Gone Girl, A Novel by Gillian Flynn

  The sheer number of reviews, the high accolades, and the number of inclusions on “Best of 2012” lists make even thinking about reviewing Gone Girl a daunting challenge. So, just let me say, it’s an exciting psychological thriller and worthy of the praise (and high sales figures) it has received.

I wasn’t intrigued at the beginning, however. Just for starters, I didn’t really like either Nick or Amy, whose marriage dissolves in this book. For that matter, I didn’t like anyone in Gone Girl, except perhaps, Nick’s twin sister, Go. Amy’s parents, psychologists both, made their fortunes writing a series of children’s books, Amazing Amy…based on the exploits of their “perfect” daughter—a fantasy perfect child that the real Amy can’t possibly emulate. Nick has his own demons—for example, his angry misogynistic father, now afflicted with Alzheimer’s, who once told his son, “There are all kinds of men…and you are the wrong kind.”

Amy, well, who is Amy anyway? We only know her from her diaries and from Nick’s inner monologue. She says she’s a sweet loving wife, “fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obsessed with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasms.” Nick however, feels cold toward Amy and acts as though she were made of razor wire.

And Nick? Is he just a corn-fed putz from flyover country and a disaffected trembling husband?  Why then does he see the sun as an “angry eye in the sky.” It’s noon when he says, “My gut twisted and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.” Is he angry enough, motivated enough, devious enough murder his wife, then pretend innocence?

Fair warning: Gone Girl will take you on a journey through dysfunction, through pathology, through an ugliness that will astound you. The language is raw, the characters are malicious, and the relationships are toxic and destructive, twisted beyond understanding. That said, it’s an engrossing read.

As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.

Anne Shirako, Reference Librarian, Ukiah Library

April is Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – EARTH DAY 2013

Posted April 24, 2013

Julia Butterfly Hill

OFFERINGS TO LUNA

A tree

a life so many years gone by

history bound with each new ring and every scar

i lie nestled in Her arms

i listen to all She has to say

She speaks to me through my bare feet…my hands

She speaks to me on the wind…and in the rain

telling me stories born long before my time

Wisdom

as only Ancient Elders know

Truths

passed to me through Nature’s perfect lips

She cries

Her overwhelming grief

sap that clings to me…to my soul

i wrap my arms around Her

offering the only solace that I know

giving myself as the only gift I have to give

a pitiful offering

to a Goddess such as this but of myself

it is all that I have to give

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 20, 2013

MARY OLIVER (again)

About Angels and About Trees

Where do angels

fly in the firmament,

and how many can dance

on the head of a pin?

Well, I don’t care

about that pin dance,

what I know is that

they rest, sometimes,

in the tops of the trees

and you can see them,

or almost see them,

or, anyway, think:  what a

wonderful idea.

I have lost as you and

others have possibly lost a

beloved one,

and wonder, where are they now?

The trees, anyway, are

miraculous, full of

angels (ideas); even

empty they are a

good place to look to put

the heart at rest – all those

leaves breathing the air, so

peaceful and diligent, and certainly

ready to be

the resting place of

strange, winged creatures

that we, in this world, have loved.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 18, 2013

DAVID YOUNG

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,

something to hang around and comment,

scavenge,

alight on highest branches.

Who hasn’t seen the gnats,

the pollen grains that coat the windshield –

who hasn’t heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,

in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,

our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,

there come these times:  you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,

a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,

but it will flare and resonate

and you’ll feel part of it for once,

you’ll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,

you’ll be a river system all in silver

etched on a frosty driveway, you’ll

say “Folks, I think I made it this time,

I think this is my song.”  The crow lifts up,

Its feathers shine and whisper,

Its round black eye surveys indifferently

the world we’ve made

and then the one we haven’t.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 17, 2013

P. K. Page

Planet Earth

It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet,

has to be ironed, the sea in its whiteness;

and the hands keep on moving,

smoothing the holy surfaces.

                ‘In Praise of Ironing’, PABLO NERUDA

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

knowing their warp and woof,

like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.

It has to be loved as if it were embroidered

with flowers and birds and two joined hearts upon it.

It has to be stretched and stroked.

It has to be celebrated.

O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it.

It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet.

The trees must be washed, and the grasses and mosses.

They have to be polished as if made of green brass.

The rivers and little streams with their hidden cresses

and pale-coloured pebbles

and their fool’s gold

must be washed and starched or shined into brightness,

the sheets of lake water

smoothed with the hand

and the foam of the oceans pressed into neatness.

It has to be ironed, the sea in its whiteness

and pleated and goffered, the flower-blue sea

the protean, wine-dark, grey, green, sea

with its metres of satin and bolts of brocade.

And sky – such an O! overhead – night and day

must be burnished and rubbed

by hands that are loving

so the blue blazons forth

and the stars keep on shining

within and above

and the hands keep on moving.

It has to be made bright, the skin of this planet

till it shines in the sun like gold leaf.

Archangels then will attend to its metals

and polish the rods of its rain.

Seraphim will stop singing hosannas

to shower it with blessings and blisses and praises

and, newly in love,

we must draw it and paint it

our pencils and brushes and loving caresses

smoothing the holy surfaces.

