Scorched earth? (52 books / 52 weeks)

Review – Wormwood Forest,
a natural history of Chernobyl,
by Mary Mycio

A keeper? Oddly, I don’t think so

If you’re over 35, you probably remember. The first vague news stories about high radiation detected in Sweden; the realization that something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in the Soviet Union; eventually, the terrifying story of how a nuclear reactor not far from the Ukrainian city of Kiev had exploded, showering the surrounding area with killer radiation. Among other aftereffects, the disaster at Chernobyl helped to bring down the Soviet system, quickly followed by the fall of Communist governments all over eastern Europe.

That was over twenty-five years ago, back in 1986. What sort of wasteland surrounds the evacuated, still-radioactive section of Ukraine and Belarus by this time? Is it a moonscape of crumbling buildings and skeletal dead trees, where no living thing walks except the handful of people who keep tabs on the sealed reactor core?

Well, no. It’s radioactive, yes. Not a safe place to raise a family (though apparently some aging Belorussians have refused to abandon their homes, and still live there). Full of towns slowly falling into ruin. But far from dead.

Instead, human withdrawal has turned the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant into an unintended wildlife refuge, green and teeming with animals of all sorts. Mary Mycio tells us how local experts showed her around the abandoned flourishing new forests (an unnerving experience punctuated by dosimeter checks; but without radiation detectors, only the strangely misshapen pine trees would show that something’s very wrong.)

Wormwood Forest has a surprising story to tell, one that’s well worth reading. I’m glad I read it; if I didn’t have a space problem, I would keep it; but I don’t think I’ll need to come back to it. Out it goes – but if you come across a copy, this little book is worth your time.

First day of spring. Now.

I took this picture five minutes ago.

Spring’s here.

What IS a pack rat to do?

Add a table, chair, and shoe holders here? How?

Seriously.

One of my projects this year is to get rid of all the stuff in my house that we don’t use – sometimes because we can’t find it – and find ways that make sense to store the rest. And looking good would be nice, but let’s not boldly go too far from the household comfort zone.

Of course, one category of stuff I’ve bought far too often is books of advice on becoming organized. None of these books solved the problem; but is that the authors’ fault, or mine?

A reasonable guess would be that I’m more to blame than the people who write advice books. So I decided to take the first one I could find and spend a month doing everything it tells me to do. (FWIW, my source of decluttering wisdom turned out to be What’s a (dis)Organized Person to Do? by Stacey Platt. I’d call it a fairly typical specimen of this kind of book.)

The first chapter – “General Principles” – sounds promising. Alas, it’s only eight pages long, with lots of white space. Worse, Platt makes several good points but doesn’t seem to realize that some of us need advice on HOW to apply them. I especially like “Live within your space means”, but! I’ve been overspending my space (a Kindle’s nice, but I could still use a Tardis) for many years. I need someone to explain how to efficiently clear away the mountains of stuff – but I already know I can’t swallow the ruthless “just throw it out, you shouldn’t want it” approach that a friend tried to make me use.

(No, I’m not out of control enough to be entertainingly pilloried on one of those TV shows about hoarders. Just far enough out of control to make life way too complicated.)

Well, never mind. I’m going to follow the room by room advice if it kills me, and by the last page my home will be a showplace. Right?

Not so fast. Platt starts with the entryway, and wants us to organize that area with prettily matching hangers in the coat closet, a table or shelf to hold keys, cell phone, mail, and more, “containers for hats, scarves, and gloves; boot and shoe storage; a place to sit.” Suuure. I’ve got fifteen inches / thirty-eight centimeters of free space next to my front door. That’s not going to hold all that extra furniture.

And the four and a half feet (135 cm) wide floor space in my kitchen isn’t going to hold a butcher-block island and the kitchen table she suggests either. What was all that about living within your space budget?

I don’t mean to jump on Platt, or not very hard. Her book is typical of the genre. On the other hand, I’m not about to rush out and buy a bigger house so I can follow her advice.

I guess I’m on my own.

