Auntie Steph's Cold-Killing Hot & Sour Soup

My cousin and his wife recommended a shiitake hot-and-sour soup recipe that sounded so delicious I immediately went out, bought the ingredients, and made it. It was just as lovely as I hoped, and I've made it a few more times since. As good as it was, I believe I've come up with an even better version. 

Just be warned: this is a serious sinus-cleanser. Much better than Sudafed (and definitely yummier). Little kids might prefer the jalapeño be scaled back, but my teens scarfed it up with extra zip. Have a box of tissues on hand.

Ingredients
1 tbsp avocado or coconut oil (or any neutral oil)
1 jalapeño, seeded and finely diced
2 tbsp grated ginger (I use jarred)
1 tbsp minced garlic
4 scallions, sliced
2 c. shredded carrots
1 lb shiitake mushrooms, sliced
2 oz. dried shiitakes, reconstituted in 3/4 c. boiling water
2 1/2 quarts chicken or veg stock
2 tbsp tamari or soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon (or more, to taste)
1 block firm tofu, cubed
8 oz. shirataki noodles, rinsed well*

In a Dutch oven over medium-high heat, add oil and swirl to coat the bottom. Add jalapeño, ginger, garlic, and scallions. Sauté briefly, until aromatic. Add the carrots and shiitakes (with mushroom water from the soaking) and sauté a few more minutes, till they are soft. Add stock and tamari sauce, bring to a simmer and cook uncovered until about 20% of the liquid evaporates. Add lemon juice, tofu, and noodles and cook until heated through. Taste and add more lemon juice, tamari, and jalapeño as needed. Serve with extra scallions as garnish.

*Shirataki noodles are a traditional Japanese noodle that happens to be low-carb. They have an odd smell when you open the package, but it rinses off. I find people like them fine in Asian cooking, but not so much in Italian, so pair them with their native cuisine. I've been able to find them at almost all our local grocery stores, and have seen them at Safeways in other states. You can also order them from Amazon and other online vendors. They're usually in a refrigerated section of the grocery store, often with the tofu and tempeh, but they withstand shipping just fine. (I ordered a big shipment of them on Groupon recently, and used the angel-hair variety in today's soup.) To make them easier to serve and eat, I break them up: I just take a pair of scissors and snip the knot of rinsed noodles a few times. Obviously, ramen or soba noodles would also work here.

If you really dislike tofu you can substitute chicken, but I'd encourage people to give the original recipe a try first. The shiitakes have a lovely, velvety texture that's really complimented by the tofu. Which isn't to say you shouldn't fiddle with later batches: I added bok choy to one batch of soup, and that worked out nicely. I added snow peas to another batch, and I didn't like that so much. I used only fresh shiitake mushrooms at first but added dried because they have a stronger umami flavor. If you're a miso fan, add a dallop of that to the soup, too.

The brand I find at most supermarkets

The ginger brand I use. I get it at Whole Foods.

The tamari brand I like.

My favorite tofu

What's Making Me Happy: December 5

We had such a nice Thanksgiving, with two of my cousins and their spouses joining my parents and in-laws, my brother and his family, and my own four-family. My cousin and his wife announced they will be adding to the family ("We're hoping it's a pony," said my cousin-in-law, patting her round tummy), which was excellent and welcome news. We all caught up, chilled out, ate dinosaur—aka "turkey"—and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Yes: living where we do, "enjoying ourselves" involves hiking as much or more than football, but lookie! So pretty. It's worth it.

As for the recommendation part of WMMH, I have a few things. If you have not already discovered the Serial podcast, that's my first pushy thing. You gotta. It's so good. A spinoff of the beloved This American Life podcast, Serial follows (so far) the story of Adnan Syed, imprisoned in 2000 for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend. Lee and Syed were both in high school when the murder occurred. It's a true story, a fascinating look under the rug of the American legal system, and a gripping whodunit. Following that hyperlink should get you started, but if you have iTunes you can also find it there. I also recommend the Beyond Pod podcast player for those with smartphones.

Once you are thoroughly hooked by Serial, you can go meta and find the podcasts-about-the-podcast. Our favorite so far is Slate's Spoiler Special. Slate does "spoiler specials" on all sorts of things, mostly movies, but since Serial has gone viral they've dedicated a specific discussion to each Serial episode. They analyze and gripe and speculate and basically stand in for you and all your besties having an awesome chat-debate over coffee or wine.

