Stealing Home, a memoir by Ron Seybold

Stealing Home: A Father, a Son, and the Road to the Perfect Game by Ron Seybold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stealing Home is a story about a man, his son, a road trip, baseball and a historic game. The author is determined to have the most memorable vacation with his son. Ron Seybold is divorced, and sees his son on established weekends and vacation times. In spite of this, he is determined to be the father that he never had, rather than the angry father that raised him.

He faces the fact that, so far, he has been he has been just that—angry, anxious and unpleasant to be around. Without telling us in so many words, he shows us the decision he made to change, to become a father worth remembering, rather than one whose children struggle to forget. He plans an epic vacation with his son. Their strongest bonds are Simpsons quotes and baseball, so he begins there. In a pre-internet world he gathers maps, a baseball atlas, phone numbers and a credit card to put together hotels, seats at games, a convertible Pontiac Sunbird, and a plan to have a baseball road trip; nine games in eight different cities in five states.

The memoir uses the games as a framework, punctuated by memories of his own childhood, his son's earlier years, his first marriage, all of which has brought him to this trip this summer in 1994. It's a book about struggling with anxiety, about fatherhood and about baseball. It is intensely personal and resonates me on many levels. But, the brilliant thing is how many different people different aspects of the memoir will resonate with.

A veteran sports writer, Ron Seybold has written a small, powerful book that is so very readable I would recommend it to almost anybody. Take it for a spin.

View all my reviews

Post-Book Slump

I finished a book yesterday, Kory Stamper’s Word by Word, the Secret Life of Dictionaries. I listened to the audiobook because I enjoy hearing authors read their own books, and Ms. Stamper, in particular, has a good voice for audiobooks. She has a conversational tone that captures the nuances of her writing. I first noticed this in her short Ask the Editor videos for Merriam-Webster’s online presence. You may remember that I posted her ‘Plural of Octopus’ video here. She describes herself as shy, not caring for human contact, but she’s quite animated.

Talk of voices and reading aside, there is the problem that I regularly face when reading a book that I love. The morning after. You know what I’m talking about. One day you feel like you’re in love and everything in the world is right, and it’s because you’re reading a book that makes you happy. Sometimes you look forward to the end of the workday, not because you don’t like your job, but because you get to go read afterward.

Then it happens. You finish the book. At first you sit and savor the moment. When I finished reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, I couldn’t start another book for days. The writing stayed with me for a while, and I didn’t want to mess that up by starting a new book. But, it was almost as if I had nothing to come home to. I had become so fond of reading this story, that I was genuinely sad that I had finished. And, the task of finding another book that is as impactful is nearly impossible. It can take a while to work myself into another read, to reset my mental palate.

This morning was different than that, even. I woke up and lay in bed. My cats were happy with this, but that’s beside the point. It almost felt like I had broken up. Reading Word by Word, as well as listening to the podcast, FiatLex (a podcast about dictionaries by people who write them) and the occasional Ask the Editor video gives one the feeling that they have a group of friends. This is the dark underside of social media. We feel like we have all these friends, but really they are just people who are out there talking about things that interest them, who occasionally interact with you. It’s a harsh reality to wake up and remember that you don’t really know these people, they certainly don’t know you and the sense of camaraderie this time was possibly a little too strong.

When I first saw the book, it seemed fascinating and very personal. A book about how dictionaries are written by a real human being that works on them. How awesome is that?! Kory writes, not just about how definitions are made and updated, but about her personal story, about what led her to begin this career and what made her stay. “I didn’t choose the dictionary life. The dictionary life chose me.” What I wasn’t expecting was the drama in some of chapters and the emotion in the epilogue. I don’t want to give too much away, but I recommend you read this book for the sheer joy of it.

Also, I can’t help but have a greater appreciation for dictionaries and reference books. To a certain extent, Merriam-Webster strives to keep their dictionary as impersonal as possible. It’s a reference and people should be able to count on an objective definition, one without somebody’s preconceived notions, opinions or prejudices. That sort of perception leads us to take dictionaries for granted. It is nice to hear the voices of the humans behind them. I’ve learned an appreciation for the front matter in dictionaries. Hell, I’ve learned that the front matter exists. I’ve learned to read the definitions with more attention, and it thrills me to know that they base their definitions on documented usage. We’ve always taken it for granted that dictionaries are an authority, but to know that there is a ginormous collection of documentation that goes back years and decades is amazing.

It’s true that Kory, Peter Sokolowski, Steve Kleinedler, Emily Brewster and all the other people Kory talks about do not know me. Considering the way Kory describes them, they’d probably feel very uncomfortable knowing that I enjoy reading about them. That’s not to say that I won’t keep trying. I interact with them on Twitter (respectfully); I listen to the podcasts and make comments. I promote the podcast to my friends, acquaintances and followers. It’s possible that they might get used to seeing me in their feed. It’s also possible that I wouldn’t like them if I knew them personally. I suppose this is the new world: virtual relationships. I felt a little down this morning when I woke up. But, the Rather Earnest Painter is coming back after my first cup of coffee. Be careful world. I feel good.

