Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips For Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty

Did you know it's grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with "hopefully?" I was writing an email to a coworker this week and caught myself making that mistake. Fortunately, I've been reading Grammar Girl so I was able to correct the sentence. Not that my coworker would have cared or even noticed, but I can't help myself. I'm a grammar nerd. I find language endlessly fascinating.

Grammar Girl's book is a great resource for hard-core grammar nerds or anyone who cares to write properly. I think it would be a great book for college students. Mignon Fogarty's writing is very accessible, much more so than the style guides I had to buy for my college English courses. She has some great memory tricks to remember grammar rules. One of my favorites was her tip for remembering when to use "whom."

It's a simple memory trick-- we'll call it the "him-lich" maneuver. It's as easy as testing your sentence with the word him: if you can hypothetically answer your question with the word him, you need a whom.

Here's an example: who/whom do you love? Imagine a guy you love-- your father, your boyfriend, Chef Boyardee. I'm not here to judge you. The answer to the question Who/whom do you love? would be "I love him." You've got a him, so the answer is whom: whom do you love?

You'd be surprised how often I've thought of that trick since I first read it. It's quite handy.

The whole book is full of useful grammar advice and tips, and it's really a fun read. I highly recommend it to everyone. The copy I read came from the library, so sadly I'll have to return it, but I've added it to my Amazon wishlist. I'm hoping someone will buy it for me for Christmas so I can have a copy at hand for all those times I need an answer to a grammar problem.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

In 1993, climber and slacker Greg Mortenson attempted and failed to climb K2, the world's deadliest peak. He found himself lost and weak in the Himalayas of Pakistan, where he was cared for and befriended in the impoverished remote village of Korphe. In Korphe, far from the government center of Pakistan, 84 children took their lessons outdoors on a frosty ledge. They shared a teacher with a neighboring village and scratched their lessons into the dirt with sticks. Mortenson made a promise to build the people of Korphe a proper school and he's been building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan ever since. That first school cost $12,000 and a teacher cost a dollar a day.


Mortenson's story is amazing. He lived out of a storage unit and his car in Berkley working odd shifts as an ER nurse when he was saving money for the Korphe school. All he really had was a little luck and an indefatigable will to help the children of Pakistan. He fell ass-backwards into some money, getting a wealthy benefactor and later some much deserved press. He shook a lot of hands and drank a lot of tea in Pakistan and figured out how to get things done in some of the most inaccessible parts of the world (hint: let the locals tell you how it's done). Basically, Mortenson is my new personal hero.


The writing in the book leans towards the overly sentimental, towards hero-worship, and does that thing where the writer tries to tie two things together unnecessarily. I barely noticed any of that because I was really busy crying and worshiping. The plight of children and especially girls in these remote, poor, and often violent areas is deplorable. And as Americans, we basically just make it worse all the time. "Dr. Greg" might be the only purely positive force coming from the U.S. so we all owe him one.


So, the book was really educational for me since I have really no knowledge of the area outside of what I see The Daily Beast headlines and the personal stories of the people of Pakistan are heart-breaking. The best bits of the book break down the way that the Taliban uses education and the shortfalls of Middle Eastern governments to recruit entire generations of extremists. Secular education really looks like the only way to win the war on terror. Books not bombs people.


I really recommend the book and beg the critics and naysayers to judge the content, not the style. And then go give Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute all of your moneys.

Just After Sunset: The Gingerbread Girl and Harvey's Dream

While Willa was a disappointment, The Gingerbread Girl and Harvey's Dream are much much better.

The Gingerbread Girl is much longer than Willa was, almost twice the length, and it takes much more care in describing the characters and the situations. The Gingerbread Girl is more what I would consider to be classic Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing supernatural in this story. The only monster is human. It tells the story of Emily, who takes up running to cope with the death of her infant daughter, Amy. She runs runs runs, as fast as she can to get away from the emotionally painful past, and ends up running right into the clutches of a mad man. This was one of those incredibly suspenseful stories where you start skimming paragraphs instead of reading because you just want to find out what happens already!

Harvey's Dream is a very simple story about a husband explaining his dream to his wife. King works his magic in making even this simple, rather mundane task suspenseful. I didn't like it nearly as much as I liked The Gingerbread Girl, but I didn't predict the end halfway through, so it's already way better than Willa.