We have also fallen in love with Transparent, a fantastic show on Amazon Prime about a 70-year-old parent who has come out as transgender. Jeffrey Tambor plays Maura, who was assigned a male gender at birth and has just gathered up the courage to embody her female identity at this late stage in life. Her three adult children react variably to her announcement, and season one (the only season so far) deals primarily with this first stage: come out, cope as best you can with repercussions. It's done with utter compassion. It's funny but Maura is never the object of a joke. It's too explicit to watch with young kids, but if you can stand the awkwardness of watching sex scenes with your family, I highly recommend watching it with your teenagers (or, suggest they watch it on their own and discuss it with you later). It's brought up loads of great discussions in our family.

"...my whole life, I've been dressing up like a man.... This is me."

We're also entranced with Black Mirror, a British sci-fi show which just became available on Netflix. It's like the Twilight Zone, in that each episode is a self-contained story; there is no through-line. The continuity comes from theme, which might best be described as "techno-angst." This show is also not for the faint of heart or for the li'l kiddies. If you want something for the whole fam to watch comfortably, we adore Brooklyn 99. It's a very funny, very nice cop comedy.

Bookwise, I am so excited that Best of 2014 lists are coming out now. I love "best of" lists; it's so wonderful to browse through total excellence and pick the most excellent of all lovely things. I feel fairly certain that for 2014 novels, The Bone Clocks and The Paying Guests will make my own best-of list, and both books are on many, many other lists as well. They are both British, and both incredibly-written literary page-turners, but that's about all they have in common.

Whew! That's a lot of recommendations. I haven't even got to my best-of-music list yet ... I'll save that for next week. In the meantime—happy weekend, everyone!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: Black Swan Green

I read one great book this month so far. I've also struggled with a few problematic books, which I will discuss after my thumbs-up review. Possibly the lesson I'm learning here is "only read David Mitchell novels," as I just love his stuff and nothing else lately seems to be measuring up.

My latest Mitchell is Black Swan Green. Readers who are only familiar with Mitchell through his breakout novel Cloud Atlas may be surprised by this intimate, straightforward little novel. Where Cloud Atlas (and the subsequent The Bone Clocks) is an ambitious, sprawling book with loads of different themes, voices, and plot lines, Black Swan Green is tightly contained and almost parochial. It reminded me of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, both of which are also heavily autobiographical coming-of-age novels with layers of magic and mystery added. Mitchell freely employs and enjoys the supernatural in his most recent novels, but here we only have hints of it ... strange and spooky things seem to happen, but we stay grounded in reality.

Black Swan Green's structure is simple: it's a year in the life of a fairly ordinary 13-year-old English boy. But incidental things made it more interesting to me: I have a son the same age as Jason Taylor, and I felt like Mitchell captured the spirit of that age. Also, Jason Taylor would have been born roughly when I was (early 1970s), so the pop-culture references are all from my adolescence. And there are so many! I grew up in the US, not England, but 80s pop culture was similar all over the English-speaking world. If you were around in the 80s, you will probably enjoy the frequent and occasionally obscure references, too. (Anyone else remember Jean Michel Jarré?)

Other elements of the story seemed more rote to me, but might have broader appeal: Taylor has a severe speech impediment that leads to his being bullied. He's also got parents whose marriage is failing spectacularly. His sister, who initially seems like a bit of a bully herself, is soon shown to be keenly perceptive and a potential ally ... but she's going off to college, leaving him more isolated than ever. Those little domestic dramas, of course, feel absolutely huge when you're 13 and in the middle of them, and Mitchell develops these painful experiences brilliantly.

As with all coming-of-age novels, BSG is mostly about the moral development of an adolescent. In this case, "moral development" is the heart of the story, not incidental to it. Taylor has lots of chances to end up like his pathetic father, but he is forged by events into a true man. By the end, he is only a year older than when we started, but he's a mensch. That is exactly how you want these stories to end. Very satisfying read.

