The Vintage Reader

Yeah, I know it's been a long, long time since I actually posted about a book I've read. But I've somehow found more time to read recently; I think it's because my BRAND NEW laptop is BROKEN, and in order to use it I have to hook it up to a monitor on my dining room table and sit in an uncomfortable chair with a cheap cushion that makes it nearly bearable for MINUTES at a time. But mainly, my recent spate of reading has come about because The Vintage Toddler has the flu, and refuses to leave my lap, and rather than actually paying attention to two episodes of Dragon Tales every day I've been reading while he sits on my lap and watches TV and whimpers in a feverish manner.

In that time, I've read The Falls, by Joyce Carol Oates; liked the story, loved the descriptions of Niagara Falls and all the Love Canal history. I'm not qualified to review JCO, so I won't, but I have a feeling that you either like her or you don't. I do, but a little goes a long way; I identify to an uncomfortable degree with some of her least likable characters, and such was the case here.

I've also read an almost-vintage book, The Girl on the Beach, by Velda Johnston. It's one of those throwaway contemporary gothic romances from the 80s, when that particular subgenre was breathing its last breath. It felt dated, and what was worse, it felt like it was probably dated when it was published, too.

But the book I'm really excited about having read is Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, by Chelsea Cain. It's a parody; it says so right there on the cover. I'm not sure whether I'd call it a parody or a pastiche, since it features Nancy Drew, Ned Nickerson, Frank and Joe Hardy, and even Cherry Ames, Kim Aldrich, and Donna Parker.

At this point I have to say that I usually don't like pastiches. Generally I find them overly clever and annoying, especially if the source is one of my passions (a good example is Robert B. Parker's Poodle Springs, a Raymond Chandler knockoff; I like Parker a lot, but only Chandler is Chandler). And I have to say that I am practically reverent about Nancy Drew, even the really awful early books. But Chelsea Cain treats Nancy well. She pokes fun at her, but not in a meant-to-be-ironic way.

The book starts out as a fond treatment of Nancy and her chums, but gets more and more ridiculous (and funny) as it goes on. Unlike the series, Nancy and the others age and get on with their lives. Oddly enough, I even felt some empathy with Nancy as she enters her forties and longs for a good missing locket or secret passage or some other mystery to solve.

Mainly, though, the book is just good fun. I don't even remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud so often; Cain hits exactly the right tone for Nancy without overdoing it. Here's a good example:

"I agree," I agreed.

Which, of course, is mainly funny because Nancy never just said something when she could reply, cry, exclaim, or retort it. This kind of thing could have made for some heavy-handed parody, but somehow Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, while broad, isn't slapstick. I highly recommend it for any fan of teen sleuths, since nearly all of them (even Encyclopedia Brown) get a mention.

And there you go. I read something! And wrote about it! What are the odds?

One of my favorite recently discovered bloggers, Lisa Paitz Spindler, lists My Thirteen Favorite TV Nerds (The Guys) for her Thursday Thirteen. I love many of her choices (Xander!), but as I read her list I kept thinking "Ooh! But what about..." so I decided to make my own list.

Since I'm not participating in Thursday Thirteen (these days I have a hard enough time coming up with a post every couple of weeks, let alone 13 things every Thursday... Gak!), I'm going to pretend it's a meme and tag Michelle to list her 13 favorite TV guy geeks too.

And so, in no particular order...

My 13 Favorite TV Guy Geeks

1. Jake Foley (Christopher Gorham), Jake 2.0.


2. First-season Henry (also Christopher Gorham), Ugly Betty. Henry lost points with me this season for behaving stupidly and inconsistently. I completely lost interest in the show and quit watching, so I don't know if his behavior has improved or not.


3. The 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who.


4. Okay, okay. The 10th Doctor (David Tennant), Doctor Who. I didn't like him much in his first season, but I like him a lot better now.


5. Leonard (Johnny Galecki), Big Bang Theory. Here I differ from Lisa, who listed Sheldon; while I think Sheldon is hilarious, I would never want him in my living room, so he didn't make the list. (I also liked Johnny Galecki as David, Darlene's boyfriend/husband in Roseanne, but I didn't watch the show enough to know whether David belongs on the list or not)


6. Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World. At first Dwayne Wayne got on my nerves, but as the seasons went on he grew on me, as geek guys often will. He had the same effect on Whitley.


7. Rom (Max Grodenchik), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I loved Rom. He was an engineer working as a waiter who quietly went about doing his job and loving his son, his brother, and a beautiful woman who eventually married him. For me, Trek characters usually don't count as geeks; when everybody on the show is a geek, nobody stands out. But DS9, not being set on a starship where everyone went to the Academy to learn some specific aspect of geekery, was different.


8. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Denisof), Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wesley all desperate and tough-guy: oh my. EDIT: I think the desperate tough-guy Wesley was more Angel than Buffy, actually.


9. Doogie Howser, M.D. (Neil Patrick Harris), from the show of the same name. I liked Doogie a lot, and I love it all the more that NPH grew up to play Barney in How I Met Your Mother, and also, both Jim Burden in My Antonia and some freaky heterosexual version of himself in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. He's crazy! You never know what he'll do next!


10. Ed Stevens (Thomas Cavanagh), Ed.


11. Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula), Quantum Leap.


12. Richie Velch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), The Class. Another short-lived series that I really liked. Richie's horrible wife was played wonderfully by Sara Gilbert, who has played Johnny Galecki's love interest in TWO shows now, which must put her in some special category of Most Likely to Play the Significant Other of a Geek.


13. Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr), Freaks and Geeks. Has there ever been a geekier scene on TV than the one where Bill sits and watches stand-up comics on TV while eating macaroni and cheese in the most disgusting way possible? I KNEW that guy in high school. My drafting class was full of them. Not to mention the band. The first time I saw that scene I nearly cried.

And now I'm going to go the the flea market if it's open, because I haven't done that since I moved. Have a great Saturday, y'all.

Via a comment on Smart Bitches by Teddy Pig: Vintage Paperbacks, an unassuming site full of great scans of pulp cover art. They're organized by genre, artist, author, and publisher. Be sure to check out each category to make sure you see all of the best ones.

I am having the strangest week. Sometime last Saturday I realized that ALL the houses I'm looking at were built since I graduated from college. Which means, essentially, that they are less than 20 years old. I'm not sure I've EVER lived in a house that new, at least, not since I was a small child; my family always lived in Brand New Houses when my father lived with us, because he apparently didn't like to live in any property that anyone else had ever lived in before, but anyone who's read more than two or three posts here knows that I am pretty much the opposite.

I like knowing that other people have lived in my house. I like thinking about who they were, what they did, what their lives were like. I used to like speculating that the people who built my last house, a kit home from the 20s, were people who liked to save money, but still splurged on custom woodwork and windows and lovely stone. That they likely had a nice Irish or Polish girl who took the cable car in every day to help them out with the wee ones and probably the housework as well. That they probably kept a Model T in the strangely narrow, but tall, garage. Perhaps they strolled down the sidewalk, laughed at the house that Frank Lloyd Wright built (which would have been shut up and empty when their house was new, its owners having abandoned it and moved to their country home--also built by FLW), went to the park and paddled in small rickety boats on the lake. I love that stuff.

But the houses I'm looking at now have granite countertops in the kitchen, "media rooms" (or at least game rooms), two-car garages with automatic doors, cultured stone facades, faux-Tudor half-timbers, laminate floors. They have breakfast bars and family rooms and double-paned windows and whirlpool tubs and his-and-hers vanities and dressing rooms. Dressing rooms! Plural! I kid you not! Features that used to be reserved for movie stars and new money are now standard middle-class fare.

And I love them. Some of them are disastrous McMansions, it's true. You can't say what style they are because they aren't any one style; they're a little bit Tudor, a little bit French Country, a tiny bit Georgian Revival, maybe, and oh-so-contemporary too. But those whirlpool tubs and dual vanities, the French doors that go out to an "outdoor kitchen," all the things I've always said I don't need, those symbols of everything that's wrong with the overconsuming 21st-century American culture that calls luxuries "necessities"--I want them. I want a pot-filler (for those of you who don't watch HGTV, a pot-filler is a separate faucet on a hose that is installed over the cooktop so that you can fill pots where they sit instead of having to actually carry them from the sink to the stove). I want a seamless shower. I want professional landscaping and a sprinkler system.

I don't know what's happened to me. I quit recycling when it became evident that the city was never going to actually empty the bin I faithfully put out at the curb every other week (overflowing, of course, since I was accustomed to weekly curbside recycling). I ended my subscription to the newspaper because I couldn't recycle it, and despite my best intentions, I don't read it online, so I have no idea what's going on in my hometown; I kept up with the news more regularly when I didn't live here! Next thing you know, I'll quit listening to NPR and start listening to contemporary country (as opposed to Classic Country, which y'all know I love) and reading Jan Karon and taking advice from Dr. Phil.

Who the hell has taken over my personality? And what did she do with the person who wanted to buy a funky Midtown midcentury modern and decorate it from the best flea market in the country, which I haven't even BEEN to since I moved back here in SEPTEMBER?