Read with fresh eyes the Definition for built-out.

The Girl

I'm finally reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Listening to the audio book, more precisely.) I've always known I'd like it, but I thought I wasn't ready. Now I am. 

The mystery is intriguing, but what I'm really enjoying so far is the prose about the weather. Northern Sweden in January. I'm listening to it in Central Texas in September, a time when it's barely under 100°, and I feel like I need to get under a blanket. 

That's some good writing. 

Weycombe

Let me take a moment to review a book that I loved. 

Weycombe by G.M. Malliet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nothing is as perfect as it seems.

It never is. Jillian White finds this out when the facade of her fantasy life is shattered by the murder of a woman named Anna, the local estate agent. Little by little the reader is pulled into Jill's world and her thoughts. (view spoiler)[It is written in first person, so we have the advantage of knowing what the narrator is thinking. However, she has the advantage of only telling us what she wants us to know.

Weycombe is like a cousin to Girl on the Train. Though Girl is more intense, Weycombe is more sinister. If Girl on a Train is on one side of Weycombe's family, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is on the other, and here is where I let the bomb drop. I don't plan on having a review without spoilers.

The thing is, being so deep inside the mind of Jill is a little unnerving. There is a transformation throughout the book, and it doesn't get any more comfortable. At first Jill is in a rut, a huge rut that she can't get out of and that threatens to get tiresome. While Rachel from Girl is lost in alcoholism, Jillian is simply lost. She has lost her job; she has given up on trying to find another one. She spends her days wondering around the wealthy village of Weycombe, wasting away her life while her marriage falls apart. Not unlike with Rachel, I tended to want to throttle Jillian for her decisions.

But, she becomes energized with the idea of the murder of Anna, a woman who used to be her friend. She takes copious notes and eventually she states what we have been suspecting for a while – that she is planning to write a novel based on the murder. (The job she lost was with the BBC, so she's right in her niche.) That the murder of someone she knew could inspire her paints Jill in a less favorable light, even as it is she telling the story. As she becomes more interested in the investigation she becomes obsessed. She uses her feminine guile and American-ness to get information from the detective, and she talks with people around town, making small talk and then rushing to write everything down.

This invigorated Jillian is more pleasant, though. She is sure of herself and her talents. She has a purpose. She wastes no time on the illusion that she can save her marriage; in fact she hides her industry from her husband – willing him to stay out all night so she can get work done. All the while, small clues keep popping up, things that would have been more natural had they been told in a more chronological way. Some things seem to be important, and yet mean nothing... until later. She talks with a former colleague and the energy of her profession continues to return. She even talks to her Member of Parliament (MP) and is not intimidated when he calls her local police to put her in her place complain about her.

In the quaint village of Weycombe with its scenic backdrop, we see this woman, Jillian, slowly raise her head to look at us, then she keeps turning her head to look toward the sky, and she continues turning. Then we are looking at the back of her head, but there is another face there, and it is only beginning to lift itself to look at us. It is another Jillian with another version of the story we just heard. And we learn that this more well-adjusted woman is more sinister than we had been led to believe. (hide spoiler)]

View all my reviews

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind by Tom Cox

I stumbled across Tom Cox the way many people discover new authors - I have been stalking following another author (G.M. Malliet, writer of cozy mysteries) and she retweeted something from him and I read it. I have cats and I feel that many people don't understand my relationship with them, so Tom's Twitter posts and his blog entries rather struck a chord with me. Ms. Malliet lived in England (according to her bio info) and her mysteries are set in Great Britain, so I kind of assumed that's how she would have heard of him. When I was a bookseller, I do remember selling his book on golf, but I'm not a golfer so I never looked at it closely and I didn't remember his name.

Tom seems to be doing something different with his writing. He's taking his career into his own hands a little bit - the promotion part of it, anyway. He created Twitter accounts for his cats, foremost among them being My Sad Cat. (I think it was @MySadCat that I came across originally, now that I think about it.) He has tweets indicating, 'My cat is sad because _". Usually it relates to the cat's deep, soul-searching eyes and the crass world's failure to live up to his expectations. @MySadCat has thousands of followers.

In his writing, Tom anthropomorphises his cats a little bit, for the sake of humor and to express the way they make him feel. But, for the most part I think that he is simply trying to understand them on their own level - their distinct personalities and the way they interact with each other. Through them we meet Tom's father who writes and talks in all caps, his mother and a few friends. But, mostly it's poignant memoir about a man who loves the outdoors and loves his cats and loves a genre of music that I can't quite put my finger on... 70's psychodelic rock? Obscure bands from just before he was born who were experimental and edgy?

If you enjoy animals, if you enjoy the outdoors, if you feel that cats were given a bad representation in The Secret Life of Pets, then I suggest you read this book, and follow @MySadCat on Twitter and read Tom's blog. He has several other books related to his cats as well.

Enjoy.