This Is A Song

When No and I were young, among the books Mom read to us was Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown (the author of the much more famous Goodnight Moon). The story focuses on the little fur child, who spends the day hanging out in the wild wood where the family lives, meeting creatures that fly and swim and an even smaller little fur person. At the end of the book, the little fur parents sing a going-to-bed song to the little fur child.

This is my favorite illustration, all by Garth Williams, in the book, though there are many that I really like. I can imagine the little fur father singing in a big voice as if he is singing in a chorus, while the little fur mother sings more quietly to help put her child to sleep.


In truth, though, I probably like this one best because when we got to the end of the book, Mom would sing us the song. At the end, the last line of which is"This is a song," she added her own lyrics to teach us some baby music theory: "with whole notes and half notes and quarter notes and eighth notes." At some point we asked her to write in her lyrics because a babysitter didn't sing the last part when we taught her the tune.


When JayBear came into my life, I gave him a copy and taught the tune to Miz Jinkins, including the last, apocryphal, verse. He so associates the song with bedtime that I don't get to sing it when we're together because it makes him think it's time to go to sleep, and he doesn't want to go to bed when Zirpu and I are over to play.


Some years ago I found the copy of Little Fur Family that Mom used to read to No and me. Last Wednesday evening after work I was going to meet No, KT, Zaye, and Mom, and I remembered I'd wanted to give to the little book to Zaye when Mom was present. I snatched it out of the bookshelf just before I left that morning.


No smiled and Mom exclaimed, "Is this THE book?!" as she opened it to the last page. KT giggled. As usual, Zaye looked all around at the lights and the people in the restaurant. I'm really glad I saved the book for him, without even knowing who or when he was going to be, all that time ago...

Our First Apartment

Zirpu and I decided to move to Hayward when we moved in together. Hayward was the midpoint of where each of us was working at the time; other than noting its location on my way to his place in Mountain View, I didn't know anything about Hayward.


We found a big yellow apartment complex tucked in on a side street near the Alameda County Courthouse. The two-bedroom apartment was on the third floor, with a tiny dining room and a little balcony, but an enormous master bedroom with a walk-in closet and two-sink bathroom. The complex had a swimming pool and hot tub. It was very close to train tracks, which we didn't realize were quite as "live" as they turned out to be when we moved in: Trains went by four times a day, at two AM, ten AM, two PM and ten PM.


HR and JR came down with Aitch while we were still getting settled. This is one of my favorite pictures of Aitch:
This is not a picture of two boxes. This is a picture of a little boy in a boat on the sea.**



**If you don't understand, read Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

A Late Post

Since I haven't been to bed yet, for me it's still Saturday and the 15th, though the clock indicates it is 12:40 am on Sunday the 16th. So a short post and I will write more thoughtfully tomorrow.


1. Four places that I go to over and over:

The food bank, the Hayward Public Library, Mom's, home


2. Four people that e-mail me regularly:

Shobi-wan, Mom, the Tea Lady, Zoyie


3. Four of my favorite places to eat:

Pakwan, Alice's (La Patisserie & Le Paradis in Hayward), Buon Apetito, Mom's


4. Four places that I would rather be now:

The Cabin (Rocky Mountains), Playa Fiesta (Puerto Vallarta), Lake Pinecrest, somewhere quiet


Four TV shows that I watch (but none regularly - I go in spates):

Battlestar Galactica (grrr!), Dinner Impossible, Chef Jeff Project (which ends this Sunday), The Daily Show

Empty Head, Pretty Flowers

My head has been empty recently, hence the long pause between posts. I have been reading tremendously heavy books instead of doing things in real life. For one reason or another, my mind has just been wandering all over the place and in no one place for very long.

So here is a photo of a couple bushes in the yard of the house next door. Pink and purple - that's pretty.

Memoir

I'm reading this memoir right now that so far sounds pretty bitter to me. I wonder if the author meant it to come across that way. The memoirist came to the US when she was about two years old from Vietnam, having fled with her family in April of 1975. Like other memoirs written by immigrants that I've read, there is a lot of discussion of the food the neighbors or schoolmates ate in comparison to the food the writer ate at home with her family: Baloney on white bread instead of falafel in her lunch; banana bread and milk after school instead of sliced steak and pho.

There are, of course, descriptions of the neighbors and the friends in and out of the writer's community. Most of the memoirs I've read are by women who talk about envying their schoolmates' perfect, (usually) blond hair and nice clothes. Often these girls are mentioned by a changed name, sometimes by first name only, and sometimes are composites of people the writers knew in elementary school.