I tried to read, but eventually abandoned, the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I kept hearing Aubyn lionized by virtually every literary reviewer I came across—no matter what book they were actually reviewing, they found a way to drop St. Aubyn's name into the review, and it was always attached to gushing praise. St. Aubyn's main claim-to-fame is his collection of novellas (forming one big novel, usually sold as a unit) that follow a character named Patrick Melrose. As with Mitchell's protagonist Jason Taylor, Patrick Melrose is a stand-in for the author himself. Edward St. Aubyn grew up in an aristocratic, highly-dysfunctional English household in the 60s and 70s, and this collection tells you all about the misery that was his youth and early life. However, I could only finish the first novella, somewhat appropriately titled "Never Mind." Unlike Mitchell, St. Aubyn seems to have no compassion for his young doppelganger. He describes Melrose's early childhood, which is truly horrific, as if he doesn't really care about it. As if it's perhaps even slightly amusing. I get the whole "stiff upper lip" thing but I don't want to spend time with it. I'm also flummoxed by the crazed praise for St. Aubyn's prose: I couldn't see anything special about it. It's not bad, but it's also not remarkable.

Currently I'm in the middle of two novels, which I expect I will finish in the next few days. (But not in time for this review.) One is The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, which follows the life of an Australian POW who was in a Japanese labor camp in World War II. It is an absolutely brutal read, but I can also understand why it won the Man Booker prize for 2014. I imagine dudes, especially those who primarily read military history—and that is my husband, dad, brother, and virtually every other dude I know—would like this novel, even if they don't normally read fiction. I think it does well in exploring the causes and costs of war. It's also a very masculine novel: Flanagan seems interested in what it means to be a man, to be brothers-in-arms, to be a (male) leader, to be a (male) prisoner degraded by other men; and conversely, what it is to be free again. How do you return to manhood after that? Women may not be so enthralled: I particularly find myself struggling with Flanagan's portrayal of women. So far, they are either absent or serving as plot furniture. The other book I'm reading is The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, described aptly as "Harry Potter set in a college in Brooklyn." It's definitely not for the little kids, though older teens would enjoy it. I'm more than halfway through and there really isn't a plot yet, which has me a bit worried, but I'm interested enough to keep pushing through.

And that's been my November reading thus far. I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving, and I'm looking forward to our December reviews!

What's Making Me Happy: November 7

I had surgery last week, a pretty minor outpatient procedure to remove a bunch of varicose veins from my left leg. My surgeon said he could date them precisely to my last pregnancy: thanks, son! Surgery doesn't make people happy very often, but this surgery went smoothly, was relatively painless, and has had a remarkably quick recovery. Best of all, it's only 10 days later and I can already see (in spite of major bruising) that the veins are gone. The surface of my skin is smooth. The achiness aspect is not gone yet, because my leg still hurts a bit from the surgery itself. In another week or two, I assume the pain will be gone. Yay! I only wish I had done this long ago.

That's the private sphere WMMH. From the public sphere, I've another silver-lining thing; a story that doesn't sound good initially, but from which I squeezed a drop of optimism.

By now you all have probably seen the Hollaback video documenting one woman's experience with catcalling in New York City. It went viral, with many many women attesting to how common her experience was. Some men jumped in to express shock and dismay at the constant and scary nature of the harassment, and other men patiently explained to the clueless why it's a problem. But upsettingly, even more men were invested in downplaying or even defending the harassment. With the defensiveness came anger: within moments of joining different conversations on friends' walls, I was called nasty names by creepy guys. Not Strangers On The Internet (we know how they are), but friends of friends.

At some point, assuming I can find the energy, I plan to write a longer piece on my own history with street harassment and assault, and my evolving attitude toward "harmless" catcalling. For now, though, because this is a WMMH, I'm bringing the good news. Which is this: harassment of women is becoming increasingly unacceptable. Defending the behavior also looks pathetic and out of touch, and clever people are pushing back in creative ways. This guy found a way to instantly show all defensive dudes why catcalling is not about a person being friendly to another person. The message is important (and dead funny) but the messenger is also important: He will be taken seriously in a way other messengers may not. If you have a Twitter account, I'd recommend following him and his #dudesgreetingdudes hashtag.

In a related story, read about this movement among young men to end sexual assault, and this story about a community who stood up and said a loud "no" to a man who preaches to other men that the way to pick up women is to abuse and assault them.

People are standing up. Women are increasingly rejecting the status quo, and critically, more men are standing beside them as allies. This makes me happy.

Happy weekend everyone! May you walk down every street in peace.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Bone Clocks

It's the end of the month, and time for our roundup of the best books of the past few weeks. To see the other Cephalopod reviews, click here.

