Eyes on the prize

I won a contest at a blog not long ago. Actually, I've won a few blog prizes (all via highly entertaining and informative blogs): from P., from Jaywalker (who has actually sent me a couple of prizes -- she's so generous) and any number of non-existent prizes from Medium Rob in his ongoing and totally mad Sitting Tennant competition. However, the prize I wish to talk about today is the one I won from BlueStalking Reader. I got second prize, so I got two books, and I just finished reading one of them today.

I generally have three to four books going at once, which is why I'm not a particularly fast reader: one for the bedside, one for the bus, one in the bathroom, and an audio book in the kitchen. The bus book has been long neglected, due to the bus strike, but one of my "prize" books The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell, started in the bathroom, then was promoted to the bedside. I've "read" a Sarah Vowell book before, an audio-book version of Assassination Vacation read by the author herself in all her flat-affect, nasal glory, with the help of several famous friends, including Conan O'Brien and Stephan King, and so I thought I'd probably find reading her rambling take on the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century more amusing, as opposed to listening to her voyage through the untimely deaths of four US presidents by assassins.

And indeed for the first part of this book, she is very funny (gotta love a girl who refers to the Second Book of Samuel in the Bible as an "R-rated chronicle of King David's serial-killer years"), with very topical humour, referencing recent events and lots of TV shows, which probably means this book won't age particularly well. As we soldier on into the horrors of massacres (the Pequot nation murdering English settlers because they think they're the Dutch settlers who have been murdering them, so the English settlers trap them in their village and shoot and burn them....), executions and mutilations, her humour starts to flag somewhat. However, this is understandable, and the book is interesting and accessible (for now; later generations probably won't get her crack about "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay").

As in Assassination Vacation she also goes for some easy (okay, cheap) laughs, that is, poking fun at Canada. "Why is America the last best hope of Earth?" she worries at one point. "What if it's Liechtenstein? Or worse, Canada?" Oddly enough, she also says: ". . . 'A Model of Christian Charity' is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. This America already exists. It's called Canada." Well, thanks for the compliment, Ms Vowell, but both statements neatly illustrate that you know dick about us...

Despite its clunky title and oddly detached conclusion, it's an informative read, particularly since I'd never heard of Anne Hutchinson until stumbling upon a biography about her last year, which (sigh) I failed to finish when it became due at the library -- as I've said, I don't read nearly fast enough. And thanks, BlueStalking, for the lovely book prizes. I should finish reading the other book...oh, in the spring sometime...