Reading this memoir in particular made me wonder if people recognize themselves in someone else's memoir as the girl next door or the boy who picked on the author every day in third grade. Especially for the neighborhood kids, because everyone who's in a neighborhood for a long time knows where that is. I try to imagine reading along in a book and thinking, "Hey, that sounds like me" if I were to run across a description that sounded like me in elementary or high school. If I had appeared in this book, I would have been the girl with a long brown braid and ham and mayonnaise on white bread in her Holly Hobbie lunch box.


But would I have recognized myself as someone to be envied? Not after starting fourth grade, but how we see ourselves is often so different from how others see us. . .

April Read A Poem A Day!

As I learned last year from Saipan Writer, April is National Poetry Month. Last year, I celebrated the month by posting my favorite poem, but this year I've decided I'm going to read a poem every day and each Tuesday post the titles and authors here. I'm so excited about it that instead of paying attention to the news on the way home I thought about which poems with which I want to start, some old favorites by Auden, Giovanni, Eliot, Shakespeare, Sandburg, and Ginsberg.


That's not pretension. While I'm not a professional one, I was an English major. I can prove it: I still have my Norton's Anthology of Modern Poetry.



Then Robert Siegel and Michele Norris caught my attention by announcing that Richard Fagles, who had translated Homer and Virgil, had passed away. I got through four years of a liberal arts education without reading either, though I made an attempt to read The Odyssey a couple years ago. The announcement of his death was followed by a recording of Dr. Fagles reading part of The Iliad. I take this as an auspicious start to celebrating National Poetry Month.


If you have poems to suggest I read, please do so.

'80s Week

It seems like it's been '80s Week around here recently - "here" being the immediate area around myself. Last Sunday I ran across The Breakfast Club on TVLand and even though I've seen it a couple dozen times and even though it was the TV edit version (with the most ridiculous substitutions for the cusswords and the pot smoking scene edited out) I wound up watching it to the end. I followed a link to a blog post regarding Principal Vernon and the first two songs on Friday's 10@10 were from Risky Business and Back to the Future. I've been in contact with someone from the Class of '85 at my high school and she sent me some photos from 11th grade. Almost every time I turn on the radio it seems like I hear Jack and Diane (incidentally, John Mellencamp turned 16 in 1967. I turned 16 in 1984).


In 1980 my brother was elected Sergeant-at-Arms for his sixth grade class. Mom put up red, white, and blue bunting and had a little party for him. No's election coincided with Ronald Reagan's, and when a friend of Mom's dropped by that evening, she asked incredulously, "You're not celebrating, are you?"


I read 1984 during Christmas week of 1983. I did that sort of stuff, like reading A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve three years in a row. I had an elevated sense of my own literacy.


In 1984 while at summer camp, which was held on the Sonoma State University campus, I became friends with a guy who was a student there during the year and who was working that summer for campus security. Because I never did anything I wasn't supposed to do, I was never caught playing hacky-sack in the courtyard after lights out, night after night. I don't remember realizing that this guy probably had a crush on me until he came to the end-of-camp dance and held me close while we danced and he sang along with Lionel Richie.


In 1986 my homeroom teacher came in from the school office and announced that the Challenger had just blown up. We had a 17-minute homeroom period, during most of which we would hang out and talk and finish homework, like a very very short study hall. I was sitting on my desk, and said, "You're pulling our legs, Nordie!" I think of this as my generation's "where were you when..." moment.


In 1988 I finally started coursework in the School of Education, with Mrs. P. We started by observing at Jason Lee Middle School, where we were placed in a sixth grade class. On my teaching day I led the class in improvisational storytelling, when each person took turns making up a few sentences of the story. Being sixth graders, they had the hero throw up a lot. After four weeks Mrs. P and I were sent to Henry Foss High School. On our first day, while we waited outside our master teacher's classroom for the bell to ring so we could introduce ourselves, a passing staff member asked us for our hall passes. We wound up having to show her our college ID cards to prove that we weren't cutting class.

Little House In The Suburbs

I've been thinking about Laura Ingalls Wilder this week.


Part of our heater blower broke Saturday night, so we have had no heat. At 5:50am on Sunday Zirpu was running around the house trying to figure out what was causing this plasticky smell. I got up with him but was so exhausted and out of it that after he told me that something was wrong with the heater, I asked if he needed me to help him with this or could I go back to bed? In my fuzzy state I sort of registered that going back to bed wasn't an option. When Zirpu went under the house and determined the heater was not on fire, he turned off the heat and I went back to bed.