I'm a few pages in to the next story Rest Stop, and I will have a lot to say about that story when I finish it. I also just finished reading Noises Off, but we'll wait to see if I'm cast in the play before I review it here.

Fun Home - Review II

Miranda already reviewed Fun Home.

I loved this book. I've not been a graphic novel (or comics) reader, aside from the odd Doonesbury, but this was so accessible. The drawings add so much nuance to an emotionally heavy story.

Fun Home feels like a cathartic exercise Bechdel went through in order to reconcile her complicated relationship with her father. Alison Bechdel is the renowned author of the comic (and website) "Dykes to Watch Out For". The story paints the disconnect between Bechdel's 70's/80's awareness and openness about her sexuality against her father's lifelong secrecy surrounding his own homosexuality.

You feel for Bechdel, she's so obviously torn between this "otherness" she and her father share, this common experience and shared heritage and the cold reality that her father was a philandering husband and a distant parent. She wants to connect with her father, and does in some ways, but she cannot escape the heartbreak, the lifetime of disappointment he put her mother through.

And then he dies. Bechdel never resolves these feelings about her father. He's gone, and she's young, though she seems older than her years in the context of the story.

As for the medium, I found one aspect particularly effective. In various chapters, Bechdel revisits some of the same scenes and events. In some cases we're shown the same scene, or room or character from a different angle, we get a more complete visual. In others Bechdel uses the same frame, the same graphic and caption, but the context gives us deeper insight. In both cases we are given a second chance to experience the event and it gives these episodes from Bechdel's life so much weight. You feel all the conflicting emotions, the history that makes a moment personal. It's fantastic.

This is a powerful story, certainly worth reading and revisiting.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King: Willa

I picked up this collection of Stephen King short stories at a garage sale this morning, and I just finished the first story, Willa. I'm a King fan, and I don't think I've written about him here before. I have several of his books on my "To Read" shelves, including Under the Dome, which I've already read about 200 pages of, but since that's still only about 15% of the book, it may be some time before I've worked up the energy to tackle that again. A collection of short stories seems to be the perfect option for me right now, since I seem to have trouble finishing books that I start. I like to blame the fact that I work with books all day, five days a week (I'm a cataloger at a library), so when I get home I usually don't want to curl up with another book. I'd like to blame my job, but it's probably the fact that I'm lazy and have a short attention span. So it's nice to have some bite-size fiction to get me back into the swing of being a Reader again.

That being said, I was decidedly underwhelmed by Willa. It's not that it's badly written, it's just kind of obvious. (Spoilers) It's a story about a group of ghosts who don't know they're ghosts, and how two of them figure it out and try to convince the others. But, in the beginning, we're not supposed to know they're ghosts either. The thing is, if you've ever read King before, or really any type of supernatural/horror fiction... you know what's going on from page one. There's minimal conflict, and not really much going on. I just read a review though that says that Willa is the worst story of the bunch, and King himself admits as much. Hopefully the next story will live up to what I expect from Stephen King.

Reviews forthcoming: Going in Circles by Pamela Ribon, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and Noises Off by Michael Frayn.

Why Girls are Weird by Pamela Ribon

My first version of this entry didn't have any sort of description of the plot of the book, it just started straight out with what is now the 2nd paragraph. But since I realize it's dumb to assume that the 7 followers who aren't Abby already know the plot, here's the summary from Amazon: "When Anna Koval decides to creatively kill time at her library job in Austin by teaching herself HTML and posting partially fabricated stories about her life on the Internet, she hardly imagines anyone besides her friend Dale is going to read them. He's been bugging her to start writing again since her breakup with Ian over a year ago. And so what if the "Anna K" persona in Anna's online journal has a fabulous boyfriend named Ian? It's not like the real Ian will ever find out about it. Almost instantly Anna K starts getting e-mail from adoring fans that read her daily postings religiously. One devotee, Tess, seems intent on becoming Anna K's real-life best friend and another, a male admirer who goes by the name of "Ldobler," sounds like he'd want to date Anna K if she didn't already have a boyfriend. Meanwhile, the real Anna can't help but wonder if her newfound fans like her or the alter ego she's created. It's only a matter of time before fact and fiction collide and force Anna to decide not only who she wants to be with, but who she wants to be."

