Formerly Known as a Zine

Divergent, by Veronica Roth

2012-02-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

I am going back to YA Book Club for Adults--okay, "Adult Young Adult Book Club of Portland," which sounds very unwieldy to me. But yeah. I don't know if you can just go here to join the Facebook group or what. But anyway, I was going with Shelley for a while, then fell off & haven't gone since last summer. But I want to start going again! I like it. So this month they're reading Divergent, by Veronica Roth, and Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver. Lauren Oliver wrote Delirium, which I talked about here, and I'm still reading Before I Fall and liking it a lot more than expected. But I read Divergent first, because it's due back at the library first, and I liked it a lot except then I was annoyed to realize that it's the first in a series--and it's the only one that's been written so far! I don't like waiting.

But it was fun. Dystopic, set in what used to be Chicago, the story of a society in which, at sixteen, everyone chooses to belong to one of five factions of the city, "each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue--Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent)" (quoting from the inside cover copy). Just about everyone stays with the section they grew up in, both because it's the culture they've been raised in, and because the sections are separate enough that if you leave, you won't have contact with your family or childhood friends anymore. In fact, a big motto is "Faction Before Family."

This is the story of Beatrice going through initiation into the Dauntless faction, when she grew up in Abnegation. I think Roth does a nice job of showing us the ways in which Beatrice and the other transfer initiates see the world differently because of how they grew up. We are reminded that they transferred because they didn't belong where they grew up. At one point Beatrice--Tris, once she transfers--says, as the narrator of her own story:

I feel more like myself. That is all I need: to remember who I am. And I am someone who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near-death experiences stop her.

It is, of course, a coming of age story. It's a nice one. I'm excited to read more books set in this world, even if I'm annoyed that I have to wait.

Chulito, by Charles Rice-González

2012-02-08T17:53:00.000-08:00

I recently read Chulito, because it was on that same list that We the Animals was on. I bought it at Powell's, because the public library doesn't have it. I thought maybe I'd add it to my classroom library, but the first line is "Chulito awoke with a hard-on as usual," and I've already had myself drawn to my principal's attention too much. I love my job. So I figured I wouldn't put it in my classroom library, but would give it to a few students maybe, starting with Teddy, who's read everything Alex Sanchez has written--I recently gave him Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and he didn't love it nearly as much as I did, but I figure I'll keep sending books his way. So I gave it to Teddy, and he spent some time that same class period looking at it, then gave it back to me, saying "It seemed like all the other books." I don't know which books those are, because it didn't seem like all the other books to me. I don't know. I thought it was a sweet story about Chulito coming out to himself, realizing how he feels towards a childhood friend who is out and gay and it's an issue in the neighborhood. That neighborhood being Hunts Point, in the Bronx.

We the Animals by Justin Torres

2012-01-28T11:54:00.000-08:00

I read about this book here, and put it (among others) on hold at the library. This list could keep me reading all year. There are so many books!

But I read We the Animals, and loved it. It's one of those short tight little books with just so much in it.

Ugh. Okay, since finishing it, I've read a bunch of other stuff, so my impressions of it are fuzzy. But I loved it, read it fast, engrossed, and am excited to read more by Torres.

It's a book about family, about three boys and their dad and their mom:

A brass-handled mirror lay on the bureau, and as soon as Ma raised it to her face, tears came and sat on her eyelids, waiting to fall. Ma could hold tears on her eyelids longer than anyone; some days she walked around like that for hours, holding them there, not letting them drop. On those days she would trace her finger over the shapes of things or hold the telephone on her lap, silent, and you had to call her name three times before she'd give you her eyes.

And towards the end, one of the brothers--our main brother, the narrator--turns out to be different. His brothers "smelled my difference--my sharp, sad, pansy scent."

Also the brothers are halfies, with a white mom and a Puerto Rican dad.

I liked this book so much. I should've written about it right away.

Anne Fadiman

2012-01-02T19:46:00.000-08:00

I just finished Anne Fadiman's essay collection, At Large and At Small. Lovely. So nice to read "familiar essays" on a wide range of topics, and whether you care about the subject or not before you start reading, she gets you so interested. I put a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on hold because of her. A specific biography, but yeah. And I want to read more Charles Lamb now because of her.

Essays about ice cream, being a night owl, Procrustes (I didn't know who he was either), mail, coffee, and a bunch more. Plus none of these essays are about just one thing.

She also published Ex Libris, another collection of essays, and she edited Rereadings, seventeen essays by different writers revisiting books they love. These are both great. The first book I read by her, and the book for which she is best known, is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a really important book about culture and communication, among other things. It's on my fifty favorite books list, and I hope to teach it at some point. I do think every American should read it, and lots of people who aren't. It's one of the best books I've ever read about people trying to communicate across difference, and how hard that can be, even when everyone wants the same thing--in this case, for a sick little girl to get better.

Yay 2012, reading good books.

New Year

2011-12-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

It's almost 2012. I made it through 2011. When I moved back to Portland, I consulted with a neurosurgeon who was asking me about the history of the brain tumor, the surgery and radiation--he said something along the lines of, "Well, you've already outlived your life expectancy," meaning that I wasn't expected to survive as long as I had after going through the removal of the tumor, back in 2003.