So we have had no heat since Sunday morning and have been burning logs in the wood stove insert in the living room fireplace and sleeping in hats and under three quilts. Except in the middle of the day, when the sun is high enough to warm up the house, it's pretty much sucked. Except that we don't live in Oklahoma and the other places where it really is cold and people haven't had power for days. I'm good at perspective, but I'm shivering as I write this, which makes it longer for me to write.


I've been thinking about the part in one of the Little House books (I forget which one) where Laura's describing the winter when it was so cold that Ma insists that the girls stay in bed to stay warm and the snow is too deep for Pa to go to town and get Christmas presents. I think the girls are concerned about Santa being able to get out to them because of the snow. Then Pa's friend shows up, having waded through the deep snow! He brings with him gifts from Santa for Laura, Mary and Carrie, and a sweet potato for each person. That is Christmas enough for Laura.

Seven Weird Things About Your PAL

On this, the last day of NaBloPoMo, I shall respond to Boegle's tag on this meme (her seven weird things are here). This way I don't (I think) have to tag anyone else. The rules are to link back to the person who tagged you (she tagged me in the Comments section on Monday), tag seven random people, and write about seven weird things about yourself.


Because I couldn't respond right away I've had a bit to think about this. I think "unusual" is a better word than "weird", certainly less loaded. Here goes:


1) I'm bisexual. That's definitely in the unusual-rather-than-weird category. I don't think being bisexual is weird, it's just the way things are. But I recognize that other people seem to think it's a little weird (and I'm not talking about wide-stance Republicans here), and it's a good, sensationalized way to start the list. The rest of the list is in no particular order.


2) Until recently, I could recite (not sing) all of the words on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in order. This is my Desert Island Disc, the record with which I learned how to use a record player, and my instant cheer-up solution.


3) I have never eaten a peanut butter sandwich, but that's because I'm allergic. I have, however, made one. I had a camper who didn't bring a lunch when I was working at the JCC day camp in 1986. I actually made four tiny PB&Js because the only bread we had was Melba toast. I remember it as a singularly unpleasant experience because of the scent, which I find overpowering.


4) I never thought I would marry, up until a couple of months before I asked Zirpu to marry me. In a life marked by so much risk-avoidance and indecision masquerading as decision, marrying him was so right it was compelling and I had to ask. I didn't even shack up with him before asking, and we got married when I'd known him less than two years.


5) I was on TV when I was nine or so (I still had the braid, so I was no more than ten). It was a show on cable TV called "Rainy Days," an educational show for kids a little older than the audience for The Electric Company. I talked to the host (maybe it was a talk show targeting what are now known as "tweens") about my then-current favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which I have given to several children in the last 10 years.

This happened before VCRs came along so I never saw my interview. I don't know if I caused a Fonzie effect.


6) I'm a ballroom dancer. If you're wondering, my favorite dances are rumba and foxtrot. My least favorite are tango (American and Argentine) and waltz, though I would watch the latter anytime.


7) I hate white underwear. I have been known to rant about how difficult it is to buy packs of undies that don't include white ones. I have particular hatred for Tighty (or Tidy?) Whities, and have stopped dating a couple men once I learned of their preference for them.


and. . .Because none of the above are particularly strange, except maybe the "reciting a rock album" thing:


8) I can put my toes in my mouth even though I have never done yoga. I still do it sometimes.

This photo goes with yesterday's post

It's from one of my yearbooks, and I didn't want to take the time to find and scan it last night. Photos of us are all over that year's yearbook, but this is my favorite one.

Someone On My Mind

I haven't been able to get to the library so I am rereading Annie On My Mind (spoiler alert: link includes a plot synopsis). It's a story about two 12th graders who fall in love. I read it for the first time about ten years ago.


This book was published in 1982, the year I graduated from eighth grade and started high school. I wish I had read it instead of Judy Blume, which I didn't understand. Almost everything that happened in 11th grade, and a lot of the things I'd felt and experienced prior to that, would have made much more sense had I known that girls could, would, and did like girls. I only knew that boys and men were or could be homosexual. For me, so many things were classified under "If I were a boy. . ." The one book I read that had a plot about gay lovers (from the library at my Catholic school, oddly enough) was about a girl who finds her boyfriend in the bushes having sex with her best friend - also a guy.


