Ooh la la

One nice thing about reading Julie & Julia out loud to James is that there are a fair number of French words in the book, and that means I get to show off my superior French accent (superior to James', that is). Any bit of French makes us a nostalgic because James and I met in French class back in 1983 at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I don't actually remember meeting him, he was just someone I knew from French class, who, alors, already had une petite amie. Zut! Here we are 26 years later though, and tres amoreuses. I ended up taking French through some advanced level courses, but I think James stopped at the 101 class in which we met. Although we speak Spanish and Portuguese with some frequency now, we almost never use our French. I think the last time we really had to give it a work out was in 2001 when we needed to ask for a camping spot while we were in Montreal, Canada. With the help of the pretty-good English of one of the park employees, we managed.

The Belt of Fat Theory

Why is it that a person who weighs less than 150 pounds can handily beat a 400 pound bruiser in competetive eating? One theory is the "belt of fat". The skinny challenger does not have any fat pressing up against his stomach and therefore has more room. Popular Science had this to say about it. Hey, it's just a theory.

Two down

In my post of November 2 I related that I had quite a few books come to me at the same time. I have read and reviewed Watercooler (watch for it in the upcoming issue of the Internet Review of Books) and finished and blogged about Life's That Way. Additionally, James and I are several chapters into Julie & Julia (posts soon to follow). So, my next solo book is Ryan Nerz's Eat This Book. I've read 25 pages so far, and already I want to vomit. No so much from the nasty descriptions of people making gluttonous spectacles of themselves, but rather from discovering that competitive eating as a spectator sport even exists in a world where so many are starving.

Wrapping up "Life's THAT Way"

So, it turns out that I was reading the title of this one wrong. I assumed it was a phrase to be said with a shoulder shrug - kind of a fatalistic view of things (that's the way things are; you can't change them). But in fact, the title should be said with the stress on the word "that". It is actually a direction, a command to move ahead.

Cynic that I am, I think I only used about dozen kleenex reading this book. Others will need many more. Jim Beaver is alternately serious, funny and emotional in this one-year journey which chronicles his wife's cancer diagnosis and death, and his personal grieving as he realizes he will be raising his very young daughter alone, and the bittersweet feelings he has of seeing her reach new milestones knowing that Cecily would have thrilled to share them.

The book is a series of e-mails Beaver started sending out to friends when Cecily was first diagnosed to let them know what was happening to her health, and how her treatments were going. The messages progress into reflections on life, death, love, and grieving and although he claims to hold back on some of his emotions and honest feelings, it certainly does not seem so to the reader.

When I embarked on this "year of" project I expected all the books I chose would be of the "shtick lit" genre - a term I just learned from Library Journal meaning "a stuntlike project undertaken for the purpose of writing about it" (see the review for Memoir: A History in the link above). A.J. Jacobs comes immediately to mind. It is also essentially what this blog is. But I discovered that some of the books recounted "accidental" years. There wasn't a plan, writing was done in hindsight. Joan Didion and Jon Katz are two that I think of here. In Beaver's case, there was no plan to send messages to friends for a year, but he stopped at the year anniversary - about 8 months after Cecily's death. The writing took place in "real time", as a "year of" project would, but the intention was not the same. He was reporting to friends and acquaintances, not writing a book. He points out in his last entry he is moving on "...from the procedure begun unwittingly (emphasis mine) a year ago...". So neither a project book, nor a hindsight book, a new sub-genre all together.

There is always a way to make a library connection

I do not recall reading anything about libraries in this work. I try to mark any page on which I find a reference to libraries, or librarians, so I can create an separate post about it. I have no such markers for this book. Not to worry. I made a connection anyway, weak though it is:

Jim Beaver was married to Cecily Adams, daughter of the actor Don Adams, known best to me as Maxwell Smart, Secret agent 86 from the TV series Get Smart. The library I work in is the Clement C. Maxwell Library. A few years ago the marketing students on campus came up with a marketing slogan for us: "Get Smart - at the Max" (groans all around).

I actually wrote a draft of this post when I was only partially through through the book, I didn't publish it at the time because I thought it was still possible that a library mention would show up by the end, but also because I wasn't sure if it seemed a bit disrespectful. I decided it was okay when I read a passage about Beaver's young daughter Maddie making a play on the words taxes and Texas. He begins to wonder if "bad puns are genetic", and if so "[h]e know[s] his papa is smiling proudly, for there were few things he loved more than a bad pun."

Families

In addition to his wife's (actress Cicely Adams) cancer, Jim Beaver writes about his own father's failing health; his father-in-law (actor Don Adams') poor health; a health crisis for his brother-in-law; and his mother-in-law's fall which results in a broken arm. All of this in the first four chapters.

I nodded to myself as Beaver described his own family's manner of communicating health concerns "Numerous times in recent years I've found out that somebody fell off the house or had somehting amputated or was diagnosed with Glaubner's disease not when it happened, but days, weeks, even months later."

It is also the way of my people to assume that someone else will tell me, the one who does not live in Maryland, what is going on in our family. As if to prove the point, shortly after reading this passage I received an e-mail from my husband, who had forgotten to give me the message he received from my sister (his BFF on Facebook) the night before that my mother was having surgery that day "you knew about this, right"? was the tagline of my sister's original message. Of course we didn't know. Who would have told us? I laughed with my sister about the "Hayes way" when I called her last night.

Libraries Cure Ignorance

Earlier this week author Tracy Kidder visited the Cohasset, Massachusetts High School and had this to say.