Ponder Post: I Need a Lifeguard ...

I Need a Lifeguard Everywhere but the Pool by Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella is a collection of humorous essays - most of which are very much in the category of chick lit. Lisa Scottoline is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and these essays read pretty much like a collection of newspaper columns. In fact I just learned the column written jointedly with her daughter is indeed titled Chick Wit. Alas, most of the essays, probably a compendium of those columns, were from the vantage point of a several-times divorced woman or her still single and half-heartedly male-seeking daughter. Though I would not be so harsh as to call them man-haters, they each do sprinkle their essays with barbs and jabs at the male gender, intimating views different from me who has been married to the same man for 42 years.

 

I've read two other books by Lisa Scottoline of a more serious bent, Look Again and Save Me, and reviewed them in my post for August 30, 2017. They were a two novels combined in one binding, which was an impulse purchase off a Costco warehouse sale table. Costco carries what is popular and I reason if it is popular, most people like it and so there is good chance I will too. This logic does not always hold true but it really is not bad as a first brush stroke. Look Again was a reasonably good thriller and Save Me less so, but I thought I would try a Scottoline humorous book as a contrast. I did not buy the lifeguard book, but instead checked it out of the library. I am glad I did not make the investment. Her humor is not for me.

Some of the entries I found very amusing. I could resonate with essays about body image. As a fellow non-athlete, I could also relate to her description of her angst when she was asked to throw out the first ball at a Philadelphia's baseball game. I could be grateful I was unfamiliar with the experience and could be educated vicariously by an ongoing saga of her garden being invaded by snakes, complete with detailed information on their bizarre mating and reproduction habits. Apparently females can store the sperm and impregnate themselves at will. Most of the other essays, however, pretty much fell flat for me. 

To avoid biasing myself, I usually defer any research on the author or any Amazon reviews of the books until I have made up my mind for myself. More often than not, I wind up discovering, "Oh, is that what I should have thought?" I looked up Lisa Scottoline on Wikipedia. She has a collection of non-fiction co-authored with her daughter but I think I will avoid those books based on their comedic slant.

Scottoline is a very prolific author but is best known for her legal thrillers. She has books on the New York Times best seller list from two series, Rosato and Associates and Rosato and DiNunzia about women partners at a law firm. I think I will pass on those, as well. My unconfirmed conjecture is that I will not like the female attitude toward men in these legal themed books. There actually is a law firm with the surname Rosato. I suspect it is no relation to the book but it is a funny coincidence that the heading graphic on the Rosata website was the Charging Bull bronze sculpture associated with Wall Street. Anyone who has seen the movie Hitch cannot forget the scene where the womanizing jerk Vance gets booted face first into the rear end of this statue by the lead female, Sara.

Aside from legal themes, Scottoline also has several stand-alone fiction novels on the New York Times best seller list. Maybe I will give another of those stand-alone novels a try. Our library has a whole shelf full of them. But for now I will give this author a rest. I think I sometimes do myself an injustice by reading several books by the same author in succession or so close together I get bored or disillusioned.

I gave this book to my daughter-in-law as a birthday gift without having read it first. Sorry about that. But then again my daughter-in-law is only six years from her bachelorette days so maybe she and the younger co-author Serritella will be more on the same wavelength. At least each chapter is short enough that perhaps my daughter-in-law can enjoy each in snatches between running after a 3½ year old and a 1½ year old.

Ponder Post: Sewing Themed Books

That Dorky Homemade Look
I received this short funny book by Lisa Boyer in a basket of winnings at my guild's quilt show. See my May 2, 2017 DianeLoves2Quilt post. It was a quick, amusing read that I completed on a plane flight to visit my daughter in Oklahoma in July. Granted it has a limited audience - quilters and sewists - but that audience will be delighted with the pearls of wisdom and dribbles of mirth found within its pages.

By the way there is a movement afoot to call crafters who sew "sewists" and not "sewers". This name change proposal is prevalent, mainly among bloggers who sew. They wish to connotatively combine the craft of sewing with the concept of an artists - hence sewists. A Threads Magazine article briefly outlines the pros and cons. Candidly, I think a stronger reason is to avoid mispronunciation of the existing term "sewer".

Here is the table of contents for That Dorky Homemade Look showing the short essay titles. Some topics are quite funny while others are satisfying. For example, one addresses spot on, the often sensitive question, actually quite dreaded for impulse fabric purchases, "What are you going to use that fabric for?"

I have hinted below on the subject matter for some of my favorite chapters:

The Fabric Funny Farm
     Organizing fabric not by color ... but by mood ..?

