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We just got back from a lovely pre-baby, early-anniversary sojourn on the beach, where the sand was pink, the water was turquoise and the breezes were balmy.

I drank a lot of pink lemonade while looking covetously upon the rum drinks of others, floated in the ocean (swimming’s too much effort at this point), napped in the sunshine, did a little shopping, and generally had a wonderful, relaxing time.

We also made significant progress on the baby-name front, which means that, eight weeks from now, we won’t be heading home from the hospital with a kid named Backup.

The vacation was marred by only one thing: the book situation.

In preparation for our getaway, I packed Richard Russo’s STRAIGHT MAN, A.J. Jacbos’ THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBICALLY, which sounded like fun, and Valerie Martin’s TRESPASS, which did not sound like fun at all, but did sound interesting.

Then, in a moment of early morning pre-flight brain fog, I left all my books at home, and was thrown on the mercy of the airport bookstore, where I ended up with books that were interesting for reasons other than those their authors may have intended.

First up: Eric Clapton’s memoir, which was astonishing for the manner in which it made decades worth of sex, drugs and debauchery sound downright banal.

Some of it was the repetition.

The first time you read about someone writhing and screaming through the cramps and screaming hallucinations of heroin withdrawal, it’s enthralling. By the sixth or seventh time, it’s like, “Eric! Again with the withdrawal!”

Then there were the less-than-revealing descriptions. When he meets the love of his life, muse of his best work Pattie Boyd, he writes, “I remember thinking that her beauty was also internal. It wasn’t just the way she looked, although she was definitely the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. It was deeper. It came from within her, too.”

However, I was struck by the passage where a young Clapton journeys to a music festival and wakes up beside an abandoned campfire in the middle of nowhere. “I had shit myself, I had pissed myself, I had puked all over myself, and I had no idea where I was.”

I remember reading A MILLION LITTLE PIECES and stopping at the part where James Frey describes boarding an airplane covered in similar effluvia and thinking, Ain’t no way. In this day and age, when you can get booted off a flight for a too-short skirt or an overlarge carry-on, there’s no way you can poop yourself, then fly the friendly skies.

Evidently, though, in England in the 1960’s, you could poop yourself, then get a friendly conductor to give you an IOU for your train ticket back to Mum and Dad (or grandma and grandpa, in Clapton’s case).

Interesting...but if you're in the market for a good behind-the-scenes, warts and all, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll laced musician's memoir, I'd heartily recommend I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD, an oral history of the late, great Warren Zevon that came out earlier this year.

After Clapton, I moved on to Kevin Smith’s MY BORING-ASS LIFE, a compendium of his last few years’ worth of blog posts, which tend toward the exactingly detailed and frequently scatological. There’s nary a bowel movement or boink session that goes unchronicled. Every fast-food meal and DVD purchase, every cold caught, fought and conquered, each late night spent watching TiVo’d Simpsons and playing online poker…it’s in there.

Which is fine by me. I’ve got a high tolerance for minutia, especially when it’s funny and /or interspersed with details about people and places I recognize. (During the course of the book, Smith shoots Catch and Release with Susannah Grant, who wrote the screenplay for In Her Shoes, and hangs out in many of the same places I visit when I visit with the L.A. branch of my family).

First I started counting bowel movements. Then I counted intimate encounters Smith had with his wife. Then I counted intimate encounters Smith had with himself, aided by naked pictures of his wife.

Then I decided to really horrify myself and count the number of times the book said Jen, his wife (who, as luck would have it, shares not only my name but also my former profession) “went for a manicure,” “went for a mani-pedi,” “went for a facial,” “went to yoga” or got was dropped off by her husband at Asia de Cuba for lunch.

About fifty pages in, after many manicures, mani-pedis, yoga classes, plus a birthday gift of a specially-commissioned tiara from Tiffany, I poked my husband over on the next lounge chair and announced that I was going about my life all wrong, and that, henceforth, there would be less work and more grooming.

“You’d be bored out of your mind,” he said, without looking up from his Economist. “You wouldn’t last two days.”

“No, I wouldn’t! Yes, I would! Why do you say that?”

He pointed at the assembled sunbathers. “Do you see anyone else on the beach with a laptop?”

“Well, I’m working on something!”

Eventually, after much grumbling, I worked through my Jenvy and acknowledged that I probably would get bored on a steady schedule of yoga and nail care.

I still kind of want a tiara, though.