Poking a nose out of my comfort zone

Noses are hard

One of my projects for this year is to learn to draw. And that means that somehow, sometime, I need to figure out how to draw noses.

Think about it. Eyes are fairly easy – they’ve got eyelashes, which are usually dark like a pencil line, to outline them, and the iris and pupil are nice and dark too. Lips aren’t too hard either, since there’s a noticeable boundary between the lips and the rest of the face that justifies using an outline to show the mouth.

But noses? In profile they’re no big deal, but head-on they blend right into the rest of the face! You can’t show the shape without making it look like your subject’s nose is on sideways. Or can you??

Well, artists can. I’ve tried to draw noses by using what I can figure out on my own, and the results look like nothing from this planet. So why not steal techniques from people who know what they’re doing?

I sat down with a book of drawings by Ingres – if you look hard enough in this house, you can find a book about just about anything – and copied Ingres noses for a while. Not as good as his, but much much better than I’ve been able to figure out by myself.

Then I tried drawing noses from photos.

Ingres was really, really good. (Surprise.)

I’ll need to spend a lot more time working on this. (Surprise.) But really, bad as these are, they’re the most convincing noses I ever drew.

52 books / 52 weeks – The Lark and the Wren

Review: The Lark and the Wren,
by Mercedes Lackey

A keeper? On the whole, yes

(This has got to stop. One point, for me, of tackling various reading challenges was to identify books I don’t really want. But now that I’m finally looking at my TBRs, it turns out that most of them are too good to dispose of. What’s a packrat to do?)

Almost 500 pages of the roving – picaresque, if you want to be English-majorish – adventures of Rune, aka Lark, and the friends she eventually makes along the way; and almost every page is interesting. It’s not a perfect book, of course, but it’s packed full of enjoyable moments. Rune knows what she wants at any given part of the story and goes after it – what she wants changes appropriately as she learns more about her world and the likely consequences of her choices, and especially as she matures and learns more about herself. (The main action of the story takes Rune from just barely 14 to 18 or 19.) But it’s not just the story of Rune growing up. It’s the story of Tonno who would have been a musician if only he had the talent, of Amber who made a satisfactory life in a hard world, of Stara who snatched at everything she wanted and lost her grip on it, of Gwydain who disappeared, of gypsies and judges and elves and lost heirs.

So, what’s wrong? Well, if it matters (and maybe it doesn’t), Lackey sort of ignores all the standard advice on how to construct a plot: start with a little problem for your main character, solve that problem in a way that leads to a worse problem, lather, rinse, repeat, till by the end it looks impossible for your character to find any sort of solution. In many ways, this book reads as if it might have started as a series of short stories – Rune is faced by a problem that makes it impossible to go on with her life as it is, and finds a way to leave and take up a new life. Her worst problem, being trapped in a tiny village with an abusive mother and serious danger of gang rape, comes at the very beginning of the story, and she escapes by taking what may be her biggest risk – playing a concert for a murderous ghost. That’s the end of that set of problems. After that, on the whole* her life gets better and better (and good for her).

* (Well, there is the incident about halfway through that leaves her with bruises on bruises and a broken arm. But, through no action on Rune’s part, this leads directly to being quasi-adopted by the nicest people she ever meets and having all her dreams come true.)

Are there worse flaws? Most of the characters, with just one notable exception, are either Good People or Bad People. Even if they have what are usually considered flaws, the people Rune likes have Hearts Of Gold every time. However, what I really disliked was the Fantasyland dialect – “Na, na, Rune. That’s not sensible, lass. Nobody can have that….Leastwise, no musicker.” I don’t like dialect anyhow, except in tiny doses – and this is especially annoying, because everybody Rune grew up with talks like this, and she talks standard English.

What I really liked, what sold me on the book finally, was the very last episode (the last sixty pages), with the most complex person in the whole story and an unexpected twist in the problem and in its resolution. Ending on a high note always helps!

Getting down to it

At last! After a string of really challenging Weekly Photo Challenges, we’ve been given an easy one – “Down”.

