What if you were suddenly and unexpectedly transported back in time to 1819? In Maryland? And you're a woman. A black woman.

That's the premise of Octavia E. Butler's book Kindred, which I have seen many, many times, but never picked up until I found it on clearance at Half-Price (I love that store). When I worked at Barnes & Noble, it was shelved in science-fiction. It has a picture of a black woman in a shift-type dress on the cover, and with the title and the photographic style of the cover, I was just never intrigued. But the copy I saw this week was a 25th anniversary edition, and they don't put out anniversary editions of crappy books, so I flipped through it. Lo and behold, a time-travel story. You can't keep me away from those!

Though it does deal with time travel, the method is never explained, so in a sense, it's not really science-fiction, more speculative fiction, but that's beside the point. Our narrator, Dana, lives in Los Angeles in 1976 and is suddenly transported back in time for a few minutes. She's transported back to her own time shortly, and only a few seconds have passed. Then it happens again, and she begins to see a connection; she's repeatedly drawn to a boy named Rufus who figures in her family genealogy.

There is a great deal of tension in the story, of all kinds, which made it seem much longer than the 245 pages it is. I started reading it in the car on the way to family's house for Thanksgiving dinner and finished it before I went to bed. I've never read any science-fiction with a black woman as a protagonist. Kindred has a science-fiction-esque framework but it's really a fictional slave narrative, according to the essay in the back by Robert Crossley. I think it goes farther than that, though. Slave narratives show us what that life was like from the perspective of people who lived in that time; we are not given guidance on contrasting that time with our own. With this premise, Butler gives us a narrator who not only has to think critically about differences in the life of a modern black woman and the life of a black slave woman in the early nineteenth century -- she has to live in that time, step into that life and all of the danger in it. And it's terrifying.

This is a great book that really makes you think about a lot of things, especially as a woman. The perspective of a white man just would not be the same. What if I were born in that time? That is horrible enough; no rights on my own, but only as defined by my husband, no identity of my own, practically. No birth control. No freedom of movement. (no Internet!) But what if I were born a black woman in that time? *shudder*

So many questions are explored here. How could anyone enslave another human being? How could anyone allow enslavement? Was it all they knew? What did it mean to aspire to be free? How could anyone live like that? How could one person make a difference? We know they did, though; Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Denmark Vesey. If just one person's life is different because of an action taken by one person, that action is worthwhile. Anyway, the situation itself -- the antebellum South -- produces all those questions, and Kindred can only address a few, but the answers presented are thought-provoking. I can't think of anyone I know that wouldn't be interested in this book.

We went out tonight to Pearl at Commerce to listen to the regular Tuesday night gig -- the Rebel Alliance Jazz Ensemble. The husband has been going there to see them for weeks. I can't believe I never knew the name of the band. Great name. They were pretty decent tonight, I thought, but the husband said they were "flat". It was a little devoid of energy, but I don't know how you get eight people to play to the crowd anyway. We were going to head over to another pub for a bite, but it was packed so we went home. This is how exciting it is to be us. Well, we were home in time to watch the Lakers game, so that's something. :)

We put in new kitchen flooring this weekend, finally. We've been talking about it for years. The old floor was vinyl, whitish with a subtle pattern of colored flecks in blue, gray and pink, but it was so old that any sort of stain resistance it might once have had was totally gone. It was a pain to keep clean, and it had this ugly seam right down the middle, which was yellowing for about four inches on either side of the seam. We wanted laminate, like we have in the living room and dining room, because it's cheaper than ceramic tile, doesn't break if you drop something on it, and doesn't develop scratches from long dog toenails the way a wood floor might. Plus, we could install it ourselves. We have a wood-grain pattern in the rest of the house, but for the kitchen we put in some IKEA flooring that's black with big white flecks. It looks great! So, now that I've put in two laminate floors, here are Andrea's tips for installing them with a spouse:

1) Don't buy the spacers/shims that you're supposed to put between the floor edge and the wall. They just fall down and you'll end up throwing them away. Don't bother using them, even if they come with your flooring. Remember, it's also called a "floating floor" and you can reposition it slightly when you need to. After a few rows, you won't need to.

2) No matter how you measure, you'll probably still end up with a little sliver of floor you'll have to cover by cutting a really skinny piece of planking. It's okay. Do the best you can and cover the gap with quarter-round in front of your baseboard.

