I just met the most controversial woman in publishing

Ms. J. R.

She's very good-looking.

once sentence book reviews

Absurdistan, by Gary Schteyngart - This book is all surface, but what a surface it is: funny, deeply ironic, smart, topical, nimble. Still, I can't love a book without a beating heart.

West With the Night, Beryl Markham - A truly wonderful memoir by a female pilot and horse trainer in Africa, in the early and middle parts of the 20th century. Hemingway praised the book highly, and there is a similarity of style, although I think that Markham runs laps around Hemingway where content is concerned. A new heroine to add to my pantheon!

The Language Police, by Diane Ravitch - A book about censorship in public schools, especially of textbooks. Substantive, well-researched, both shocking and thought-provoking.

Book By Book, by Michael Dirda - Books about books and reading can only rise to a certain height, but this one is light and fun and will probably give you some good ideas.

The Surrender, by Toni Bentley - Toni Bentley thinks she's a badass because she likes anal sex, and she wants you to know about it.

The Land Was Everything, by Victor Davis Hansen - A eulogy for the family farmer; a book as noble and yet also as narrow-minded as its subject.

A Field of Darkness, by Cornelia Read - A very witty, character-driven mystery. The whodunit wasn't hard to spot, but the book is great.

The Mona Lisa Stratagem, by Harriet Rubin - A beautifully written, oracular "guide" to power and authority for older women. Unfortunately, it's most useful for women who think Colette's greatest accomplishment was seducing a 16 year old boy at 60, and want to follow in her footsteps.

Harry Potter 7, by J.K. Rowling - Bliss.

Thief, Queen of Attolia, King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner - Satisfying young adult series, reminded me a bit of Lian Hern's Tales of the Otori or Poison Study.

Woo-hoo!

We're going to try to sign the authors of two books I pulled out of the slush pile! I have found a wee diamond in the rough, a thumbtack in a haystack! Twice! In one week!

Now, this is a victory for me but we have yet to discover if:

(1) the author in question will want to sign with us
(2) we can sell the book
(3) if the book will sell

But yay! Baby agent on the loose!

Newsflash

After re-reading Harry Potter 5 and 6, I have changed my mind: I think Snape is evil.

You won't regret going to the movies to see...

Sicko - Michael Moore haters will observe that he is up to his old shenanigans, pulling ridiculous stunts and sometimes not telling the whole story (I walked into the movie knowing next to nothing about the health care systems in Canada and England, but pretty well informed about France - and although he got the country's excellent health care system right, random Americans yammering about their kids going to college for free gives the wrong impression. Students who excel go to college for cheap; kids who lag behind or don't make the grade get cut at a very early age, starting around 11 or 12, and about 80% of all French college students fail their freshman year. This doesn't make it any less true that it's easy and cheap to have doctors make home calls, or that the public access medical care is both cheap and high quality. Nor is it entirely untrue. It's just an inadequate and unnecessary tangent). Somehow I feel like I got this review started on the wrong foot, though, because my point is that the movie is great and you should go see it.

Live Free or Die Hard - A worthy installment in one of the best series of action movies ever made. I alternately laughed (at funny things) and cringed (at scary things) through the whole movie. Love Bruce Willis. Love the Yalie who plays the mac guy in the commercials, and, more or less, plays a slightly geekier version of the mac guy in the movie. Love the fact that the Die Hard movies always zero in on some important issue of the day and have something to say, if you can look past all the metrosexual, Europeanish villains. And thank heavens for metrosexual, Europeanish villains in a time when most movies muck around with politics and feature Middle Eastern/Eurasian villains. In fact, I'm going to say that again, in the form of a useful advisory:

Moviemakers of the world: if you want to avoid making asses of yourselves, stay away from the Middle Eastern/Eurasian can of worms and go for the metrosexual Europeans. They work every time.

one line reviews

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Earnest Hemingway: Oh my God, it's like everything I hate about Paul Auster condensed into twenty pages and then multiplied.

Lost in America by Sherwin Nuland: An exorcism - a memoir about a gifted surgeon's troubled relationship with his father.

Breath Palette

is my new favorite product. It's a Japanese brand of toothpaste that comes in forty different flavors, all of them bizarre: green tea, Japanese plum, bitter chocolate, Indian curry, pumpkin pudding, café au lait, fresh yogurt, etc. This is the kind of thing I find exciting on principle, and to test the quality I decided to sample one of the flavors I thought would be most difficult to achieve succesfully in toothpaste: darjeeling tea. I thought that if it was artificial or too pasty, the tea-scent would end up bitter or medicinal. Lo and behold, the toothpaste surpassed my wildest expectations: the flavor was subtle, pleasant, and sophisticated. Delightful, actually. Plus, brushing your teeth with tea-flavored toothpaste makes breakfast much more palatable.

Yesterday I bought three more tubes: caramel, honey, and café au lait. The tubes are pretty small, so they are great for sampling and for travel. I've tried the honey - which is a bit too mild, and not very striking, and the café au lait, which is delicious.

I'm sure that Breath Palette toothpaste is difficult to find in most places, but if you come across it anywhere, give it a whirl.