Jerk. Who says that to somebody? Wouldn't it have been enough to say, "You're doing great?" That would've been enough for me.

Anyway. That was back in 2008. I'm still going strong. So poopy on you, Mr.--Dr.--Hotshot Neurosurgeon.

Planning to keep on going strong. Doing what I can, living my life.

Princess Ben

2011-12-26T07:58:00.000-08:00

I just read Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock--I love Dairy Queen so much, and the other books about D.J., so of course I wanted to read something else by her. I am happy about how entirely different it is, too. Dairy Queen and its sequels are realistic fiction, then suddenly I was reading Princess Ben, about princesses and kingdoms and magic and there's even a dragon! I see there's another novel set in the same kingdom that just came out a couple months ago--I want to read that one too. Putting it on hold at the library now! (Reading more about that book, Wisdom's Kiss, I discovered that Princess Ben is in it--as the grandma!)

I guess I read a fair amount of fantasy--I started to write, "I don't really read much fantasy" but realized that isn't really true--but I don't feel like I quite understand the conventions of it, and I don't know if this novel would meet all the expectations of someone more well-versed in the genre. I know it doesn't quite work that way--but yeah. I know it's fantasy, so you can set the rules of your world, and you just have to be consistent about it, which I think Murdock does. I don't know. I should look up reviews of Princess Ben.

Huh, Amazon lists it as "Historical Fiction." Wow. Interesting. Google Books has it under "Fairy Tales and Folklore," which seems more accurate. Many other sites list it as both of these, and as "Fantasy" as well.

A fun, quick read. Looking forward to reading the follow-up, spending more time in this world with another generation of princesses.

More YA

2011-12-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

I finally read the last two books on Julianna Baggott's list for NPR, "Hooray for YA: Teen Novels for Readers of All Ages." I talk about the first three here, here and here. Of the five, I really liked three of them (Ten Miles Past Normal, Flipped, and Delirium), really didn't like one (Trapped), and had a lot of problems with one (Karma). I might have found Ten Miles Past Normal and Delirium on my own, but I probably wouldn't've read the other three. So. All in all, good.

Trapped is about seven kids who get stuck at their school when a blizzard starts. The blizzard lasts a week.

Delirium is a dystopian novel about a United States in which they've found the cure for love, and everyone undergoes a sort of vaccine when they come of age. They're then partnered up for marriage. Each chapter has a fabulous and terrifying epigraph from a book of the era, many from The Book of Shhh, which is what everyone calls The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook. Love is a condition known as amor deliria nervosa, and sometimes teenagers have to get their procedure moved up because of it--but "the procedure" is apparently dangerous if you're under 18, though they've mostly got it down now and it rarely causes permanent brain damage. If you don't count the general zoned-out-edness and lack of emotion shown by those who've had it as brain damage. Which Lena doesn't, until she starts to question things, in that way of teenagers in dystopian novels everywhere.

I liked this book a lot. Very well done. I don't seem to have much more to say about it right now.

Emily, Alone

2011-12-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

I love Stewart O'Nan. I've read many of his novels, though strangely I've never been systematic about it like I usually am when I find a writer I really like, reading their collected works. I think it's partly because many of O'Nan's books have been really creepy. But it might be time to make sure I've read all his books, because even when they're creepy, they're so good.

Emily, Alone isn't creepy. And apparently it's a sequel--I don't think I've read Wish You Were Here, but this novel completely worked on its own.

I don't feel enough on top of O'Nan's oeuvre to generalize about his writing (beyond saying that I haven't read all his books because lots of them were creepy), but two things that impressed me so much about this novel were how believable the narrator's voice is--and she's an elderly woman, while O'Nan is a middle-aged guy--and how clearly set in Pittsburgh it is, how much Pittsburgh as a place is important to the story.

It's a novel about getting old, about Emily's shifting relationships with her children, about Emily's friends dying off and her dog growing decrepit.

It's a novel about Emily and what is important to her--and music is so important, classical music on the radio or on the stereo not often center stage, but often present and noted, a big part of her world.

She "married up," and she notes about her parents that

They had struggled to achieve and maintain their middle-class respectability in the face of a depression and a world war, a feat Emily thought was lost on her own children, accustomed to an affluence that must have seemed their birthright as much as it had been Henry's [her late husband] and Arlene's [her sister-in-law--and one of her few remaining friends], born to fortune.

The book is set during the 2008 presidential election, and Emily, a life-long Republican, votes for McCain almost in spite of herself. Her sister-in-law is excited to vote for Hillary Clinton:

Early on, Arlene had made it plain she was voting for Hillary, and, as a woman, was thrilled to have the opportunity. Emily, who saw the Clintons' marriage as the very worst kind of compromise, regarded Hillary as the opposite of a role model. She understood Arlene's excitement in finally having a viable woman candidate. Too bad she happened to be Lady Macbeth.

Ha, ha, ha.

She's dubious about Obama--"He'd been a senator for less than two years, and all Emily heard out of his mouth were platitudes. What maddened her was how the media compared him to Jack Kennedy, as if that were a good thing."

