The Vine: June 25, 2010
I’ve got two really sketchy book descriptions that I’m hoping the Vine readers can identify.
In the first book, the main character wants to tile her shower to look like the periodic table of elements. I think she undertakes the project early in the story, and then gets caught up in a new job (?), and when she and a friend work on the tile again at the end of the book, it symbolizes her return to what really matters, or something.
The second book was available as an audiobook from the Brooklyn Public Library in 2005. The main character’s name was Aisling (not sure on the spelling, as I only listened to the book), and the book was set in modern-day Britain. Aisling was not a chef, but she liked to cook, and I think many of the chapters started with recipes she was working on. She may have had a coworker named Charmian.
And that’s all I’ve got. Told you they were sketchy. I’d love to reread these two to a) see if they’re any good, and b) try to figure out why they’ve stuck in my head.Thanks!
KC
P.S. The second book is not Katie MacAlister’s Aisling Grey series.
*****
Hey Sars,
I’m looking for a book I read as a grade-schooler in the early ’90s. It was about a family that hosted an exchange student from Vietnam. Whenever Exchange Student didn’t understand something, he’d say, “Please explain…”
I know there was a part where Exchange Student tells Narrator that the word for “bicycle” in Vietnamese is “xe dap,” pronounced very much like “shut up,” which the narrator thinks is hilarious. I think the book starts with Narrator amusing himself at his boring after-school job by covering up the last two letters on something called “PURE” so there’s a whole display of “PU”… but that may have been some other book I read around the same time.
Anyone have any idea what this book is?
Sharon
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Hi Sars,
I have what’s probably a simple question to answer, but it’s waaaay outside my knowledge base (I’m a geologist…never even took Soc 101. Or economics, for that matter), so I’m not sure what terms to use in Googling efforts.
I’m looking for a study/book discussing the relative change in cost of living in the U.S. over time, specifically as it relates to the increase in technology and all the associated “must-haves” it creates. I’d love to read an analysis of how the internet, satellite/cable TV, cell phones, and all the other stuff we now need to participate in modern society have affected the monthly budget of average families.
I suspect that it adds up to quite a bit, just based on my memory of being a kid and not having any of those things, but….maybe there are other costs that have gone down to make up the difference? For instance, despite the fact that two-car families are now the norm (at least out west where public transport is sucky or nonexistent) when it used to be much more common to share a single car, have the costs of buying/maintaining/insuring/fueling a car gone down as compared to, say, 1960? Have phone service costs gone down enough to make up the difference for our increased usage? At a guess, I’d suspect that post-WWII is a good place to start a comparison to the present, and carry it up through the start of the Internet age.
The more I’m thinking about this, the more complicated a question it’s starting to appear. Readers, can anyone direct me to a good discussion? Or, barring that, any opinions?
Technophobic hippie
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
@Tech, I think what you’re describing is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-of-living_index
The problem is that, as you noted, there have been substitutions & augmentations over the years, so it’s not a clear index. You’d probably also have to look at the components factoring into the Consumer Price Index.
You can find a lot of historically trended data at the Census Bureau site; some measures are trended back to 1940. Enter “cost of living” in the search field & quite a bit comes up.
That second book is “Hello, My Name is Scrambled Eggs” by Jamie Gilson. I read it about 6000 times as a kid. And yes, it does contain the PU toothpaste scene.
KC, this is probably not right, but could the second book you’re looking for be “Sushi for Beginners” by Marian Keyes?
The main character is named Ashling, and she has a friend named Clodagh, so that seems kind of close. Neither of them cook, though, and there are no recipes. But maybe the title made you remember it that way?
http://www.amazon.com/Sushi-Beginners-Novel-Marian-Keyes/dp/0060555955/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277473974&sr=8-1
@Sharon – The book you’re describing sounds like “Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs” by Jamie Gilson. The plot summary on Amazon matches up, and I remember Tuan (Exchange Student) generally asking people to explain things to him.
@Tech: This article from Salon seems relevant (not sure if it’s exactly what you’re looking for), so maybe the interviewee’s book might be helpful to you?
@KC The first one is The Twins of Tribeca, a thinly-veiled, er, commentary on the rise of Miramax and the Weinstein brothers: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781401360009-1
@Sharon,
I don’t remember the title either, but the story rings a bell. If it helps anyone else: the hosting was arranged through the family’s church; the kid’s last name was Nguyen, which everyone had been mispronouncing as “nuh-GUY-en” instead of the proper “winn”; they may have been hosting an entire Vietnamese family instead of just the boy; and there’s a scene where the boy wigs out after mistaking a hairdryer for a gun, and seeing the Narrator point it at his head.
I may be confusing it with another story, but the narrator was the only kid on his block with an entirely Day-Glo bike.
@Tech, I’m a sociology grad student and unfortunately can’t think of a good book about what you’re asking (but I’ll be reading the comments to see if someone else does!); however, here’s a sequence of blog posts about the subject.