3) Your walls are not straight. No, they're not. No, really, they're not. It's okay.

4) Have bandaids ready for the inevitable cuts you're going to make with either the saw, the razor blade you're using to cut the underlayment, or the tape measure. Yes, the tape measure -- that edge can slice you!

5) If you accidentally pound your finger, don't sweat it. You won't lose the nail unless it turns an awful purple color. Then, you'll lose it and it will be gross.

6) Use the tapping block and avoid a pull-bar as much as possible; it doesn't evenly distribute the force and can damage the edge of your plank. If it's a big floor, resign yourself to the possibility of purchasing a second tapping block.

7) Don't open all of the boxes of planking or unwrap all of the underlayment. If you over-bought, you can return unopened packages.

8) If you stop halfway through the project (maybe to sleep or something...), remember to lay the planking down on the floor. If you leave it standing on edge against the wall, it will warp overnight. Just leave it flat for a few hours and it will re-straighten.

9) Your clerk at Kroger will not bat an eye when you go to pick up 5 bottles of Gatorade and a six-pack of beer. I don't know, maybe they're trained for that. Anyway, avoid soda; too much sugar.

10) Under your fridge is really gross. No, I mean really, really gross. Don't blame yourself. You can't clean under there!

11) The people that lived in your house did stupid shit. Your "workarounds" will likely similarly amuse a future tenant.

12) The instruction sheets in each box are good for making paper templates for strangely shaped cuts around corners.

13) One of you has better spatial relations. That person should make measurements and templates for the next cut. One of you is better with power tools. That person should make the cuts. Don't try to impress each other. Treat putting in a floor as a metaphorical foundation of your marriage. Accept each other's flaws.

14) Sure, you can hire someone to do it. But when someone says, "Hey, that's a nice floor. Did you put that in yourself?" it's really great to be able to say "Yes!"

Ages ago, I wrote in my "To Read" list Gould's Book of Fish, by Robert Flanagan. It must have been sometime after I read Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, because they're both about Tasmania, or Van Dieman's Land, as it used to be called. I have been reading Flanagan's book this week and finished it last night. I really liked it, but I'm having trouble articulating just why.

It's about a convict in the Sarah Island penal colony named William Gould, who is tasked with painting fish species for scientific publication. The lead-in to the story is that Sid Hammett, who sells counterfeit antiques to American tourists, finds Gould's illustrated journal and becomes a little obsessed with it, though experts tell him it can't possibly be authentic. The rest of the book is the journal.

I think I liked it because it ended up to be about much more than the story, even though the story itself was very interesting and entertaining. Gould, the narrator, is a sympathetic character of course, and it's a little predictable in that the administrators of the penal colony are shown to be much more evil than the prisoners themselves, who have to endure terrible punishments and disgusting conditions. For me, it ended up being about love and identity, and I find myself drawn to stories about identity again and again. It's lovely prose and very literary, and won the 2002 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for best book.

I put a down payment on season tickets to next year's Rangers games. It's been a dream of mine for the past few years, and I'm so excited! You know, it's really not that expensive, especially when I considered the number of games we went to this year. Tickets, parking and service fees add up, so why not spend it all at once and then have the option to go to every single game? The cheapest deal for nosebleed seats is about a thousand, or you could spend $34,000 for home-plate seats. That will probably never happen. But there are a lot of in-between deals. I got really jazzed today talking to our sales rep when he said we could come down to the Ballpark to see our seats ... and get a tour of the dugout! I know it may seem cheesy, or geeky, or stupid, but it's totally cool to me. 

It's going to be a long winter. The husband will be watching every single Lakers game. Good thing he's not a Mavericks fan, because I don't think we could afford season tickets for both teams. I'm already wondering how it's going to work next year, with my job and yoga and family and everything else. It's only 82 games, though. They'll be at away games for week-long stretches. Most games start at 7:05, so that's plenty of time to get a full day of work in and go to the ballpark. Of course, that's going to be a lot of hot dogs unless I take advantage of the turkey-swiss croissant sandwiches. 

Now I'm rambling. I'm just so excited! 