But she has her reservations about McCain, too:

She would have been happier voting for John McCain if he wasn't so gung ho about the war. And if he hadn't been one of the Keating Five. And if he hadn't run out on his first wife after her accident.

The novel ends with Emily and Arlene (and Rufus, the dog) going to Chautauqua for their week in the summer. It ends with Emily keeping on trucking, a nice ending for a book that is so much about mortality and Emily wondering why she's still around when her children are grown, her husband is dead, her friends have mostly died. But in the midst of these moments of wondering why she's around, she is still enjoying her life, and we see that here: her weekly trips with Arlene to the breakfast buffet with coupons, her phone calls from the children and their occasional visits, her reading, her love of her summer garden.

The Hugo Movie Companion

2011-12-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

I love the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret so much--I was very nervous about the movie, but knowing that the author, Brian Selznick, liked the movie, made me less nervous. Then it came out and I saw it and I did really like it. I blogged about it here.

I heard there was a book about the making of the movie, so I put it on hold at the library--now that I've read it, I want my own copy. Plus I want to put a copy in my classroom library. It's got a $19.99 sticker so we'll see when that happens, but not only is it a beautiful book, but Selznick wrote it so it's beautifully written, and it would be of more interest to someone who'd read The Invention of Hugo Cabret and seen the movie, but the subtitle is "A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture," and I think it would be of interest to many people who maybe even hadn't seen or read Hugo Cabret.

First of all, like I said, it's a beautiful book. Tons of full page photos of scenes from the movie and the filming of the movie, of the fabulous double page illustrations from the book, of sketches and floor plans and pages from the script and the score and from people's notes related to the movie--including lots of images related to the automatons: photos and blueprints and related images (there were fifteen different automatons used in the film! I had no idea. There is so much I'll look for when I see Hugo again), and of other images related to the images in the books--old automatons, and stills from related films, and the real George Méliès in his toy booth, and a diagram from the Cinémathèque Française showing exactly the angles and placement of the fish tank to film through the tank so that the mermaids appeared underwater in Méliès' Kingdom of Fairies. At first I thought maybe there were too many photos, but then I didn't think that anymore. Also, the book is so perfectly designed--I love the full bleed printing, sheer to the edge of the page--and it's great to get to see some of these images in such proximity to each other.

But it's a book about how a movie is made, including profiles of/interviews with the Production Designer, Set Decorator, Props Master, and many others. I also love the "Biographies" section at the end, especially seeing what other films some of the behind the scenes people worked on. For instance, many of them were involved with the film of Sweeney Todd, which made me smile. Anyway, I imagined lots of, "Oh, Helen! Haven't seen you since the last Harry Potter opening in London!" when shooting began on Hugo. It was also cool to see how many people have worked on so many projects with "Marty" Scorsese. He has a team, for sure. A hell of a team.

I'm even more eager to reread the book now. The last chapter of The Hugo Movie Companion focuses on the shooting of the final scene of the movie, which is a great idea for many reasons, not least of which it's the scene Selznick had a cameo in (and a line!)--but he talks about how the ending of the book is different from the end of the movie, which registered, but I want to look at them both more closely.

So yeah. Read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, see the movie, and read The Hugo Movie Companion. Ideally in that order, I think, but not necessarily.

Chuck Klosterman

2011-12-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

Friday was the last day of our non-fiction unit, and we read Chuck Klosterman's great essay "Me, On Shuffle."

We read it out loud, then listened to excerpts of some of the songs he talks about: Humble Pie's "I Don't Need No Doctor," Motley Crue’s “Ten Seconds to Love,” AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way To the Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll)" (OMG if I never hear those bagpipes again it will be too soon!), Guns N’ Roses "Rocket Queen," Kate Bush's "Heathcliff," the Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind," REM's "Nightswimming," and The Carpenters, "Superstar." We talked about it a little, then listened to the clips again.

The first time I did this, I made the mistake of leaving enough of the YouTube screen visible on the InFocus (go here if you haven't been in school in a while, or are somewhere without the access to technology I'm so lucky to have this year--basically, instead of an overhead, I can project my computer screen up onto where the overhead would've projected!) and of course my students said, "Let us see the videos! We wanna watch the videos!" I said, "The essay's about music, not about videos, we're not watching the videos" but yeah, damage done, huge distraction created. So the next classes got fewer glimpses, and they were especially curious about the "Heathcliff" video. So I ended my classes on the day before break with a showing of a really old Kate Bush video!

Toy Dance Party

2011-12-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

My insomniac self just finished reading Toy Dance Party, by Emily Jenkins (illustrated by the fabulous Paul O. Zelinsky). Toy Dance Party is the sequel to Toys Go Out, which I read back in October. I loved this one too. Toy Dance Party is about a lot of things--the washing machine is a major character!--and among them, it's about the little girl of the house growing up, showing more interest in her Barbies, which don't even talk to the other toys, than in the stuffed animals and plastic ball who used to mean so much to her.

Fun, strange, excellent books.