I first read Why Girls are Weird when I was 19. Nineteen is a weird age. You're out of high school, so you feel like you should be all grown up. You think of yourself that way. But really, you're still a teenager. Judging by the passages I had underlined my first time reading it, I was most definitely a teenager, in every sense of the word. I'm pretty sure this is not the first time I've reread Girls, because I remembered some of the passages too clearly for this to be only the second time I've read it. But for the intents and purposes of this review, we're going to go ahead and pretend that I'm rereading it for the first time in 6 years. It feels that way, at least.

I bought this book the first summer I worked at my favorite summer camp. Something you must understand about camps is that they are almost entirely staffed by young people, late teens to mid-twenties. Hormones, sunshine, close quarters... you see where I'm going with this. I had my fair share of unrequited crushes, which really colored my first reading of this book, and when looking at the passages I underlined, it shows. Ribon wrote that Anna K was feeling left out of love while all her friends are getting married, and I underlined it. I laughed at myself when I saw that underline this time through because I'm pretty sure I only had one friend who got married by the time we were nineteen, so it's not like I was being left behind in anything. I was just being dramatic. And immediately after laughing at 19 year old me, I was overcome with mortification. Not only had I underlined passages that don't actually pertain to my life in any way, but I underlined them IN PEN, and I have LOANED THIS BOOK OUT. I'm... I'm so embarrassed. But to those of you who read this book and saw my underlines and wondered what the hell I was on about: I was nineteen, and being a teenager is weird.

So how did I react to the book now, now that I'm really a grown up (mostly), in a healthy romantic relationship? I wasn't as affected by the romance plotline. It was still interesting as it ever was, and I had actually forgotten a lot of the details of Anna and Ian's relationship. And I think with the added perspective of actually having been in real relationships, the actions of the characters make much more sense. But the biggest difference of all: This time, I was much, much more affected by the stories of Anna and her dying father. Three months ago I lost my beloved grandfather, and I would come across parts in the book that would make me want to shout to those around me "This! This is how I feel!" There is a part not too long after she finds out her dad is really dying where she says she wishes she could go back to when "things were simpler, [...] when being a daughter had nothing to do with watching someone slip silently away. I wanted to go back to when a father was someone big and strong, an invincible man who never let anything get in his way." Yeah, I know how that feels. I loved the part where she wishes she could wear a sign that says "I'M IN MOURNING" so people don't give her strange looks when she's crying in front of frozen foods. Maybe I should make a sign like that, because I'm going to have to brave the Fathers Day section at Target next week to buy my dad a card. All those cards for Grandpas...

Mourning is weird. Even though it was sad, reading about Anna's mourning was cathartic. I don't remember crying during the gynecologist scene the first time I read this book, but this time I was sobbing. Anna has to go to a new doctor for the first time, and the doctor has to take a medical history. For the first time she has to say, out loud "My father died of heart disease," and she breaks down. I haven't had to say it yet, but eventually I will have to do some sort of medical history or something, and I will have to say it. Out loud. "My grandpa died of lung cancer." It's weird just to type it.

I don't know what my favorite single line was the first time I read Why Girls are Weird, but I know now. When Dr. Sanji tells her: "It's sad when our daddies die. Makes us one less person inside." :'(

And I have to say, Tiny Wooden Hand is still freaking hilarious. Also, if you want to turn this post into a drinking game (and really, why wouldn't you?), drink every time you read the word "weird."

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

Bonk is our second Roach book. It does not disappoint. Excessively foot-noted with tidbits like "nasal congestion is actually an erection in your nose", Bonk is hilarious and educational. As it turns out, after centuries of scientific study, we don't know that much about something totally fundamental to the future of our species.

The researchers Roach encounters (and whose experiments she and her husband participate in) are kind of a strange lot. But you have to value the work they do. I'm glad someone is out there studying how to have better sex.

Roach reviews the research done into human (and often animal) sexuality as far back as records are kept. Some of her juicier finds are at the U.S. Patent office, and others are in the strange opinions of Victorians, Catholic dogma, urologists' offices, and doodles in Leonardo DaVinci's engineering drawings.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys science, history or (God forbid) sex. Mary Roach is a great author who makes sense of scientific jargon and puts herself into all kinds of strange, potentially humiliating situations for her reader's benefit.