I have been doing some very depressing reading in the last little while. Like a good little librarian, when Nana got sick I ran straight to the stacks to do research on Nursing Homes, since that is exactly where Papa is going to end up now that Nana can't take care of him. Let me share some gems of wisdom with you.
1. The name "Nursing Home" is not the correct nomenclature. Care Facility, please.
2. Alzheimers is both tragically sad and hysterically funny. Really, how can you not laugh when your grandfather puts his pants on backwards like KrisKros?
3. Any family member who gives a damn will feel like a murdering ungrateful son of a bitch for even thinking of letting their loved on set foot in the door of a care home. The only ones spared this miasma of guilt are those assholes who don't care anyhow, which strangely makes them the only people who are really able to make objective decisions.
4. There are two types of books on Nursing Homes. First, there are the kind that actually give you good information on the different types of homes, making the transitions, assuaging your overwhelming guilt, etc. These books tend to be written by medical professionals or researchers. They are often helpful.

Then there are the books that average-joe authors wrote to assuage their guilt for putting their own parents/grandparents in crappy awful nursing homes. These books vacillate unpredictably between telling you that your parent will be just fine, and giving you examples of the horrific treatment their own loved one suffered at the hands of the demonic care aides before gasping out "how could you?" with their dying breath. These books are not helpful.

Sadly, there is no way of knowing which type of book you have got your hands on before you jump onto the rollercoaster ride of either medical detail or heartrending stories of someone else's crappy experience. I would like to send a general notice out to all authors of books on care facilities: IF YOU DON"T HAVE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM DONT TELL ME ABOUT IT!!! If my grandfather might be restrained upside down from a chair in the ceiling so that the psycho head spinning care aides can watch him better, and YOU KNOW A WAY TO PREVENT THIS, then by all means, include problem and solution in your book. If you don't have a fucking clue how to prevent said tragic problem, DONT" TELL ME ABOUT IT because it will just make me freak out, and want to send my grandfather to the SPCA instead of the BC health care system.

Ok, i'm quite sorry. That was quite a rant there, please forgive. Signing off,
Guilt-ravaged-moderately-coping-granddaughter.

And the moral is...

Ugly fish is an excellent, if totally amoral, picture book. Ugly fish starts off as king of his tank, and every time a new fishy little friend joins him, he shows off his lovely abode before eating the unfortunate tankmate. Well, once all the friends are eaten, Ugly Fish comes to realize that he is lonely. Perhaps eating all those other fish was a poor idea. Think you smell a moral? Yes, so did I. I could not have been more mistaken.

Ugly Fish is pleased when a new tankmate, Shiny Fish, joins him. He proudly shows off his tank to the much larger Shiny Fish, who likes the tank just fine, thanks, and polishes off Ugly fish in short order. The end.

What, you say? What about character development, learning from mistakes? Couldn't Ugly Fish have found a non-violent solution, and seen the error of his ways? What will this book teach our children? The answer, my friends, is absolutely nothing. They will learn not to make mistakes at all, and go to bed haunted by nightmares of Shiny Fish eating them up because they were mean to the kid sitting next to them in kindergarten. You, however, will be howling with laughter on the floor, which is a very good reason to read this picturebook.

Ambulance Idiot

Never have I disagreed so throughly with both Booklist and the general reading public in my assessment of a book. Ambulance Girl is the "heartwarming" "inspirational" and "honest" tale of a fat, middle aged, phobic, depressed woman (all her words, not mine) who decides, along with her therapist, that a job as a small town volunteer EMT will be lift her out of her slump. She proceeds to sign on to the local firehouse (in the states, municipal fire stations=EMS services for small towns) and drags her whining ass through the minimal required training. Upon "graduation", she recounts tales of such astounding ineptitude that i'm shocked she wasn't fired immediately on publication, or at least sued. Although her unprofessional bumbling improves marginally by the end of the book, it is made up for through a sharp increase in self importance and woe-is-meing over the emotional stress and strange hours that are (hello!?!) part of the job.