My paternal grandmother died in January, and her death was the one I knew would hurt more than any other. She was 95, so I knew it was coming, but it was still hard. I loved her more than anyone else in the world. She was always there for me. I went to her house before and after school while I was growing up, and when I was 16, I moved in with her, and I lived there through college breaks until I got married. More than any other person, she represented stability and kindness to me. She gave her time, volunteering at the senior citizens center, and she gave her love to anyone who came through her door. When my mother was kicked out of her house at 16 (and pregnant), Gramma took her in. When my maternal grandmother moved back to town after living on the coast, she moved into Gramma's basement. That basement housed a lot of people over the years, including my sister for awhile after she got married, my Dad for awhile, after his second divorce, and my little brother, after my Dad's death. Gramma's home was open to anyone who needed it, and she was the hub of our entire family. She loved and cared about us all, and never had a favorite -- we all thought we were her favorite. 

When she died, my uncle, her surviving son, began settling her estate. This week, my sister received a check from him, with no note in the envelope, for $190. When she asked for more information, he said that was her share of the estate.  That didn't sound right. Gramma's will stipulated that half of her estate go to my uncle and the other half to my Dad's three kids. I know she had living expenses of around $5,000 a month since moving into an assisted living facility and later a nursing home, for the last 9 months of her life ($45,000). But her house was sold last year, for $134,000. Not including any other assets she had, what happened to the other $80,000, figuring in funeral and some medical costs? Apparently, it was in a savings account that was held jointly with my uncle. To pay her bills, he would transfer money from the jointly-held savings account into a checking account, which, when she died, amounted to the $1200 he split with us to provide my sister with that $190 check. My uncle said that, because it was a jointly-held account, and because he had rights of survivorship, that account is "not part of her estate." And by the way, although he could have, he did not deduct any of his expenses associated with hotels, travel, and lawyer's fees from the $1200 estate before splitting it. 

( This is a little long, so here it is under the cut )

I hope he's enjoying his nice house in Puerto Vallarta. I hope living near the beach makes up for the self-knowledge of what kind of person he is.

The husband got me Audrey Niffenegger's new book for my birthday. We both loved The Time Traveler's Wife, and have read it multiple times, something I just don't do very often. (There are so many books out there and I want to read everything, so for years I haven't read the same book twice unless I really loved it.) That book is definitely in my all-time top five. I was almost afraid to read her new one, because I didn't want to be disappointed if I didn't like it as much. Well, I'm not sure if it's quite as good, because time-travel stories are my absolute favorite -- I don't know why I'm so fascinated by that topic. 

Anyway, Her Fearful Symmetry seemed to get off to kind of a slow start, beginning with a death and a funeral, and since I started the book on a day when I was attending a funeral, that was a little strange. But the story picked up momentum like mad and last night I just wanted to read a little bit more. I picked it up at 11:30pm, and I absolutely could not put it down. I was up until 3a.m. Even then, I was so affected that I thought about just staying up, but I knew it would be at least another three hours before dawn. 

The book is set in London, and Niffenegger really has a great sense of place. The city of Chicago is almost like another character in The Time Traveler's Wife, and London is fleshed out well here. In an interview, the author said initially she was going to set this book in Chicago, too, but when she realized that she wanted most of the action in the book to be centered by a nearby cemetery, she decided she wanted to use the best cemetery she could find, and she loves London's Highgate Cemetery. There are really great characters in the book, and I've been thinking about the symmetry mentioned in the title. It's from William Blake's poem "The Tyger", of course, and I've been thinking about how and why she chose the title. Most obvious are the two sets of twins in the book -- Julia and Valentina are twins, and at the beginning of the book, their aunt, who was their mother's twin sister, dies. There is symmetry in many of the relationships between characters in the book, too. This would be a great choice for a book club. There are two characters who can't leave their apartments (for different reasons, though), and two sets of characters in which one is overwhelmingly dependent on the other, but again, for different reasons. 

There are also some great, gasp-provoking twists. One of the best parts is that Niffenegger doesn't over-explain. It's like a sucker-punch POW! and then she leaves you to think about how what you've just read means for everything you've read before. It's so much more satisfying to think about it yourself instead of having it delineated for you. 

I stayed up late one night to finish Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, which I bought on the suggestion of a friend who still works at B&N. In the beginning, it was a little depressing, because it's about Soviet Russia, which was a pretty depressing place and time to live. Really, really depressing. Leo, the protagonist, works for the secret police and he's tasked with arresting a guy who has been accused of being a spy, and in Soviet Russia, it's presumed guilty until proven innocent. There's betrayal of friendship, abuse of power, execution without trial, and then our guy's wife is accused of being a spy, so he's got that to deal with, too. Meanwhile, a child has clearly been murdered, but there is no crime in Soviet Russia (it's a perfect society, so crime is unnecessary), so Leo is instructed to get the poor kid's family to forget about investigating it. 