Ready Player One

2011-12-08T19:57:00.001-08:00

I crashed my motor scooter Monday, requiring some emergency dental surgery (I broke a tooth) and lots of rest. I did need the rest, but I was also in no rush to go back to school and have my students make fun of my split lip. So I slept for a couple days, got the tooth fixed, and now it's Thursday and here I go.

I also read a ton while I was lying around. That was the only good thing about this experience, frankly. No--I'm sure my sunny self could find other good things, like the awesome guy at United Fire, Health and Safety, the business I crashed in front of, who took me and my scooter in and took care of us. Etcetera. But anyway--the reading part was great too. I finished A Better Angel on Monday, Flip on Tuesday, and read all of Ready Player One yesterday. Maybe I started it Tuesday night--it's long--but yeah.

This is not the kind of book I'm usually into--I guess it might be called "hard sci-fi." Last year I read all of Pat Murphy's books--this was akin to those, I suppose. Except different. Written in 2011, feeling very written in 2011, and about a multibillionaire who was a teenager in the 1980's. It feels as though it's by someone of my generation but a couple years older--and yes, it was. I googled him--Cline was born in 1972. I was born in 1976. So this explains how his view of the 1980's is more firmly set in the earlier part of the decade, before I discovered pop radio in middle school in 1987. My 1980's were more about George Michael and Madonna than Oingo Boingo and The Alan Parsons Project (I forgot about this awesome blog, that features The Book Notes series, where writers create and discuss music playlists that relate in some way to their books). Also, video games were barely on my radar. I remember occasionally playing with someone's Nintendo at a slumber party, but I never had a Nintendo or anything of that sort, and I didn't care so much. I might have played a video game once or twice at a bowling alley or something, but eh. And this book is maybe 55% about video games? Maybe 65%? Anyway, Cline is reading on December 17 at Ground Kontrol, which I have grown to love thanks to my obsession with pinball, but I don't play many video games there, except with Sierra and Miles--watching them playing the driving games is almost more fun than pinball, and the PacMan cocktail table game (lingo I have added to my vocabulary thanks to Ready Player One) with them is a blast.

Many of the same movies were important to me as figure largely in Ready Player One: the John Hughes oeuvre specifically. And Ghostbusters. Though Ghostbusters was more important to one of the characters in this novel than it ever was to me. And many of the same writers: Vonnegut specifically, Douglas Adams, Bradbury, Tolkien. Plus lots of more sci-fi and fantasy writers I was never into: Neal Stephenson, Terry Brooks, Heinlein...

Anyway, the book was so much fun. It's basically about a future (2044) that is even grimmer and poorer than today. James Halliday, a very rich guy--one of the designers of OASIS, basically the next generation of the internet--dies and leaves his entire fortune to the person who can solve the series of puzzles he's left behind. Our hero, Wade, who lives in a stack of trailers twenty-two trailers high (gas got too unreasonable, so people "desperate for work, food, electricity, and reliable OASIS access--had fled their dying small towns and had used the last of their gasoline ... to haul their families, RVs, and trailer homes to the nearest metropolis"), is one of the "gunters" obsessed with solving James Halliday's puzzles.

It's a good story. Even if you're not into sci-fi and/or video games, it's compelling and fast-moving and well-told. The one thing that annoys me is when Wade finds out that another gunter, also one of the leaders in the contest, and someone who's been a close friend of his for a long time in OASIS, although they've never met in real life, is different from how he's presented himself online. When Wade learns this, the reader is told that he "loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation." I just don't buy that. I'd like to, but I'm not sure I can.

But this huge revelation is never any kind of issue ever. Not sure how much it would fit into the narrative if it was, but still.

Otherwise an awesome, fun book. Highly recommended.

A Better Angel

2011-12-06T21:19:00.000-08:00

As I discussed in an earlier post, I read a great collection of fairy tales retold, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and I went on to look for more work by several of the writers who had stories included. One of these was Chris Adrian, who got his MFA from Iowa, went on to med school, then got a master's at Harvard Divinity School. So he writes, but he is also (primarily) a pediatrician. I liked his story a lot in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, but I was also just curious about him. I liked this interview, in which he says, among other things, "I think I sound fancier than I actually am. I’ve just tried a lot of different stuff, but I’m not necessarily very good at any of it," when the interviewer says, "Well, I thought we should get out of the way that you’re probably self-conscious about how accomplished you are in general. I read a quote somewhere that you were cautioning people not to think that you were smarter than you are."

I read a collection of his stories that came out in 2008. It was nice to read a collection of stories. I should do that more often. I liked these stories a lot--many of them concerned hospitals and illness, many of them were somehow about children, and many of them had things in them like angels and visions and the anti-
Christ. They are strange and wonderful. I'm looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

Flip

2011-12-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

Just finished another book on Julianna Baggott's list for NPR, "Hooray for YA: Teen Novels for Readers of All Ages." So now I've read three of the five: Flip, Ten Miles Past Normal, and Karma. I'd put the other two on hold from the library, but I picked them up then had to bring them back before I had a chance to read them because they both had holds on them and I was busy with other books. I'll try again with both of those--the others have been great. I loved Flip. It's a boys-switching-bodies story that I found to be completely convincing and moving. It rings true, and I feel like it does a nice job of addressing the sorts of questions that aren't always addressed in such situations. Questions I'd have about what happens when friends or family reference common memories that the body switcher wasn't around to share... the relationship between the people who switched... I don't know. Just questions.