Entling No. 2 wanted me to know that the Dallas Symphony will perform The Composer is Dead next June. This orchestral work is a collaboration of A Series of Unfortunate Events author Lemony Snicket and composer Nathaniel Stookey. The work premiered in San Francisco a year ago. The book and CD are to released in 2008. The news release from HarperCollins describes the work:

The Composer Is Dead engages listeners with a gripping plot—in this case, a whodunit murder mystery—while the music and Snicket’s narration work together to provide an entertaining introduction to the instruments of the orchestra, in the vein of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

“Ever since I was a boy, classical music has made me weep uncontrollably. I hope The Composer Is Dead does the same for a new generation. It’s certainly either alarmingly original or originally alarming.”

Piano Piano by Davide Cali, illustrated by Éric Heliot, Charlesbridge, 2007
First published in France in 2005

When Charlesbridge offered me a chance to see some books from their catalog I was immediately drawn to the cover of Piano Piano. Heliot's strong opening image of a kid running down a keyboard just, well, struck a chord.

Marcolino practices the piano for several minutes a day. He would rather be doing ANYTHING else than playing the piano. When his mother tells him of her own missed opportunity of becoming a grand pianist, Marcolino practices for her. A visit with his grandfather reveals an interesting truth about his mother's piano dreams and helps him find the musical instrument that really defines him.

Héliot's illustrations give the story the perfect comic touch. His seemingly simple drawings convey the character's emotions perfectly. Marcolino's face as he sits at the piano is very familiar.

This story brought back such memories of my own childhood piano lessons and adult regrets of wishing I had practiced more. It also evoked parental memories of herding my own children back to the piano bench.

This book is for kids who are looking for their own musical instrument and parents who express their own dreams through their children.

Honky-Tonk Heroes & Hillbilly Angels: the Pioneers of Country & Western Music, words by Holly George-Warren, pictures by Laura Levine, Houghton Mifflin, 2006

I was a fan of Warren and Levine's first collaboration, Shake, Rattle and Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll so I was ever so pleased to see them take up this music. Holly George Warren certainly has the bona fides to write about the subject.

A book like this reminds me of how much fun a school librarian can have with lesson plans. I can imagine using this to teach "Biography" and sharing these musicians' music along with their stories. Kids today sing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" but have they ever heard of Gene Autry? Shouldn't they experience the musical virtuosity of Bill Monroe?

Warren has a one page biography on each artist with important dates and milestones from their life and career. She begins the book, appropriately, at the beginning, with a profile on the Carter family.

Laura Levine has painted a full page portrait of each musician with their name worked into the art work. Each member of the Carter family is designated along with "The First Family of Country Music." Bill Monroe is titled "The Father of Bluegrass" and Loretta Lynn's "The Coal Miner's Daughter" appears in the smoke plume coming from a small cabin. Each painting is featured in a period frame so you feel as if you are looking at a grouping of family pictures.

All the greats are included: Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubbs, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and more.

I think it would be so much fun during Rodeo time here in the Lone Star State, to turn on some Western (we call it Texas) Swing and share the story of Bob Wills.

Holly George-Warren Website

The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven by Jonah Winter, pictures by Barry Blitt. Schwartz & Wade Books, 2006.

This book begins with a musical score in Beethoven's own hand. The end papers are an actual photograph of Beethoven's working manuscript for the Grosse Fuge in B flat major, Op. 134.

Jonah Winter recounts the story of Beethoven’s pianos and the thirty-nine apartments where he lived in Vienna. So often children's "non-fiction" blurs the line between fact and speculation. Not so in this book. Winter clearly identifies what is fact and what is conjecture and does so with great humor.

Diaries, eviction notices, physical evidence and piano movers' notes are used as a basis for the story he tells. Why did Ludwig change apartments so frequently? Well, there is some evidence to suggest the neighbors complained. As Beethoven moves from place to place, Winter chronicles the music that was composed there. An author's note at the end gives additional information about his deafness and the amazing fact that he composed his magnificent Ninth Symphony after he had completely lost his hearing.

Barry Blitt's illustrations lift the story to a new level. We first see Beethoven as a baby crying in Gothic letters, "wha wha wha WHA." He accurately and humorously depicts the difficulties and incredible logistics involved in moving pianos to the new apartments, over rooftops, through windows and through walls. The composer's effect on his neighbors is depicted in a cross-section where we see the neighbors living above, below and next door to him reacting to the noise coming from his apartment in the middle. Babies cry, dogs bark and people pound on the floor, ceiling and walls as Beethoven plays.

This book is a must have for music teachers, piano teachers and students of music. What a treat!