The Whitney Chronicles by Judy Baer

The Whitney Chronicles was my first experience with inspirational chicklit. To be frank, I would not have picked the book up if I had realized that it was inspirational, because I have not had good experiences with the inspirational fiction I've tried in the past. Having said that, this was a fairly good read. Whitney Blake has just turned 30, and her best friend has given her a journal. She resolves to write in it daily and to improve herself. She wants to lose a little bit of weight, she's a little frustrated at work, and she feels a sudden strong urge to be settled...with a Christian man. Baer has a very comfortable writing style and the narrative flows well. Whitney is a very likeable character: she isn't a flighty fashionista at a deadend job, being abused by her boss and engaging in a string of bad relationships. She's a professional who is good at her job. She has a good circle of friends and family who are a part of the story. In fact, her friend Kim's struggle with breast cancer and depression are a large part of the story. The two men she dates in the book are nice guys, but each has issues: one is airplane obsessed and can disappear for days, which leads her to give him the lets be friends speech; the other is work-obsessed and also is not a Christian. (Well, there's more to it than that, but to say more would be a spoiler...although I saw what was coming way, way before Whitney did.) After being frustrated by those two, Whitney decides to leave her social life in god's hands. I thought the decision to leave her social life in god's hands wasn't really consistent with how she dealt with Kim's illness. In Kim's case, her family has a history of depression and of ignoring the depression, because it only means either that you have sinned or that you haven't given yourself properly to god. Whitney's argument is that god gives you all kinds of tools to solve your problems in life, and a tool to combat depression and other illnesses is medical treatment and/or medication. If actively seeking out help is okay for illness, why isn't it okay take an active role in searching for a companion? Join a club? Post a personal ad? Try speed dating? Whitney pooh-poohs all of these ideas and is irritated by a colleague who suggests them. (If god exists, I doubt she just hands the good stuff out to people who sat around and waited to be helped; gotta make an effort. *shrugs* But what do I know? Nothing, really.) Because the story is told via Whitney's journal entries, the POV is first person. While that gives good insight to what is going on in Whitney's head, it means that our perspectives of all of the other characters are filtered through Whitney, colored by her opinions and emotions. We never know much about the hero, all of the sudden she just loves him. Yes, he's a good looking doctor and he's a Christian and he loves kids, but that's all generic. What was it about him in particular that she loved? The book is set in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But for one mention of snow, it could have been set almost anywhere: there was no sense of place. That isn't really a plus or a minus for me, because the location isn't particularly important to the plot. Since this is an inspirational novel, the religion and biblical quotes are pervasive. Whitney does a great deal of praying. At one point, she and her friend Kim pray together, and they talk about prayer a lot. (Do Christians really do that?) The religion is not preachy, in the sense of "This is the only way to live, and unbelievers will be damned to eternal hellfire." In fact, Whitney acknowledges that the church alone isn't always enough to get one through things (which is a very different message from the other inspirationals I've tried). Whitney is a little bit judgmental about people who are not Christian. While I didn't see her desire to marry a Christian any different than a Jewish woman desiring to marry a Jewish man, the subtext to Whitney's preference for Christians is not that non-Christians are wrong for her, but that they are just wrong generally. I put The Whitney Chronicles down with very mixed feelings. On one hand, Whitney is very likeable and the story flowed well. On the other hand, some of the major points really bothered me. On another hand (three? am I an alien? Kali-like?), I am religion-intolerant in my fiction, so maybe I'm being a little hard on the book. My grade: C+.

Wrong headline for WV mine cave in

Did anyone else see that the print version of USA Today (early version, I assume) led with the banner headline that 12 miners survived the cave in, only one miner died? I noticed the paper at the news stand in Union Station yesterday evening as I left the office. Ouch. When I got up at 5am, they already knew that the numbers had been reversed in initial reports. I'm guessing that USA Today's website included the proper information, but it kinda surprised me to see the wrong headline still hanging around in print at 7pm. I wonder what the timeline was for the correct information, as compared to the paper's printing schedule.