A fun book that wasn't nearly what I'd expected, in many excellent ways.

Hugo

2011-12-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

Laurel and I saw Hugo this week--and it was frankly pretty great. I love the book it's based on--The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick--so much, and I was very nervous about one of my favorite books being made into a movie, but I heard that Selznick was really happy with it, plus it's such a book that's asking to be a movie--it's so visual, and it's so about film. The movie does a lovely job of using footage talked about (and pictured in drawings) in the book, and it makes me happy to have that footage in a movie that people who might not have seen it will see (and those who have seen it will be happy to see it again)--Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of the clock in Safety Last!--which fits into Hugo in many ways--several clips and references to The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, and plenty of others including lots of Melies. The actors are great, the script is great, of course it's not the same as the book and I'll always love the book, but the movie does a fabulous job of telling the story of the book, but telling it as a movie. If that makes sense. I guess the movie isn't really quite telling the story of the book--it's telling its own story, closely related but well suited to its medium.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

2011-11-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

I read a great collection of "new fairy tales," edited by Kate Bernheimer, of fairy tales retold, reconceived, and new. Many of these stories--all by different writers, and such a wide range, including of course many I haven't heard of (I've put several books on hold since I started this book, wanting to read more by some of these writers!)--is a retelling of a classic story, or some kind of reworking of the story--but some of them are new fairy tales, maybe playing with some elements of the classics.

I know most of the stories that are being played with, but I've discovered some new ones:

Donkey Skin: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault11.html
The White Cat: http://mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/310.htm

Highly recommended collection. Lots of fun. Always so interesting to see which elements writers pull out of familiar stories, and so much fun to read fairy tales based on stories I don't know or don't know as well.

There's a "Snow White" with no Snow White, only dwarves--this might be one of my favorites. Francine Prose wrote a strange beautiful unexpected "Hansel and Gretel." There are a couple awesome and very different "Rumpelstiltskin"s, a fabulous "Swan Brothers" (I did always love "The Swan Brothers," and it is such an odd story, really), and on and on and on.

The mothers and fathers in fairy tales are so weird. It's great. Nice to see certain elements highlighted or addressed at a literal level.

I'm going to reread and read lots of fairy tales now. Some more. Again. After I read Emily, Alone, by Stewart O'Nan, which I got off the "Lucky Picks" shelf so I won't be able to renew it, and In Cold Blood, which is this month's bookclub book. Then (and honestly, probably in between), fairytales.

Wonder Struck, by Brian Selznick

2011-11-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

I loved Selznick's previous novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Loved it so much that it shot up into my canon almost instantly. It is even on my 50 Favorite Books List.

So I had unfairly high expectations for Wonder Struck. I was almost certain to be disappointed. And I was. I was disappointed that I didn't want to read it again immediately. That's an unreasonable expectation, but that's how I felt about Hugo.

I am excited to reread Wonder Struck, though. Maybe in a month or two. It's the same fabulous confluence of text and image telling the story--though for much of Wonder Struck, there is one story told in text and the other in image, which frankly I didn't like. We'll see if it grows on me. They are related stories, and they come together beautifully in the end. I don't know.

So Wonder Struck is a wonderful book. I'm not sure yet if it's a great book. It's no Hugo Cabret, that's for sure. But who would really want it to be? That would've been disappointing too. I'm happy with how different a story it is, and I have to give Selznick props for telling what is in many ways a more ambitious story. So yeah. Read it. It's awesome. It's not on my top 50, but only 50 books are.

Matt de la Peña

2011-10-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, Matt de la Peña gave the 2011 Multnomah County Library Teen Author Lecture. I didn't know there was such a thing, and was glad to see a link to the press release on the library website the day before. I would've been so sad to miss it.

But they publicized it somehow, because there were a lot of people there. There were a lot of students and a lot of teachers--it was an evening thing, though, so I was trying to figure that one out. They were older students--late teens--maybe part of a program like Portland Youth Builders...?

Anyway. It wasn't really a lecture. He talked about his books, and read a little bit from Mexican White Boy, and was clearly excited about the crowd and the demographics of the crowd (lots of Latino kids--holding his books!). He asked whose grandmas made tortillas, and lots of hands shot up. He said something along the lines of, "Well you know how grandma gives the first tortilla to the most important person, and then it goes down the ranks?" and he talked about how after he'd gone to college, he got the first tortilla, and he felt bad and like it should've gone to one of his uncles, but it was because he got an education. He also talked about being the first in his family to go to college--he said, "Who here will be the first in their family to go to college?" and lots of hands went up. He said, "Well I want to tell you guys something--" and he proceeded to talk about how much going to college alienated him from his family for a long time, how they treated him differently and related to him differently, but he said, "Eventually you'll figure out how to be a part of the family, and it'll be okay again. It'll be hard for a while, but then it will be okay again."