Beauty and the Beast
     An encouraging pep talk to enter your quilt in a quilt show
Quilting Quagmire
     A fun treatise on indecision
Oh Well, No One Will Notice
     You can guess what this is about.
Make Your Husband Read This *
     Why many husbands are lacking in the art of gift giving

Quilters, Sharks, and Modern Plastics *
     I chuckled my way through this one, read the book to see why.

*   These two essays are fun even for the non-quilting readers out there.

I will admit this book may fall flat with those not into quilting, but for those who quilt, or for those who even dabble in it, it will hit a home run. That Dorky Homemade Look is a short fun read that can easily be completed in one sitting.

*************************

The Lover's Knot

I was shocked in chapter 30 (of 58 chapters) when a bloody body was found on the floor of the local quilt shop. I guess I failed to get the memo that this was a murder mystery even though the back cover of this paperback clearly states

Young, hip, and heartbroken – Nell picks up the pieces of her life and pieces together clues for an unsolved murder in the small town of Archers Rest.

I grabbed this book to read from Frank's pile of completed books just before jumping on a last-minute flight down to Dan when he had his emergency appendectomy. I picked the ~300 page The Lover's Knot mainly because it was thin, light-weight, and probably not too brain intensive. At its page dimensions of 5¼" x 8", larger than the typical grocery store romance paperbacks, it indeed could be thinner, only ⅝". It indeed was lightweight. But, when the suspect list includes all the members of the Friday Night Quilt Club, the cast was heavyweight. I had a terrible time keeping them straight... Eleanor, Nell, Nancy, Nanette, Natalie, Suzanne, Carrie, Maggie... aargh! It was a bit more brain intensive than I had bargained for. All those N's! Then the guys Jess, Marc, Ryan, Barney... were added to the mix. My head was in a whirlwind. Wait. I think Barney was the dog. You get the idea.

The back story of a broken romance between Nell and Ryan was much less taxing for me to follow. But does that play into the murder? This was a well-written murder mystery but one from which I did not get the full benefit. I wish I had been in a less distracted mindset and able to pay more attention. After all isn't a murder mystery better when the reader is try to figure out whodunnit? Frank reads more quilt-themed murder mysteries than I do so the plot lines must be pretty good. Or else is it just a staunch husbandly display of solidarity...?

The title Lover's Knot is based on the name for a quilting pattern of interlocking strips. There are other quilting and fabric allusions sprinkled throughout. They add a nice touch but are not necessary to the solution of the mystery. I particularly enjoyed a paragraph in which a seasoned quilter is trying to convince a newbie to take up the hobby.

I think it's [quilting's] really the absolute best way to deal with a problem. It's a right brain, left brain activity. There's a lot of math and figuring out patterns and amounts of fabrics, so that's one side, then the other is taken up with the whole creative process. So when you are quilting, you are completely involved in it. There's no space leftover in your brain for worrying about your problems.

I copied this image from another blog https://custom-writing.org/blog/left-vs-right-brain. Funny, quilting is not included on the diagram. There is COLOR though!

I think I would rate his book more favorably if I had been paying more attention. It is the first of five books in the Someday Quilts Mystery series by Clare O'Donohue. On Amazon, books in this series typically get 4 - 4½ stars so I will definitely give at least one or two of the others a try. As an indicator of my vote of confidence, I just put books two, three, and four on hold at my local library.

Robin's Visit August 17th

Our daughter Robin works as an electrical engineer for the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), designing, developing, testing, installing, and qualifying runway lights as an employee of its ATO (Air Traffic Organization). She was working on an assignment at the San Francisco airport, SFO, and so Frank and I were pleased that she could drop by our house and spend one night with us before heading back home to Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is the technical center for the FAA.

Robin had been working hard on sewing a shirt for her Dad out of Harry Potter themed fabric. It was to be a surprise. Completing a project like this is quite an accomplishment, squeezing in the time to sew with a full time job and a four year old and a two year old. Even more challenging was keeping the four year old from spilling the beans to Grandpa.

Robin was able to make the presentation in person. She was so excited to do so, she whipped it out of her carryon suitcase as soon she walked in our door, not even taking time to remove her jacket. Not only did Frank love the shirt, but he was very pleased with her efforts to devote so much time to make something for him.

It fit! Frank poses to show off the garment – and to show off the daughter who made it. In her spare time I am guessing Robin is planning to post about the creation of this shirt to her sewing blog. She was here a couple weeks ago, but I think the post is yet to come on RobinLovesQuilting.

Robin was there only for dinner and one evening of visiting. We whisked her off back to the airport for her return flight the next morning. We thoroughly enjoyed the undivided attention of one-on-one time in adult conversation. The visit was short but sweet. Ya gotta love those grandkids but, as our son Dan puts it, when they are in the vicinity, you can only have "one-third of a conversation". His statistics are pretty right on. We have clocked that to be pretty accurate during our Skype calls to both his and Robin's families.