There are so many things I hate about this book, I am having trouble organizing them. Perhaps point form will help.

1. If you have serious emotional and mental illnesses, coupled with a physical disability that prevents you from moving with agility, you are NOT a good candidate for an emergency services job. Even if the service is starving for people and willing to accept you while holding its nose, you should probably do your hapless patients a favour and donate some money to the service instead. People's lives are depending on you being fit, alert, and competent.
2. If you work in the medical field, you should be aware of something called confidentiality. The author, Jane Stern, has a professional reputation as a writer. People know her work. They can find out where she lives. Therefore, they can figure out who the people are that she writes about. This presents a problem. Either she is flagrantly and outrageously violating the privacy of her patients for financial gain, or she has lied lied lied about her exploits for financial gain. Neither option really promotes a professional view of EMT's.
3. A professional complaint. Some of the stories in this book are, shall we say, padded for effect. But hey, in the words of James Frey, it could have happened. I prefer my non-fiction to be, well, non-fiction. Is that so wrong?

Anyhow, the upshot is that this strange and misguided woman has done everyone but herself a disservice by elbowing into Emergency Medical Services. To read a book filled with self aggrandizing drek about her misuse of the job was annoying in the extreme. Being a paramedic is a tough and rewarding job. It demands commitment and a tenacious will to work without glory. And in the end, the thing that really sunk this book for me was her astonishing lack of professionalism.

I love you, Nanas!

Ok, this is my first stab at Manga review, so please bear with me as I stumble through it. Nana is a Shojo Beat serial that reads like a soap opera for young adults. No! Wait! I mean that in a good way! Since Shojo Beat is VIZ media's "manga from the heart", it's really no surprise that the 2 stories contained separately in this publication are all about the loves and losses of Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Both young women are hovering on the brink of adulthood, and both end up moving to Tokyo for love. But there, the similarities end. I read Nana 1 tonight, and despite the utter silliness of Nana K and the posturing bad-assedness of Nana O, I ended up rooting for both. The girls are just so perfectly teenaged; they do stupid things, waffle and whine and take ridiculous moral stands, throw love away and date the wrong men...but every once in a while, they both display an inner strength and determination that makes it all worthwhile. They make the same mistakes as I did, or could have, and they recover from them with a fragility and fortitude that I hope I recognize.

Reading this installment was literally like watching the Nanas grow up, and I can't believe it, but I'm now addicted. I *MUST* read the next installment, as soon as possible. This first book is really just a prologue, telling you about how Nana K gets dumped by an older slimeball and mends her broken heart, and how Nana O gets left behind in a small town by her rock star boyfriend. Both Nana's end the installment by moving to Tokyo, and the forthcoming books will tell about how they meet and become best friends.

Audrey, these books are so good that next time I come over I'm going to bring them for you to read. You can return them at any Victoria public library, because BC just instituted a program where libraries have to ship returned books all over the province for borrowers. Nice, huh?

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Never Let Me Go, is an undercover masterpiece of horror. Kathy H. is a 31 year old caregiver living in England, and this book follows the nostalgic reminisces of her childhood spent in an English boarding school. Slowly, we come to realize that Kathy's comfortable life is not at all what we assumed from the first half of the book; our initial assumptions are terribly wrong. By the middle of the book, I wanted to shout a warning to Kathy the child, and to shake Kathy the adult out of her inculcated apathy. The complete shocking horror of this book lies in the characters' inaction when faced with a fate worse (although including) certain death. Reading Never Let Me Go is rather like watching a lobster boil to death in a pot of water, hardly noticing as you turn up the heat. I'm trying not to give too much away, because really, you should read this book and give yourself the worst halloween nightmares ever.

La pipi della zebra

oh, the things you discover when you travel to foreign lands. Being a librarian, i discovered this book. Actually, rob discovered it, as he was transfixed by the sight of a cartoon zebra with a rubber-hose-like penis, peeing all over the cover of this hardcover children's reader. For the uninitiated, readers would cover ages 6-8, roughly.