Looking down from a bridge at Krka Falls, Croatia

Somewhere in the Arizona desert – or possibly New Mexico

Looking down at a cactus -
no, I didn’t want to get closer!

And this is the least impressive of my four pictures,
with the most impressive “down”.
Because we’re looking at the edge of Niagara Falls,
and the water in the top half of the photo is 165 feet / 50 meters
below the water in the bottom half.

Maybe that’s why so few pictures emphasize “down” -
depth does not photograph well.

A few millimeters off the top of Mount TBR

Review – Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith

A keeper? Eh, maybe.

I didn’t want to throw it across the room.

Well, maybe, at the very end. More of a gentle toss, really. It’s hard to get worked up about any of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories, and that’s a large part of their appeal. As in the other subdued adventures of Mma Precious Ramotswe and her friends and family, nobody is ever threatened with degradation or violent crime. This is a very middle-class, cozier than cozy, series of mysteries; the standard “cozy” involves at least one major felony, generally murder, but as often as not Mma Ramotswe deals with situations that turn out not to be criminal at all. Misunderstandings are common, heartbreak is entirely possible, life isn’t exactly easy, but on the whole Alexander McCall Smith’s version of Botswana is a pretty amicable place to visit.

My biggest complaint about this particular story is that the central problem dribbles away into the desert sands even more than usual for the series. On the one hand, Mma Ramotswe eventually figures out why the Kalahari Swoopers have suddenly stopped winning games, but I had to read and re-read the last few pages several times to notice that she does finally tell Mr. Molofololo, the annoying team owner, what’s wrong. We never see their final confrontation – we only hear Mma Ramotswe telling her good friend Mma Potokwane how it all turned out, as one nugget of news in a conversation where the real interest lies elsewhere.

Will I keep this book? I really don’t know. It’s literary chicken soup, the kind of undemanding read that might be pleasant when you’re under great stress or recovering from the flu. If I had infinite shelf space, it could stay; but I don’t. Maybe I’ll look at the next Mma Ramotswe story to make up my mind.

An alliteration attack

I’ve been amusing myself with Alphabetaphilia over at West Coast Writers. The game is to come up with a sentence using five words starting with the letter of the day – today was “P”, which means that tomorrow is going to be tough, since words that start with “Q” are almost as rare as ones that start with “X”. Silly stuff, and good practice in trying to come up with active, concrete statements even in artificial situations.

But…I think, maybe, it’s….getting out. Taking over. Something – something eldritch.

Because a while ago I started making a grocery list. And here’s how the household needs happened to hit me.

Help. 

Regret

The current Weekly Photo Challenge theme is a tough one – Regret. I don’t usually take pictures of things that are sad or ugly, but at last I remembered this series of photos. They were taken in early 2009, in Camden, New Jersey; unfortunately, there are still many similar sights not far away. (Camden is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., and it shows.)

This is a shame and a scandal, and certainly a reason for regret. Only a few decades ago, this was a small but adequate home. But during the years that I drove past this intersection on my way to and from work, it was a ruin. This is how it looked in March, 2009; I was afraid at that time that it was going to collapse any day.

Granted, there’s room for a tiny bit of hope here. Over the following two months, someone gutted this house (and the adjoining row houses) and started to repair them. Here’s how it looked by May:

Those yellowish lines near the top of the house are huge wooden brackets to stabilize the brick wall – they extend the width of the house and hook over the firewall dividing it from the next rowhouse* up the street. (The roof was long gone.)

Unfortunately, work stalled at this point. And since I no longer work nearby, I never found out if the project got completed.

Camden. Regret.

 

*If you’ve never been in the Philadelphia area, rowhouses are basically block-long buildings, usually brick and two stories high, that are divided into subunits twenty or thirty feet wide by brick and plaster firewalls. Each subunit is a separate home. This is the typical form of housing in Philadelphia and most of the nearby smaller cities.

And for a different take on Valentine’s Day -

I can’t resist. Please, please take a look at the Valentine’s post on SPQR Blues today….Ancient Romans and turtles and more!