I was such a dummy. I only have the Reagan Administration and the total lack of talk about sex at home as my defense. The big mystery is why none of it hit home when my (very progressive) PE teacher brought in a panel to discuss homosexuality and even bisexuality for one class during the "Life Skills" quarter.


Of course I fell in love with a girl in my class, my best friend, and in retrospect I know she fell in love with me too. She had a paper route so she could never sleep over, but when I spent the night at her place, I got up and delivered papers with her. When we got back she made the craziest French toast ("When we make it in New Zealand, we always add hot sauce") and I would eat it and not only declare it, but actually find it delicious. For years afterwards, and I mean years, because the last time it happened has been since I moved back to California, whenever I saw someone who looked like her, my heart would stop and I would have to catch my breath (if that sounds like hyperbole, remember this was my first love and I was a teenager so I've gone back to that place when it happened).


If I'd read Annie On My Mind in, say, 1983, or even 1986, so many things would have made much more sense. The fact that I never got what was so special about boys, just for starters! And maybe this girl and I would have had an actual relationship. . . Not that it wouldn't have been full of passion, drama, and confusion- an adolescent relationship is an adolescent relationship after all - and its own problems, especially as in 1985, we would not have been able to be out comfortably at our high school.


I was feeling sad last night about this girl for the first time in many years. And it wasn't she that I was feeling sad about really, it was the missed opportunity, or the experience I could have had or should have had, instead of the one I actually did, which resulted in my running around the halls at the school thinking, "I'm too young for this! I'm only 17!" and getting in a stupid, crazy fight on prom night (well, maybe I wouldn't have gotten in that fight, but I'm sure I would have pled youth about anything). I wonder if we could talk about that craziness now; we sure couldn't the last time we saw each other, in 1989. But all of that is a long story, at least another blog post if not a novel.

Memoirs

For me, it started with Angela's Ashes.


I just finished The Glass Castle, a memoir about a miserable childhood (as a former counter for the US Census, I was interested to see proof of why the government asks how many toilets in the residence). I've read Bad Blood: A Memoir, Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars, Running with Scissors, and several others whose titles I don't remember right now. The early parts of these books are a little more fun, when the authors are so young that they don't understand how really screwed up things are.


These memoirs make much more interesting reading than happy, "normal" childhoods would. I remember that when I started volunteering at Harry's Mother, the trainees were asked why they wanted to work with run-away, throw-away youth. There seemed to be two camps: Those of us who had survived crappy childhoods with poverty, bad parents, poor parenting, trouble, and/or drugs wanted to be the person who helped them when they were growing up, or who they wished had; and those of us who had had ordinary childhoods and wanted to reach out to those who hadn't been as fortunate as we had been.


Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be reading these books, being entertained by someone else's unhappiness (though they are not relentlessly unhappy every moment). The authors are telling their stories, though, so it seems that they want someone to read them, to hear them speak about where they come from and who they (and their families) are. I'm drawn in, time after time, and not just to the unhappy childhoods.

Rain and Rainbows

It rained today - soft in the morning and hard in the afternoon. I took my break in my car, as I do most of the time now that the heat is gone, and read my book and listened to the rain on the roof. I've always loved the sound of rain on a car's roof. It's so loud and unabsorbed. I remember one time I had to pull my car over on 122nd Avenue in Portland because it was raining so hard it was as if someone were pointing a really big hose at the windshield. The sound drowned out the radio (ha ha!).


I think the sound of rain on any roof is delicious. I lived in a finished attic for about a year and rainy days and nights were always the best sound. My housemate/landlady had a white cat named Bree who would sit on my chest when I was reading and so I would be forced to listen until she got bored and stalked off. Now, because of the location of the gutter ends on the house, the sound of water crashing into the deck comes along with heavy rain drumming on the roof.


I saw six rainbows today. There was one on the way to work, and five on the way home. Two of them may have been the same rainbow viewed from different directions. One was the mirror image of the other one (in a double rainbow), and Zirpu pointed out the colors were in reverse order (now we know why).


When I was a kid, Grush, who had lived for many years in Hawaii, gave me a book called The Eight Rainbows of 'Umi. I remember that it had beautiful pictures but I don't remember the story, except that every time something significant happened to 'Umi a rainbow appeared. I'm pretty sure the book didn't tell 'Umi's story like this. Anyway, I wound up thinking rainbows were a sign of magic, visions and illusions.


Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

The Road

Alton Brown is eating his way along the road again in Feasting On Asphalt. Last season they followed the blue highways from east to west and this season they're following the Mississippi River from south to north. I can't get enough of this show and it's not Alton and it's not the eating. It's the road, or the places and people along the road. I remember as a little kid lying in my bed not sleeping, imagining that I was actually in a motorcycle sidecar zooming over a ribbon of highway.


I've read all kinds of books about people traveling on the highways of the US, fiction and nonfiction (or roman a' clef, in the case of Kerouac), traveling by car, van, motorcycle, bicycle, bus, and on foot. I have done some road-tripping, up and down I-5 so often it has become a dance, and back and forth between the west coast and Colorado. None of it, however, has resulted in meeting people along the way (though I have dined in some fine and not-so-fine diners). I've always been on my way somewhere, trips where the journey was the means to the end, not the means and the end.

The national highway system exists because Eisenhower, a military man, saw that one was needed for national defense - he thought that in this big country of ours, soldiers and supplies needed a way to get to each other that was not reliant on railroads. I've only traveled across half of it by car and I'm always surprised at how far away everything is.

I don't know if I'm the kind of person who could jump out of a car in any small town and have a conversation with a local. I don't know if I'm too shy for that. But I hope that sometime I will be able to take a trip across at least part of the country and have the trip be the trip.

It doesn't feel like I cooked a lot today

All three recipes were really easy, and went in the oven to cook.


After I got home from work, I ate some lunch, planned the week's menu, and wrote a grocery list. I went up to Trader Joe's to get said groceries (a short list this week, as I'm recycling half of last week's list), where I was amused to see TJ's food in it's natural habitat. The TJ's in Alameda donates so much stuff to the food bank that I'm used to seeing everything in banana boxes. I shop at Trader Joe's because my mother's butcher said to go there for meat because he didn't know of any butcher shops in the east bay.


I bought this chicken last Sunday that I didn't cook yet. I had planned to cook it Thursday but we had a big lunch and opted for "skip" for dinner. I knew it couldn't wait any longer, so I pulled out a few cookbooks to see what they said to do. My 1964 Joy of Cooking, as I suspected, has instructions that were clearly out of date. Alton Brown's cooking science book doesn't have directions to roast a chicken, though it does have those for turkey, a standing rib roast, potatoes, meatloaf, broccoli, and tomatoes. So I turned to Williams-Sonoma's Essentials of Roasting, though I tend to avoid food-porn cookbooks because they are usually fussy. Not that I followed the recipe: After removing most of the skin from the chicken, I chopped up an apple and an onion to stuff inside and rubbed the outside with pepper, salt, and oregano. Then because I forgot to rub the olive oil on first, I sprayed it on.


Amazingly enough, the chicken came out perfectly, in the perfect time. I have learned to rely on my meat thermometer, but with only guessing the size of the chicken I didn't have to put it back in the oven several times - in fact, I didn't even have to do it once. Wouldn't you know it, it's the one time that I wasn't trying to get a bunch of things on the table at the same time and we didn't have any company.


I also made Grush's Banana Bread out of peaches that would have otherwise gone to the worms. I learned years ago from a coworker that if you have a decent banana bread recipe you can replace the bananas with any semi-solid fruit or vegetable, even condensed tomato soup(!). I have done it with applesauce, grated carrots, and now peaches. The peaches didn't have a strong enough flavor to really come through the bread, but it's still decent sweet bread.

Grush's Banana Bread (one loaf)
1/4 c butter
1/4 c shortening (I use trans fat-less Crisco)
1/2 c white sugar
1/2 c brown sugar (not packed too tightly)

Cream these together. Add:

2 eggs, one at a time
1+1/4 c flour
1/4 t salt
1/4 t baking soda
2 t baking powder
1 t vanilla (I usually use rum)
1 c mashed bananas

Grease and flour a loaf pan. Bake for ~50 minutes at 350*F.


The recipe for Lazy Blueberry Cobbler in Death By Pad Thai caught my eye, and Michelle Wildgen, the author of the story in which it appears, mentions that you can substitute other fruit such as cherries or "peaches especially." I had more peaches, so I made that too. I just took it out of the oven just before I started typing the recipe above.

If I were a real food blogger, I would have beautiful pictures of all of these, but a skinned, roasted chicken is hardly beautiful in the first place and the bread isn't that interesting, to look at or to eat. However, I did take a picture of the cobbler, which I'm about to try.