Anyhow, we found this book in Rome, in a tiny bookshop near the pantheon, and although it is entirely in italian, the gist is fairly easy to get. In translation, the first page says...this zebra is a zebra with a little problem. He pisses all the time. Psssssssssssss.... (the accompanying pictures portray a gleeful zebra urinating happily in a piazza).

First the unfortunate zebra pees in a restaraunt, into his friends duck and pig's soup and dessert, respectively. Next, he pees out the window onto their heads, to their dismay. Repulsively, he pees into his bath, and overflows it, and the apartments below. The lovely pen and ink illustrations of these events invariably show zebra with a beatific smile on his face as he contemplates his spouting nether regions. I especially liked the well drawn and substantial ball sack that the illustrator added. Nothing like anatomical correctness in a reader.

Anyhow, by now you also get the gist. The story progresses to pig and duck banishing zebra for fear he will overflow the whole town; a fire breaks out; only zebra's unending stream of urine can save the day! Zebra returns in triumph and is made the fire chief, and everyone is issued regulation umbrellas.

A happy ending? yes, except for the poor librarian who accidentally orders this title on spec from a publisher, and gets fired due to patron complaints when little johnny tries to pee on his sister's head. My favourite part of all is the tiny illustration on the endpaper of the bakc page, where zebra, wearing his new fire hat, pees out the sun. Good job zebra.

i'm too tired to connect a link, so the isbn for interested parties is 9788880331841. Do see if you can find a cover illustration! Sadly this book will never be release

Oooooooooooh, I'm so Scaaaaaared!

Scaredy Squirrel, by Melanie Watt, insists that everyone wash their hands with antibacterial soap before reading his book. Ever met a rodent with OCD? Read right on! Scaredy squirrel never leaves his nut tree because he is a furry little control freak who just can't deal with the possibility of meeting up with any of the several things that terrify him out in the big wide world. These things include, but are not limited to, tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, germs, sharks, and killer bees.

Good point, Scaredy Squirrel.

But one day, Scaredy Squirrel's comfy routine gets wrecked by an event that not even his carefully stocked emergency kit can save him from! A killer (ahem) bee approaches, and as he flails around wildly, he falls (?) from his tree to his death. OK, he glides from his tree to a bush where he scares himself so much he plays dead for 2 hours, then climbs back up. Scaredy Squirrel ends the book by making some big changes to his safe little life. (ok, not so big...read this book dammit, and find out!)

Cutest book ever. Written for neurotic adults who want to feel better about themselves and preternaturally tightassed preschoolers. And Audrey, do you remember a certain jumping-off-roof incident that occurred somewhere south of the border when we were 14, due to a killer, enormous, deadly, coming-right-at-me bumblebee? hmmmm. I wonder why i loved this book so much...

Note to readers; this is a picturebook. I will review anything I want to in this blog. You too should read more kid's lit.

Warning: graphic content

This is heroine number two signing in. Yes, when Audrey and I get together, we cook up the most amazing (often illegal) plans. Yesterday I read Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Doll's House while floating around on an air mattress on Buntzen lake. And yes, being a librarian gives me absolute freedom to do with books all the things I forbid you to do. This includes, but is not limited to, activities such as reading in the bath, reading while eating sloppy joes and fizzy pop, reading while lounging around on floatation devices, and reading while seriously impaired.

Anyhow, back to the book. Love the story, hate the art. Need more detail? I thought this book was a tease. Gorgeously horrifying photo art on the cover and front pages, creepily blurred and superimposed introductory text, followed by...crap. Art that I would expect from a failed out DC comics hack with a mild brain injury. Even Gaiman's consistently excellent storytelling can't save this graphic novel from crapdom. I only read it cuz i was trapped on a floaty thing; normally i bail out immediately from such a yawnorama.

But don't be deterred; Sandman comics in general are good. Find out more about this generally superior series at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(DC_Comics/Vertigo). Just don't bother with this particular edition. Instead, check out Kabuki, David Mack's hauntingly slow paced graphic novel at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki_%28comic%29. Enjoy!