I read two really excellent books this month, both of which I gave five stars to on Goodreads: David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, and Laline Paul's The Bees. Readers may know Mitchell from Cloud Atlas, another great book which has been turned into an apparently terrible movie. (I haven't seen it.) Mitchell is hard to categorize. His writing is literary and often solidly realistic, but he always seems to wander off into the strange and speculative. In his writing I see shades of Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. But those just give you hints: he has his own totally unique style. He must be synesthetic because his metaphors and verbs sparkle with a mixture of senses that are rarely or never combined. You can practically chew on his language: "icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls" is a not-untypical example. (From The Bone Clocks.) But if that sounds distractingly ornate, don't worry: he is a nimble stylist and enjoys playing with every kind of mood and form. He's funny, he's dark, he's just-the-facts, he's show-offy, he's dry, he's wet. In Cloud Atlas he toys with channeling completely different genres in each section. In The Bone Clocks he sticks pretty much to one tone—though, echoing Cloud Atlas, he does have a number of narrators who each bring a slightly different style to the prose. I'm in love with his writing enough now that I'm simply going to commit myself to reading his entire body of work. (Not a difficult job: he only has a half-dozen novels or so.) Right now I'm reading Black Swan Green, an earlier work. It's got one narrator, a teenage boy, and is stylistically very unified. So far.

OK, OK. I hear you. "Stop whittering on about the style, woman! Tell us the plot!" Well. In The Bone Clocks there's this girl, Holly Sykes. And she's a normal English teenage girl, except she's telepathic, and some psychic vampires discover her and she gets caught up in a temporal war between good immortals and bad immortals. I feel like it's rude to say I was reminded quite a bit of the HBO show True Blood, but I was ... at least in the "battle of immortals + psychic mortal" aspect.

"I'm just a waitress!"

Hello? I lost you, didn't I? You were with me until I started talking about telepathy and immortals. Well, trust me on this: Mitchell is far more comparable to Dickens or Du Maurier than he is to Stephenie Meyer. He is a lovely, accomplished writer, and he is fully aware of the eye-rolling genre writers deal with. "A book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant!" a literary agent splutters at a character in the novel who is himself a writer of half-fantasy novels. Yeah. This is just one of the many winky metafictional twists in this novel. David Mitchell hears your scorn of fantasy, and he is not going to let you get away with it.

No judgy-judgy!

OK. Moving swiftly onward. The Bees is another experimental novel that totally hit its mark, at least for me. We follow the adventures of Flora 717, a worker-bee who is destined to help her hive weather the kind of crises that real bees are coping with: early frosts, cell-phone towers, wasps, spiders, mice, and pesticides. Flora is one of the most engaging protagonists (human or non) I've come across, and I highly recommend this unusual book. I think it's especially appropriate on a high-school reading list. I mean this in the best possible way: it's entertaining, accessible, smart, and has a not-overbearing ecological message.

Since the last Coffeehouse I have also read, for the record, Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officer's Club, a lightly fictionalized memoir of her stint as a military brat on an Air Force base in Japan; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, about a disillusioned and dissolute young journalist during the Great Depression; and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, about a pizza deliverer who quickly morphs into sword-wielding computer-hacking badass. But actually it's about viruses. But actually it's about memes and language. But actually it's about a libertarian dream-nightmare of a corporate-owned America ... oh hell, that one you just have to read for yourself to sort out. All of these were fascinating books in their own right.

Happy reading, everyone! Off to see what everyone else read/loved this past month.

What's Making Me Happy: October 17

It's mid-October already. It's been weeks since I've done a What's Making Me Happy and it's not because nothing's making me happy. Life with two teenagers means I'm always busy but I'm not in the volunteering hell I was last fall and in contrast with that, things seem pretty great.

Quite a bit of new music has come out lately, relieving me from a summer slump, music-wise. Alt-J released their second album, which instantly became my life soundtrack. The band, out of Leeds, gets pretty heavy rotation on Alt Nation (is it the name?) even though they're a little on the weird side for that fairly poppy station. If you find yourself muttering about "kids these days" or thinking music was much better when you were in high school, give them a listen. The first time you'll just tip your head on the side and go "huh?" but do it twice again and, if you're like me, something might click. (If you're Suze, don't watch the video.)