It took a while for the story to get going, and I put it down for awhile when it was depressing me a little too much, but eventually, the plot started to come together and it got bad enough for Leo that things couldn't get much worse. At the very beginning of the book, there's a short scene that's described as having taken place 20 years earlier, and I kept waiting to see how it was going to be tied in, and while it wasn't a shocker, it was still nicely done. If you're looking for a new author to pick up and you like Lee Child or Nelson DeMille (especially if you liked DeMille's The Charm School, one of my all-time favorites), pick up Tom Rob Smith.

 I've been reading a lot lately, but I've also been busy at work and down with a cold, so I haven't written much. A friend reminded me that next month is NaNoWriMo, and while I don't feel like I have any novels in me, I do feel like I need to take the time to write more. I've finished three books and given up on another in the past three weeks, which is a pace I haven't been on in a long time. I gave up on Simon Winchester's The Man Who Loved China because it was just boring. I like biographies in general, and I'm very interested in China and science, and when I had a World Civ course in college, I was amazed at just how many things were invented in China a long, long time before anyone in the West came up with them. Even more amazed that I'd graduated from high school without ever learning about any of it. It wouldn't be going too far to say I was outraged and felt cheated. Did you know the Chinese invented a wheelbarrow with a sail to transport loads on the desert plains? Combine that with the way more interesting philosophical questions and I had found a new area of passion.

Anyway, there was a Cambridge biochemist named Joseph Needham who traveled to China in the 1940s on a mission to foster international cooperation in the sciences. He eventually wrote a multi-volume history of science in China, and I think that's probably what I should have picked up instead of this book. I gave up a little more than 100 pages in. It's just boring! I thought there would be more in it about Needham's findings, but I learned all about his nudism, his open marriage and the travels of his mistress. Boring! Isaacson's biography of Einstein, for example, certainly described his family and upbringing, but always with an eye toward what Einstein ended up doing professionally. The science is explained to us. Same with Quammen's biography of Darwin. It was interesting to hear what his personal life was like, but Quammen never forgot the reason why we picked up the book -- because we want to hear about what he did and how he did it. And sometime before the first 150 pages, please! It's the important stuff!

So I gave up and I'm taking it back to the library. I was too impatient to start the new Jodi Picoult book I'd also checked out so I could then get to Audrey Niffenegger's new book. Plenty of fiction to go around, but now I need to look for some more nonfiction. My shelves look boring, so I suppose another trip to the library is in order.

See, I'm capable of reading the classics! Okay, so I primarily read it so I could then read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and feel confident that I was not missing anything (otherwise it's like watching Spaceballs without having seen Star Wars. Or hearing a Weird Al Yankovic song without first hearing the song he's parodying. Except "White and Nerdy". That one's great either way.) (And, yes, I will be reading me some Arthur Conan Doyle so that when Robert Downey, Jr., stars in Sherlock Holmes later this year [next year?] I won't be missing that either.).

Where was I? Anyway, I did quite like it. I loved Austen's sense of humor and viewpoint as a woman. Have you tried to read Dickens? Oh my goodness, he lived more that a generation after her but his writing seems so stilted and ... what's the word?... oh yes, that's is -- boring. Somewhere out there a lit major is wincing at my comparisons, I'm sure, but what I'm trying to say is that, though I don't usually have much patience with books written before the 20th century, I did like Austen and will probably read more of her. The husband said, "You have to understand it as satire," and I agree. Austen is poking fun at her characters and through them, her society. 

What's it about, you ask? It's about a middle-class family of daughters. Their mother is concerned foremost in getting them married off, and when a wealthy man moves in next door, it's a great chance for the Bennet girls and all the other young ladies in the area. Elizabeth Bennet is the primary character, though the focus of the family is first to get Jane, the oldest, married off to the guy next door. He has a friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy, who's a bit of a jerk, very prideful and very prejudiced against the boorish and shallow Bennet matriarch and the fact of the Bennets' lack of money or prestige. 

I really liked the contrast of Elizabeth and pretty much every other young woman in the story. She comes across as much smarter, more thoughtful, and possessing a much better sense of humor than everyone else. But it still made me happy that I live in the 21st century and was expected to get a job, not a husband, first.