50 book challenge: February.

[rivka]

Annie Duke: How I raised, folded, bluffed, flirted, cursed, and won millions at the World Series of Poker, by Duke & Diamond.
Michael brought this home from the library for me. I normally wouldn't read an "as told to" celebrity bio, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. It's partly an autobiography and partly a poker memoir, although there's probably not enough in-depth poker coverage to keep a real enthusiast happy. I'm interested in Duke as a person, so it worked for me. She writes about her unhappy, competitive childhood, her development of a crippling case of panic disorder during her graduate training in psycholinguistics, her impulsive marriage to a man she'd never dated but who offered her a chance to escape the career path she'd come to detest... and her choice of poker as a practical career to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for her husband and children. It was also interesting to read about some of the ordinary mechanics of competing in a massive poker tournament; I'd wondered about the details when we watched the tournament on TV.

George Alec Effinger live! from planet earth, by (unsurprisingly enough) George Alec Effinger.
I had never read any Effinger, and I'm not usually even a short story fan, so who knows what made me pick this one up from the "new books" display at the library. I had heard stories about his tragic life, but I'd never gotten much of an impression of what he wrote. Here's what I have to say now: Whoa. Almost every story in the collection is very good, and some of them - "Two Sadnesses," "Everything but Honor," "The Man Outside" - just blew me away. "Two Sadnesses" stayed with me for days and made me shudder every time I remembered it.

How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, by Faber & Mazlish.
The parenting classic. It's way over Alex's level, but I'd heard so much about it that I was curious. It turns out not to have a whole lot of new information to offer a psychologist (I don't really need to learn how to sensitively reflect someone's feelings), and there are some odd assumptions about how negative parents' "normal response" to children's behavior is. (Do people whose natural instinct is to verbally abuse their children generally read parenting books?) But I did learn from some of their subtler or more advanced techniques, such as their ideas for encouraging autonomy and their suggestions about how to counteract roles/labels foisted on your child by others.

The children, by David Halberstam.
It took me most of January and February to plow my way through the 800-some pages of this book. It's a fascinating story - Halberstam follows the lives and works of the group of Nashville college students who ran the first organized sit-in campaign and then went on to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But the man can't write a decent sentence to save his life. This book contained some of the clunkiest prose I have ever seen professionally published - and Halberstam's won a Pulitzer Prize! Did he always write like that, or has the brain eater gotten to him? ...At any rate, the prose failings made the first couple of hundred pages hard going, but by the time I got to the section on the Freedom Rides, the story was too gripping for the writing to get in the way. I thought I was already pretty damned well-informed about the Civil Rights movement, but this book was still an education.

Five children and it, by E. Nesbit.
I know, I know, it's shocking that I never read this book as a fantasy-crazed child. Although there's also something anti-fantastical about E. Nesbit, in that the ultimate message of those of her books that I've read seems to be that fantasy will always disappoint and ultimately end in tears. The five children discover a sand-fairy who will grant them one wish per day (ending at sunset), and every wish turns out badly. They wish for a lot of money, and find themselves in possession of vast quantities of gold coins that no one will accept and that ultimately get them in trouble with the law. And so forth. The auctorial voice is kind of cloying and annoying, as is often the case with 19th century children's books, but all in all I liked it anyway.

Garlic and sapphires, by Ruth Reichl.
This is the third volume of Reichl's memoirs, covering the years she was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. Like the two previous books, Garlic and sapphires mixes food writing with personal exploration. Reichl disguises herself in order to review restaurants without being recognized by the staff, and finds that the costumes seem to connect her with buried aspects of her personality. I also enjoyed her reflections on how others treated her various personae - for example, her famous double review of the restaurant Le Cirque contrasting the service and food she received as, apparently, a dowdy suburban nobody vs. the service and food she received as the New York Times restaurant critic.

What do you do all day? by Amy Scheibe.
Finally, a decent entry in the Mommy Lit category. The plot of this one was pretty standard: stay-at-home mom grapples with questions of identity - who is she if she's not working? was staying home a conscious choice or a way of hiding from life? do her kids need her at home, or does she need to be at home with them? But the writing quality elevated it considerably above the other Mommy Lit books I've tried.

Just as a sidenote, every Mommy Lit book I've read has had this weird class thing going on, where the protagonist is raising her kids in a hypercompetitive and hyperwealthy community in which all the other moms dress their infants in cashmere, have $600 designer strollers, have pony rides and clowns at their one-year-olds' birthday parties, hire nannies even though they don't have jobs, etc. The protagonist is always wealthy enough to be able to match the other moms financially, but she is always - always - from a middle- or working-class background herself, so she (a) doesn't fit in, and (b) thinks critically about all the crazy overspending. I don't know if this is specifically a Mommy Lit thing, or whether it generally applies to the whole Chick Lit genre. My suspicion is that its purpose is to let readers wallow in the $$$$$ fantasy without losing their ability to identify with the protagonist.

Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld.
YA science fiction, the sequel to Uglies. Westerfeld's created an interesting post-scarcity, post-population-crash world in which everyone receives extensive cosmetic surgery at the age of 16. Children are taught as scientific fact that evolution has hard-wired humans to trust and love beautiful people, and that therefore when everyone is equally pretty there is no more distrust, conflict, or hatred. The protagonist of the trilogy learns that some teenagers run away and refuse to become pretty, and is then threatened with never being allowed the surgery for herself unless she tracks the runaways down and turns them in. Pretties definitely suffers from middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome, but was otherwise a fairly good read. I'm looking forward to the concluding book's release.

Total for February: 8
Total for the year: 17.