I'd never heard anyone say that to a group of students before, and it's so important. How many first-generation college students drop out for exactly the reasons he was talking about? It must be so scary to be in a community different from anything you've known, and then to also be alienated from everything you've ever known. But he was matter-of-fact about it, and I thought he was pretty cool before seeing him speak, but now--yeah.

He told a lot of stories. He talked about how reading The Color Purple his sophomore year of college was what turned him into a reader, but he wrote a letter to Alice Walker and she sent it back unopened because she doesn't read fan mail, so he doesn't really like her. I think he must've poured his heart into that letter.

Anyway. It was an evening well-spent. He and the audience were both excellent--though I wanted to yank headphones out of some ears. Oh, high school kids.

Karma, by Cathy Ostlere

2011-10-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

I read my second novel off Julianna Baggott's list for NPR, "Hooray for YA: Teen Novels for Readers of All Ages." I just finished Cathy Ostlere's Karma, which I almost didn't finish. I almost didn't finish it because I felt weird about this story being written by a white woman. It's a fascinating story, with a great setting that I'd never seen in fiction, but it didn't feel like Cathy Ostlere's story to tell.

It's the story of an Indian-Canadian girl who goes "back" to India with her dad, bearing her mother's ashes. It's 1984, and they are in New Delhi when Indira Gandhi is murdered. She is killed by Sikhs, and Maya is half-Sikh, half-Hindi--her father is a Sikh, and suddenly there are riots and Sikhs are being killed all over New Delhi.

Her father leaves her in their hotel room when he goes to try and get help from an old friend--but he doesn't come back.

So this is the story of what happens to her.

Is it weird that I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for what is an engaging story, because of who wrote it? Would I like it more if it had been written by an Indian-Canadian author? Except I don't think it would be the same book if it had been written by an Indian-Canadian author. Though Ostlere clearly did her research, somehow this doesn't totally ring true to me. Obviously others disagree--she got great reviews. Is this weird that this felt like such an issue for me?

I was trying to think of an example of something that didn't ring true, and here's one. Maya's mother killed herself. No mention is ever made of the Hindu standpoint on suicide, and that doesn't seem to be a factor in bringing the mother's ashes back to India, where Maya and her father will have to deal with the mom's family, who already don't like Maya's dad because he's Sikh. At least, it's never mentioned--and granted, the book is written as a journal, so maybe Maya wouldn't have had anything to say about it--but--I don't know. She is clearly grieving, but--yeah.

Anyway. I liked this book, but am not sure how much I liked it, and am also not sure how much my not loving it has to do with the fact that I feel like the author was really writing a story both outside her experience, but also perhaps writing a story that wasn't hers to write. This is something I've thought about a lot--who gets to tell which stories, whose stories--and I clearly haven't figured it out yet.

I keep thinking about who I think would have the right to tell this story. It's fiction. Do I think the writer would have to be Indian? Maybe an Indian couldn't tell this story either. Maybe s/he would have to be Indian-Canadian. But would s/he have had to be in New Delhi for the riots when Indira Gandhi was killed? Maybe Ostler was--according to her website, she was traveling in 1984, and that's when she went to India.

I don't know.

First Day on Earth

2011-10-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

Before Mockingjay came out, I emailed Scholastic to ask them to send me a copy of it to review for my blog. They did, and I'm now on their list, which is fabulous! They just sent me First Day on Earth, by Cecil Castellucci, whose name is so familiar to me though I don't think I've read any of her other books. She co-edited the anthology Geektastic, which I loved, but I don't think that's why her name is dinging in my brain. My guess is that I read a story she wrote in a magazine ages ago, and her name is memorable. Somehow I feel like I read one of her stories in Sassy or Seventeen back in the day.

Anyway. I liked this book a lot, and I already told a student about it and am going to loan it to him on Monday now that I've finished it. This student went off in class last week about having been homeless and how hard it is and how people don't understand. All of which is true, I'm sure, but the class looked at him, confused, because what he was saying was very tangentially related to our discussion, about "The Kicking Queen," an article from the New York Times about the only girl on her school's football team elected homecoming queen. Somehow what he said started off being related to the conversation (which was awesome, by the way, with some football player boys chiming in about how cool it was, and some other school athletes noting that usually really athletic girls don't get elected homecoming queen... it was a good conversation) but then it wasn't related, and I know I wasn't the only one who realized he just had to say what he had to say.

So I think he might like this book. Others will like it too, but I thought of him first.

The main character, Malcolm, narrates the story, and in the first brief chapter, we learn that he has "been to outer space and back again." The first chapter ends, "...one day, I'm going with them. And I'm going to be free."

We meet his drunk mom, hear about his father who left, go to an Al-Anon meeting with Malcolm--and then he walks into the wrong room, goes to the wrong meeting: it's a group for people who have been abducted by aliens.

This is a short book that covers a lot of territory. No pun intended, really. Anyway, I liked it. I'll be glad to add it to my classroom library, and I'll read more by her, for sure.