April is Nation Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day
April 16, 2013

Pablo Neruda

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still

 for once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language;

 let's stop for a second, and not move our arms too much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines;

 we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

 Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm the whales

and the man gathering salt would not hurt his hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire,

 victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes

 and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving,

 and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence

 might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems to be dead in winter and later proves to be alive.  Now I'll count to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 13, 2013

April Prayer

Stuart Kestenbaum

Just before the green begins there is the hint of green

a blush of color, and the red buds thicken

the ends of the maple’s branches and everything

is poised before the start of a new world,

which is really the same world

just moving forward from bud

to flower to blossom to fruit

to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots

await the next signal, every signal

every call a miracle and the switchboard

is lighting up and the operators are

standing by in the pledge drive we’ve

all been listening to:  Go make the call.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 11, 2013

W.S. MERWIN

THE OVERPASS

You know how you

will be looking for somewhere

and come by surprise on a long cement bridge

sailing out over a wide

cement ditch carved deep into the hill

between whose banks the traffic is rushing

in both directions

in what is now the air above it

there was a pasture

beside dark woods

I saw it

and a swamp near the first trees

with a pump house hidden

in low green blackberry bushes

and mist coming off the upland marsh

first thing in the morning

and on the cold hill

a man and a boy

planting potatoes

with a mule keeping ahead of them

climbing the furrows

through the morning smelling of

wet grass

none of them seeing

the white bird flying over

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library
National Poetry Month Poem of the Day –
April 10, 2013

Stuart Gravatt

Spring Is Weeping Tonight

Not summer’s narcissist, calling

attention to herself with booms

and flashes, nor winter’s frozen

fury, piling white on white.  A shimmering

sheen of rain, instead, an incessant

shower that lulls

and saddens, like a woman somewhere

in the world, her face in her hands.

Always so much to weep for – the friend

who is dying; the lover who left;

a river that made the news,

poisoned forever by something

leaking; the unnamed

species extinct this hour.

April is National Poetry Month

 Ukiah Library Poem of the Day
April 9, 2013

Prayer

Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Lady Day by J. Patrick Lewis

Lady Day
by
J. Patrick Lewis

Billie Holiday
1915-1959  

On “Blue Moon” nights I love to hypnotize
Strangers in smoky nightclubs just like this,
“Too Marvelous for Words” in “Them There Eyes,"
They swoon like I was “Prelude to a Kiss.”
“Nice Work If You Can Get It.” What I’ve got,
Oh, no, “You Can’t Take That Away From Me.”
It’s “All Or Nothing At All”—or maybe not—
“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” off-key.
“What Is This Thing Called Love?” I cannot find
It in a blessed note a Lady sings.
A life mistreated treats you so unkind,
Left me with “Just One of Those (Crazy) Things”—
A voice that Harlem toned and living tuned,
A voice I carry with me like a wound.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 6, 2013

William Wordsworth (b. April 7, 1770)

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ‘tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure: -

But the least motion which they made,

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 6, 2013

MARY OLIVER

THE MORNING PAPER

Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition

is the best

for by evening you know that you at least

have lived through another day)

and let the disasters, the unbelievable

yet approved decisions,

soak in.

I don’t need to name the countries,

ours among them.

What keeps us from falling down, our faces

to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day
April 4, 2013

Neil Gaiman

“House”

Sometimes I think it’s like I live in a big giant head on a hilltop

made of papier mache, a big giant head of my own head.

I polish the eyes which would be windows, or
mow the lawn, I mean this is my house we’re talking about here

even if it is a big giant papier mache head that looks just like mine.

And people who go past
in cars or buses or see the house the head on the hill from trains 

they think the house is me.
I’ll be sleeping there, or polishing the eyes, or weeding the lawn,

but no-one will see me, no-one would look.
And no-one would ever come. And if I waved no-one even knows it was me waving.

They’d all be looking in the wrong place, at the head on the hill.
I can see your house from here.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 3, 2013

MARGE PIERCY

The ark of consequence

The classic rainbow shows as an arc,

a bridge strung in thinning clouds,

but I have seen it flash a perfect circle,

rising and falling and rising again

through the octave of colors,

a sun shape rolling like a wheel of light.

Commonly it is a fraction of a circle,

a promise only partial, not a banal

sign of safety like a smile pin,

that rainbow cartoon affixed to vans

and baby carriages.  No, it promises

only, this world will not self-destruct.

Account the rainbow a boomerang of liquid

light, foretelling rather that what we

toss out returns in the water table;

flows from the faucet into our bones.

What we shoot up into orbit falls

to earth one night through the roof.

Think of it as a promise that what

we do continues in an arc

of consequence, flickers in our

children’s genes, collects in each

spine and liver, gleams in the apple,

coats the down of the drowning auk.

When you see the rainbow iridescence

shiver in the oil slick, smeared

on the waves of the poisoned river,

shudder for the covenant broken, for we

are given only this floating round ark

with the dead moon for company and warning.

In honor of Warbler and other tree sitters in Willits

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters:  how well they understood

Its human position:  how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s icarus, for instance:  how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.