Irish troubadour Andrew Hozier-Byrne, who just goes by the name Hozier, finally released his first full-length album. His music has been coming out in dribs and drabs, though EPs and singles, but now we have the whole shebang. I was eagerly awaiting this since his song "Take Me to Church" worked its way under my skin. The verdict? It's flippin' fantastic. Not what I expected, but absolutely amazing nonetheless. If you remember the 1991 movie "The Commitments," about an Irish band, you'll recognize some of the flavor of the music in Hozier's. Does all Irish music have a Motown sound? Odd, but I'm not complaining. Click here to watch "Take Me to Church," but be warned, the video and the message of the song are much darker and more political than a casual listen indicates. It seems like a sexy little song to have in the background while you offer your loved one a nice massage. You won't want to do that after you learn why he wrote the song. (And that's also why I kinda love the guy. Nothing to do with his tousled good looks, nope, no sirree.)

Here's some genuinely sweet fare from Hozier:

And some plain ol' rock-n-roll (reminiscent of Hootie & The Blowfish). Listen for the lyrics.

A friend and I went to see Gone Girl, which was exciting simply because I almost never go see movies with girlfriends. I almost never go to the movie theater period. Look at the shiny lights! Look at the big screen! Oh brave new world, that has such people in it! Well. Gone Girl is full of characters so dark and crazy that even Prospero would probably run screeching, but I loved it. The movie, that is. The book was masterful but left me curled up whimpering on the floor of my closet (figuratively). Maybe because I already knew what was coming I was less horrified by things as they unfolded in the movie, and the acting was superb. Rosamond Pike as Amy is magnetic, you can hardly take your eyes off her. Ben Affleck's performance is easier to dismiss at first but upon reflection I appreciate how hard his role as Nick was to pull off, what a line he had to walk, and how much he had to communicate with body language and subtle facial expressions. The two "straight men," the twin sister and the lawyer, were both brilliantly performed by their respective actors and help the audience find an entry point into the Land of Crazy that is the story. Go watch it if you like Hitchcockian psychological thrillers. (And speaking of Hitchcock, keep your eyes peeled for the many homages.)

I've been listening to a ton of podcasts lately, while hiking, cleaning, and driving. (My little iPod plugs directly into my car's sound system, which is handy and safer than earbuds.) A few new discoveries have me riveted, most of them coming from Slate Magazine. The Double X podcast is a roundtable discussion among women writers for Slate and other magazines. This week's discussion was of Hanna Rosin's cover piece for The Atlantic on why teens sext. Rosin herself is there for the discussion; she was also on Fresh Air recently, talking about the same thing. I highly recommend both discussions if you have teens or pre-teens.

Slate's podcasts are more casual than NPR's, it's more like being at a really cool cocktail party with your smartest, funniest friends. I still like my NPR podcasts but Slate is offering me something a little deepier, a little riskier. The same Slate discussion with Rosin also gets into why male feminists (at least, guys who lead with "Hi, I'm a feminist") can sometimes seem a little sketchy, and why Gone Girl may or may not be anti-feminist. While the podcast definitely should appeal to women of my age/demographic, it's also something dudes may want to listen to, if they are interested in women and women's issues. Slate's Political Gabfest and Culture Gabfest are also riveting, smart, and funny discussions of the Topic of the Day, whatever it may be. Slate's Audio Book Club has long been a favorite way for me to find new books and enjoy a deeper look into novels I've already read. (They do a few nonfiction books, as well.)

Finally, I've started reading a much-anticipated book that got its hooks into me instantly: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. You may know him from Cloud Atlas, which I read and mostly loved, though a few of his experiments didn't work as well for me as others. The Bone Clocks is much easier to get into; the first two sections, at least, are told by highly engaging narrators. The plot and style feel like a mashup of Doctor Who and Neil Gaiman, which is a pretty awesome mashup. It is a very, very English book, and I wonder if it will do as well with American audiences, who might feel a little lost in the specific cultural references and lingo. I've spent enough time in the UK, and have enough British friends, that I'm gleaning more out of the story than I might have. Anyway, I can't wait to get back to it!