Anna to the Infinite Power

2011-10-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

I loved this book when I was a kid. I read it over and over--checked it out from the library, again and again--and I thought it was so creepy and great. Then there was a thread on the child_lit listserv about books in which children participate in a scientific/social experiment. Her given examples were "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, The Giver or, of course, The Hunger Games." Someone mentioned Anna, and I thought "How could I have forgotten about it?!" So I put it on hold at the library.

It was published in 1981. It's by Mildred Ames.

It was amazing upon reread, but it wasn't at all the book I remembered. Or I should say--I didn't really remember it, but even after rereading it, I didn't remember it like that! I remembered something about clones, and that it was creepy.

This, also (like my last post), is a book about the Holocaust, sort of. If you're going to put The Book Thief on the same shelf with The Diary of Anne Frank, this one might belong there too. Oddly.

It's aged very well, I think. It's sci fi, so their ideas about the future--i.e. now--are very 1984, in how it's so clearly a future seen through the perspective of that moment. (How else could you see the future?) But I liked it. I think I'll read it again. I want to keep thinking about it. It's easy to dismiss sci fi set in a future that's now the past--the 1990's, say--but it's interesting to think about how, sure, she was wrong about a lot of the technology stuff--but she was thinking about reproductive technology, and making guesses about that. It went a different way than in the novel, but... yeah.

I never know how to talk about a book without telling the story of it. And I could tell the story of it. But I'm not. I want you to find this and read it. It's out of print, but my library had it, and Amazon has fifteen used copies for sale. I might be buying one. Probably not from them, but--yeah.

The Book Thief

2011-10-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished The Book Thief, ten years (well, five years) after everybody else. I loved the last third of it, but I'd set it down once before soon after starting it, and I forced myself through this time, interested in it if not fully engaged, and figuring that if everyone else loved it so much, it had to be worth reading. I'm extremely annoyed by the blurb on the back from the USA Today review: "Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank..." looking at that full review now, though, I see that the reviewer also notes that "the first forty or so pages are dismal and tough to slog through."

Anyway the blurb annoys me because this book has so little in common with Anne Frank, really. The protagonists are about the same age, and both are set during WWII and have a lot to do with Nazis persecuting Jews. But one is fiction, one non-fiction; one is the story of a German girl in Germany, the other is the story of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam. I love Anne Frank, but this is such a different book in so many ways. One is narrated by death, the other by Anne Frank.

Though I guess, yeah, in your own personal library, you might put them on the same shelf.

Ten Miles Past Normal, Toys Go Out

2011-10-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Author Julianna Baggott posted a link on the child_lit listserv I'm on, to a recent article she did for NPR: "Hooray for YA: Teen Novels for Readers of All Ages." I, of course, immediately put all of them (there's only five) on hold at the library. So far I've only read Ten Miles Past Normal, by Frances O'Roark Dowell. This was partly because of Baggott's review, partly because of the inside cover text, largely because of the cover.

This is one of those nicely balanced books that good YA and every kind of good book has to be: about much more than just living in the country, about much more than just being fourteen, about much more than learning to play bass, about much more than realizing that your best friend since elementary school is actually kind of annoying and maybe you don't have so much in common anymore. All of these elements--and much more--make up this funny sweet completely accurate little book about one experience of being a fourteen-year-old girl--very specific to Janie's life, but also universal, of course.

And I love that in fourth-grade, she went on a field trip to an organic farm, came home and told her parents they should "move to an organic farm and raise goats." She has presented other ideas to her parents in the past: "Let's keep a horse in the backyard! Let's adopt a homeless person!" and her parents always reject them, so she doesn't expect her mother to get "...very quiet. She looked at my father, her eyes sort of glimmering, a dreamy expression on her face."

"Eight months later, we were farmers." And when she starts high school four years later, living on a farm is cramping her social life: "And suddenly I realized that living on a farm was weird. Milking goats and pushing a chickenmobile around the yard every morning, dumping eggshells and coffee grounds into the composter every night after the dishes were done. Knowing way too much about manure and fertilizers and the organic way to grow bok choy. What kind of normal teenage girl lived this way?"

---

Then this morning I read Toys Go Out; Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, A Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic, by Emily Jenkins--illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky! It's a short chapter book; six stories presenting the adventures of three of the beloved friends of the Little Girl, two stuffed animals and Plastic, who discovers what he is over the course of the story. I loved it. Yay anthropomorphism and becoming friends with the scary washing machine in the basement and going to the beach.

50 Favorite Books

2011-09-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Emma Straub posted a link on Facebook to the blog of a St. Paul bookstore, Micawber's Books, that has undertaken a great project: publishing the top 50 books of a book seller at every independent bookstore that cares to participate. Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books, explains the project here. His list is here, and he explains the project a little more, explaining that "My question was to list either a Top 50 or 50 favorite books to handsell. Out of print, new, all manner of genres, etc. Everything was fair game. Some booksellers/stores placed their own restrictions and I will list them as appropriate. Also noted is the fact that most people chose to list the books alphabetically by author and not do a ranking. I've done my best to compile them as nearest as possible to the way in which they were sent to me either by e-mail or handwritten letter(bless you, Mr. Joseph DeSalvo)."

There was a nice little article on his project in Publisher's Weekly, too!

I've been interested to see where children's books show up, and which titles.