One thing I would add is the following: consumer goods and transportation are far cheaper today, no doubt; so we all own more electronics, we fly more, etc. Meanwhile, at over the last thirty years, rising inequality means the American working class has earned less while the richest Americans have earned vastly, vastly more. For a long time, the falling living standards were papered over with debt: even before the economic crash, it was true that most working-class people owned far bigger homes than in the past, yet were far less likely to have health insurance (or more likely to be bankrupted by a health catastrophe even if they were insured).
The crash and the debt crisis have brought that to a head in the sense that Americans earning far less in real dollars than their counterparts in their parents’ generation can no longer paper over that with debt, especially mortgages. (It’s worth pointing out that even during the crash this was hugely uneven; the average white family gained tens of thousands of dollars in wealth in the past couple decades, and the average Black family gained none. That’s because most wealth was tied to homes in white neighborhoods, as well as because of the depth of America’s incarceration crisis.)
The result: we can buy things like iPods that would’ve been undreamable to our parents, and we can do it without it necessarily being a huge expenditure. We can fly across the country more than almost anyone would’ve dreamed of just a few decades ago. But people my age (27) are not likely to have good health insurance or pensions (if we manage to have a job), and we have a non-negligible chance of seeing our parents laid off and their pensions slashed before they retire. That’s the sense in which the relationship between consumer goods prices and cost of living is very, very tricky.
I think Book #2 in Letter #1 is Sushi for Beginners, by Marian Keyes. Irish girl, working at a fashion magazine in Britain, and Charmian rang a bell. Character’s name is Ashling Kennedy:
http://www.amazon.com/Sushi-Beginners-Novel-Marian-Keyes/dp/0060520507
@KC – I thought I immediately knew the first book, because I know I read it; I was thinking it was A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank. I’m second guessing myself now, though; if it’s not that book, it’s something I read right around the same time, during a severe chick-lit phase (which would have been late 2000 or early 2001).
@hippie — this is weird. I was browsing in a bookstore last night, and I flipped through a book which I think is exactly what you are asking for. (I didn’t purchase it, though, so I can’t give a recommendation one way or another.) Let me see if I can remember the title….
Yes, here it is, “The Value of Nothing” by Raj Patel. There are a bunch of customer reviews on Amazon.com.
@KC – Or maybe it was The Twins of Tribeca, by Rachel Pine. I’m going to stop now. I swear.
@KC Yup, Leigh’s right–it’s totally The Twins of TriBeCa.
Books aside, I really want a periodic table shower now.
@Laura: I can’t give you tile, but here’s a consolation prize.
http://tinyurl.com/w3cuj
@Laura – You can get a periodic table shower curtain. I agree the tile would be cooler but the curtain is still educational. Friends of mine have it and their eldest daughter is at Yale now and I am sure it has everything to do with the shower curtain.
@hippie
Unfortunately, there is no suitable answer. The CPI is how most economists try to account for changes in cost of living, but the CPI is flawed in a number of ways. First of all, there is the composition of the CPI. This changes periodically, so a long-term comparison is impossible. Productivity increases also pose a problem. Increases in average productivity mean that the value of goods produced now is much higher than it was 30 years ago even for products where the number of goods has remained largely the same. The effect of productivity increases upon quality is very hard to quantify. For example, a car made in 2010 is essentially as useful in conveying you from point A to point B as a car that was made in 1970; however, if you run into a tree on the way from point A to point B, you’d rather have a Honda Civic than a Gremlin. Thus, the Civic might be less expensive per unit of utility (broadly defined) than a Gremlin even if it is more expensive in inflation adjusted dollars. The same difficulties arise when you try to quantify the utility associated with things like an Iphone relative to a rotary-dial land line. This means that the “middle-class lifestyle†that is being maintained in 2010 is different from the one available in 1970. There is also the issue of depreciation. The rate of depreciation has accelerated for most durable home goods. A good economic analysis of the cost of maintaining a middle class lifestyle should take this into account as well. My mother had the same typewriter for 25 years. None of us will be typing on the same computer in 5 years.
Technophobic Hippie, check out The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook, it might have some discussion that relates to what you’re going for.
@ KC- I also think think it could be Sushi for Beginners. I read it not too long ago. Kind of a fluff book, easy read, and the characters seem to match.
@Laura:
I remembered seeing a periodic table afghan, and tried googling it. This isn’t the one, but it’s what I found today:
http://tinyurl.com/ptafghan
Also a periodic table table:
http://tinyurl.com/pttable
and a periodic table sweater:
http://tinyurl.com/ptsweater
The table in particular is amazing. As is another he made with bisected and inscribed triangles and circles.
Thanks, guys! The first book is definitely Twins of Tribeca – the title rang a bell right away.
Sushi for Beginners doesn’t sound familiar, and the bit I’ve skimmed on Google Books doesn’t seem like something I’ve read before, but I think I’ll have to check out the whole book to be sure.
I was also going to recommend the Census site for information on cost of living. It won’t have exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s interesting. The part of the site called “American Fact Finder” has all sorts of tables you can download about demographics on a neighborhood, city, or state. You can make Excel tables and sort the data however you want. It’s pretty cool. http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en