It seems like years ago that I oh-so-naively sent more than $1,000 to Barack Obama’s campaign of hope and change. And many, many people whom I assumed were mean spirited – or just plain wrong – told me I had lost my mind. They called then-candidate Obama an empty suit, with lofty rhetoric. A short-term Senator, he was labeled, who wasn’t ready to govern.

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What do western Europeans do with all of their free time? The last twenty-fourhours of my life have been filled with calls to doctors, and insurance companies trying to get my insurance company to authorize pay for a non-invasive diagnostic screening in lieu of an invasive, expensive one that I’d rather avoid. Needless to say, in our fee-for-service medical marketplace, the doctor (I hesitate to call him my doctor – let’s just say he’s the only specialist available to request the proper authorization) preferred the more expensive one, at, oddly, the potential expense of my personal health.

Read the rest . . . .

I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food because it seemed like a good way to round out my survey of currently popular books about food.  I say, skip this and move right on to Nina Planck’s Real Food, Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calfories, The Untold Story of Milk, or any number of other books that critically address our nation’s food supply and ‘nutrition’ based diet.

This book is no more than a lengthened magazine article. It lacks depth, and moreover, passion. The book lacks the investigative journalism of Pollan’s previous Omnivore’s Dilemma, and falls down in the interpretation of science. He criticizes Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but without conviction. This pamphlet may have some merit, but Pollan lost credibility when he failed to acknowledge that lactose intolerance is a scientific invention. Unpasteurized milk has plenty of lactase which make lactose digestible. Our country’s insistence on processes that ostensibly protect our food supply by destroying essential enzymes and nutrients is completely ignored.

A Rendezvous to Remember has been lingering on my bookshelf for over a year.  In fact, I must have met the author, Geri Krotow at some point because there is a personal inscription in the book, and I use her personalized pen to make shopping lists in the kitchen.  The book, however, just wasn’t for me.  I found the theme kind of charming: heroine discovers true meaning of love by witnessesing (through her grandparents’ journals) tests of real love during one of life’s greatest trials – the Second World War.

My biggest issue with the book was the lack of authenticity with the voices of the heroine’s grandparents.  We’re reading journals of first, her grandmother in Nazi occupied Belgium for whom English is her second language.  But the book is peppered with American English jargon and colloquialisms pulling me out of the story.  When the heroine’s grandmother mentioned her desire to move to the ’suburbs’ in a 1946 entry, I almost gave up just then.  First, suburbs as they are now perceived as havens from cities, crime, and blacks didn’t come into existence until the 1950s.  Second, it seemed an unrealistic goal for a character where survival had been paramount for much of her adult life.

Then there was the romance.  Divorcing couple disover they still love each other, and to top it off there’s an epilogue filled with baby love.

Everyday I move farther and farther from category romances.  They read like the McDonald’s of their genre: processed, non-nutritional bites of homogenized sameness.  But, then again, don’t take my word for it – other romance readers loved it.