Update: It's very good. It's quite sweet. I've never made cobbler before so I don't know if I could reduce the sugar (which is an even amount with the flour). Do use fresh butter. Yum!

On The Other Hand

Children's books my mother hates:


Good Night Moon - "Bo-o-o-o-ring!"

Richard Scarry books - "Too many words! Too many things going on on each page. They took forever to read!"

Charlotte's Web - "After all that, and the spider dies!"

Early Reading

Frederick
Corduroy
Anansi The Spider: A Tale From The Ashanti
Dr. Seuss' Happy Birthday To You!
Free To Be... You And Me (and the record)
Where Did I Come From?
Where The Wild Things Are
In The Night Kitchen
Richard Scarry books
The Wizard of Oz
Tick Tock of Oz
Alice In Wonderland
The Phantom Tollbooth
a biography of Sam Houston, title forgotten (which I won for my good marks in California history, which even at the time I thought was strange)
Julie of the Wolves
The Diary of Ann Frank
Harriet The Spy
The Call of the Wild
The Narnia Chronicles (my favorite was, and is, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
The Hobbit
Shogun

Eating Good

I've been thinking a lot recently about something Tony Bourdain wrote in one of the essays in The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. I don't remember which essay, but most of them are amusing enough it's worth reading the whole book.


He asks us to eat good things.


Not things that are good for us, nor just things that taste good. He advises first of all to eat things that taste good, yes, but he also requests that we eat things that are prepared well. He is, obviously, against fast food, but not for the same reasons Eric Schlosser is; Bourdain is about quality ingredients and skilled preparation. I don't think he says this, but I think he would agree with eating everything as if it were the last thing you were going to eat.


Because I work around food every day, and because I've been learning more and more about food preparation from the great cooks and the foodies in my life, I am getting an increasing understanding of food quality. The food bank receives a lot of stuff from farmers' markets and from Trader Joe's, so I'm tasting better-quality, fresher, and riper (sometimes too-ripe) everything. At the same time, the range of quality of the nonperishable goods is huge, and the labels tell me so, even if it's the same item (like three brands of chicken noodle soup, for example).


I've been thinking about eating better everything. There are things that I like for which I'm not looking to change my taste, but there are things that I think I might like better if I found better versions (grape tomatoes from TJ's were this year's revelation; I thought I didn't like tomatoes). It seems that these days I consider eating things by asking myself, "Is this worth my time and my taste buds?"


If the Mother Ship arrived to pick me up, would I want the last thing I ate to be Cheetos?

True Story? Riiiight....

I finished reading "Princess Sultana's Daughters" by Jean Sasson last night. It's the follow-up of "Princess," both of which are supposed to be exposes written by a Saudi princess, alias "Sultana," about how totally restricted the lives of Saudi women are. I read the first book more than a year ago, and for all I knew everything in it was true, though a few things seemed tacked on, to make men look even worse than they already had been portrayed. This book, however, is just too pat: For example, one daughter rejects God and has a mental breakdown while the other becomes very religious and complains that her family is too liberal. I had doubts when the first daughter's psychiatrist tells the parents that the daughter has told him that she has had a lesbian relationship, because no ethical psychiatrist would do this. Later, when "Sultana" describes the second daughter becoming an Islamic fundamentalist while she also loves lap dogs, I stopped believing in the book altogether.


A quick perusal of the reviews of this book doesn't show a lot of other people doubting that any of it is true, though the few that do actually explain why they think the books are false. I'm rather surprised, post-James Frey, that more people aren't questioning this, though it must be said that both books precede "A Million Little Pieces" by more than ten years.


In the end I felt really manipulated by Sasson. Women's rights are high on the list of concerns about Saudi Arabia (and other places in the Arab world). However, I wonder if she isn't just trotting out these stories for the sensational effect, stories which non-Muslims would totally "buy" because it fits so many of the stereotypes we already hold.


The last time I read a book that caught me like this was "The Kite Runner." That was my fault, though. I tend to read the same kinds of books for period of time, because of where I end up in the library. I'll read a bunch of authors whose last names begin with E because I was looking for a Louise Erdrich novel, and I'll read a bunch of memoirs in a row because one day I was in the Biographies section. I had been reading memoirs when someone loaned me "The Kite Runner" and was so totally sucked in that until the absolutely unbelievable coincidence I never read the back flap, which starts, " Hosseini's stunning debut novel..."


That time I felt silly, not cheated. I know in the future I will look closely at books that purport to be "as told to" the author.