Happy weekend, everyone!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry

I read a good book this month! What a relief. I was beginning to suspect I'd permanently lost my ability to really enjoy novels. How horrible that would be, considering the amount of reading I do. The good book was The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a sweet little novel about a cranky bookstore owner, recently widowed, who is only in his 30s but is already a grumpy old man. He doesn't like modernity: the computers, the e-books, the humans. Then someone dumps a baby on his doorstep and thus begins the process of resurrecting his joie de vivre. (Hey, don't laugh at me: it's a phrase Fikry would use.) The storyline moves along tidily and contains some good twists, and all the plot threads are so neatly tied up in the end you could put a bow on them. The characters are quirky, three-dimensional (mostly), and believable, and the writing is solid and literary. You can tell the author is a seasoned writer, though I'd never heard of her before. The complaints I've heard about the book are a little odd: mostly that it's too good. Too tidy, too sunny, too well-crafted. Well, after the raft of crap I've been plowing through, I wasn't complaining. A pleasurable, smart story, one that leaves you smiling and satisfied, is a lovely thing.

The other books I read in September were pretty solidly in the three-star category. That third star, sitting in the middle between "it was really good" and "I hated it" should be bigger. It covers so much territory. I feel so differently about each book I mark three stars: some I admired overall but just had a few too many flaws to make it to four stars. Some were quite problematic but had some shining moments that bumped them up past two stars. I feel like a decimal system is needed just for that "meh" middle grading.

Anyway: The first was The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. I'd promised the blogosphere last month I was going to read this, and I did. I didn't love it as much as I thought, perhaps because my expectations were very high. So many people have praised this book to the sky. James McBride's mother's story is indeed remarkable, almost unbelievable—she was a Polish Jewish immigrant who was raised in the deep South by a horribly abusive father and a loving but weak, physically disabled mother. She went on to marry two black men (her first husband died of cancer) and raise a total of twelve biracial children, mostly by herself, in very rough circumstances in New York City. They never even knew she was a Jew till McBride forced the story out of her—before he was born, she converted to Christianity and founded a Baptist church with his father, her first husband. And that storytelling is great, it speaks for itself ... what bothered me was how much I felt McBride left out, probably because he was protecting her and his siblings. The book was an homage to his mother, almost a eulogy, though she was alive when he wrote it—and really, she "wrote" nearly half of it by granting him recorded interviews. But on the whole, the memoir is not very reflective, and McBride's own voice felt hidden, or flattened. I recently read his award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird, a book written in a wry, humorous, spunky voice. That voice was totally missing from this memoir, which felt more journalistic. Still an interesting read, but not quite what I expected.

Next I read The Painter, by Peter Heller. What I liked best about this novel is the setting: it's all in the Rocky Mountains, and about half of it is set in Santa Fe, a place I called home for 12 years. Heller really knows the area. He even made a reference to the "stick teepees" found in the mountains there, big structures fashioned of aspen poles; nobody seems to know who made them. The novel itself is a mashup of Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, or at least it tries to be. It's got the murder-in-the-southwest aspect of the former, and the aggressive, unapologetic masculinity of the latter. But the women of the novel are a real problem. On page 2, we get this description: “She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit.” That is just ... terrible. He compares her to poultry, and her boobs to citrus fruits. She is a tiny-but-bodacious babe throwing herself at the beardy burly protagonist who is decades her senior. Because that's likely. Gak. This sort of thing happens a lot, and every time I considered throwing the book across the room. But it was a library book, and one mustn't damage federal property, right? I could have just politely returned it unfinished but I loved Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars, very much. So I persisted till the end, and some good bits almost made up for the fruit-boobs.

Not boobs

The third book I read in September was Bark, Lorrie Moore's latest short-story collection. It's been sixteen years since her last one! Not that I'm one to talk, but Moore is kind of the opposite of prolific. What's curious about these stories is that, as many critics have noted, you kind of get the feeling they were languishing on her hard drive for, oh, about sixteen years. Perhaps she didn't like them very much but got tired of reworking them, and her editor was bugging her, so she just sent them along. (She also made sure the word "bark" was in every story. Is that clever or schticky?) A few of these stories are amazing, and I'd already read those: they appeared in The New Yorker. If you do pick up this collection (say, at the library), read Paper Losses, Referential, and Debarking. They are excellent, some of the best writing you might read all year. If you've never read Lorrie Moore, however, you should probably stick with Birds of America or Self Help. And you'd better like your humor on the mordant side!

That's my Coffeehouse Contribution for September. I look forward to hopping over to all the other reviews, links to which can be found here at our host The Armchair Squid's site.

Here's to a bookish October: may all your next reads be wonderful.