Lipton Green Tea

I drank gallons of Lipton's Green Tea with Citrus when I was on vacation in Hawai'i. I'm addicted. It has supplanted Diet Coke as my soft drink of choice. I've checked vending machines, Target, the softdrink aisle at the grocery store, but I couldn't find it anywhere here on the east coast. Last week, when checking out the sale shelf at the grocery store (at the back, near the entrance to the meat room and the staff only area), I noticed a stack of cases of bottles of Green Tea sort of hidden by the stack of fake firelogs. Yay! Happy dance right there is the store. I've sucked down 202.8 ounces of the stuff (12 16.9 oz bottles) in the past week, and it's time to go get more. Now if only a few bottles of that Txakolina wine I liked could be found in the same manner...

First DNF for the year

It's early, but I've encountered my first unfinishable book of the year: Wolf Tales by Kate Douglas. It is a heinous waste of paper and ink. I picked it up at the train station bookstore, because I was out of reading material and the author's name seemed vaguely familiar. I really wish I had seen Keishon's review before I bought it. The blurb on the back read like a hot paranormal book about werewolves. I made it through the first couple of chapters before discarding WT in disgust. The sex crossed the line from hot into skanky fairly early, there was no plot, no characterization, no point other than moving from skanky sex scene to skanky sex scene. I want my money back. Now, just because I didn't care for this book, doesn't mean someone else won't love it, different strokes and all that. If anyone checking out this entry wants this book, please let me know and I'll be happy to mail it just to get it out of my sight. Post a comment to this entry and I'll email you offline for shipping information.

Serenity

Anyone who reads this journal will probably think that I'm a total Joss Whedon fan, because I've been so obsessed with Serenity in the past few weeks. But I'm really not. Firefly was my first happy encounter with Whedon's imagination; I didn't watch Buffy or Angel, and I have no plans to start. But I really enjoyed Serenity, enough that I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with Wonder Woman. Anyway, my last Serenity-related post: although the captain, Mal, was the hero, Jayne the screw-up had the best lines. My favorite: "Shiny. Let's be bad guys." And his manifesto about killing cracked me up: "How does a man get so wrong? Cutting on himself, raping, murdering. I'll kill a man in a fair fight...or if I think he's gonna start a fair fight...or if bothers me, or if there's a woman, or if I'm getting paid. Mostly only when I'm getting paid."

Death and the Sun

I fell in love with Spain on a high school trip and have never fallen out of love. To assuage my longing for Spain between trips, I drink rioja and albariño, and I eat chorizo, manchego cheese, tortilla española and paella. After my last trip, during which I took a tour of the bullring in Sevilla, my mother asked if I would want to see a bullfight. When I said yes, she asked why I would be interested in seeing a bloodsport that was unsporting and gruesome. [This from a woman who doesn't have a problem with modern American hunting, with all of its tools for tracking and killing for a pair of antlers or a hide.] My answer was that it is something that is quintessentially Spanish. I still believe so, although I haven't been yet. Someday though, I will visit Spain during the feria season and see a running of the bulls. My first new book for 2006 was Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain by Edward Lewine. Lewine accompanied Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, a famous torero during the bullfighting season of 2002, and chronicled it. He also attempted to explain what bullfighting is to outsiders, touching on the history, the social context and the reality of the corridas (frequent injury, relatively few truly successful matadors, being almost constantly on the road for 8 months of the year). I didn't particularly care for Lewine's writing style, which was fairly choppy in places, but I do think he did a good job describing Fran's season, and the forces that push and pull at the toreros and the bullfighting world. The narrative itself flowed well, even when Lewine interrupted the journaling of the season to write about the historical development of modern bullfighting, or the medical reasons for the death of Fran's father, the bullfighter Paquirri, after being gored by a bull named Avispado in Pozoblanco in 1984. In generally, Lewine's non-fiction account pleased me much more than anything Hemingway ever wrote. [I think Hemingway latched on to the corrida in a desperate attempt to be macho, and his writing is overrated.] Grade: B.