So of course I've been trying to make a list of my own. Not being a bookseller, it's just my fifty top books. Fifty favorite books is so much harder than one hundred influential writers. This is the draft as it now stands, in the order in which I thought of them:

My 50 Favorite Books Ever

1. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
2. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
3. The Letters of Flannery O’Connor
4. A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
5. Walt Whitman’s Complete Poems
6. Kindred, by Octavia Butler
7. The Collected Essays of James Baldwin
8. The Adventures of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick
9. The BFG, by Roald Dahl
10. The Search for Delicious, by Natalie Babbitt
11. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
12. Ramona Quimby, Age 8, by Beverly Cleary
13. Dear Mr. Henshaw, by Beverly Cleary
14. Ramona and Her Mother, by Beverly Cleary
15. Ramona and Her Father, by Beverly Cleary
16. Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst, by Lois Lowry
17. Anastasia Has the Answers, by Lois Lowry
18. Grimms’ Fairy Tales
19. Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
20. Drown, by Junot Diaz
21. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
22. Pastoralia, by George Saunders
23. The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
24. The Selected Stories of Alice Munro
25. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
26. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
27. The Best of Marlys, by Lynda Barry
28. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman
29. The Trumpet of the Swan, by E.B. White
30. Mariette in Ecstasy, by Ron Carson
31. Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh
32. A Bargain for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoben
33. Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoben
34. D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths
35. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
36. Angels in America, by Tony Kushner
37. Morris’s Disappearing Bag, by Rosemary Wells
38. The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats
39. The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston
40. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
41. Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown
42. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
43. Ship Fever, by Andrea Barnett
44. The Stories of Ray Bradbury
45. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, by Walter Mosley
46. Walkin’ the Dog, by Walter Mosley
47. Alabanza, by Martin Espada (Collected Poems)
48. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (translated by Anne Carson)
49. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie
50. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

Yeah, I stuck The Things They Carried on at the end, influenced by all of the lists on the Mr. Micawber site--but I have loved teaching it, and students love it too. It's not one of those books you like, but it's amazing.

Mare's War, by Tanita S. Davis

2011-07-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

I just read an awesome book, one I pulled off the shelf at the library: "Featured." I get so many recommendations from friends that it's rare I'll just pick up a random book I've never heard of--but this one has a great cover, too, which always helps.

Two teenage sisters have to go on a roadtrip with their grandma, from California to Alabama for a family reunion.

The book is mostly the story of their trip--chapters alternated between "now" and "then": their grandma, Mare, telling stories of her days in the 6888th Battalion, the one colored battalion to serve overseas in the Women's Army Corps, or WAC, during World War II.

So it's historical fiction, but it's also the story of two teenage sisters trying to get along on a long car trip, and it's the story of granddaughters learning more about the life of their grandmother who Octavia (the sister narrating the "now" part of the story) describes as "scary... because I never know what she's going to do next."

Really, it's mostly learning about Mare. Mare's war, but also her life, and making some sense out of who she is and why.

I'm going to buy a copy for my classroom library. I want lots of people to read this book.

Winter's Tale

2011-07-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

I finally finished Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin. It's 748 pages long, and I was really into it for the first half, then I had to read some other stuff and try to figure out what I wanted to teach next year (Flight, by Sherman Alexie!), and when I came back to it, I wasn't as into it. The last two hundred pages were rough going--but it's hard to give up on a book when you've put that much time into it. Plus there continued to be a lot I loved. But the book spans a hundred years, and I liked a lot of the characters in the beginning, but wasn't as interested in or engaged in some of the later characters.

Also, the book is mostly set in NYC, and when the book opens, it is the NYC of the early 20th century--but the end of the book is set in what was the future when it was published in 1983, but I lived through the turn of the millennium, and there was so much hype (remember that, folks?), that while it was interesting to read Helprin's take on what it would be like (in this weird sort-of-NYC fantasy world he creates), I'm also really over it.

I was telling a friend about this book, and she said, "So it's fantasy?" Another friend, who'd also read it, said immediately, "Yeah. Not like unicorns and stuff, but it's fantasy." I said, "No it's not!" and the friend who'd also read it just looked at me. I said, "Okay, I guess it kind of is. I guess it mostly is. Yeah, okay, I guess it is."

Helprin's world, in its weirdness, just feels so real--maybe I'd suspended disbelief that thoroughly. But there's a small upstate town that most people haven't heard of and can't find. There are ice-boats used as a regular mode of transportation. There's a magic horse. There's a man who lives a hundred years and doesn't age.

This is a book that will stay with me. And I loved how NY it was--and how much it was about the city evolving. I loved this description of the hundred-year-old man wandering the Manhattan of the 90's:

...at the end of May and in early June he began to walk the city, to see what he might remember, and to note the changes. It was almost all glass and steel. The buildings seemed to him more like coffins than buildings. The windows didn't open. Some of the buildings had no windows. And their graceless and exaggerated height made the streets into wispy little threads strung together in a dark labyrinth. Only at night did they redeem themselves, and only at a distance--when their secretiveness, their inaccessibility, and their arrogance disappeared, and they bathed the city in light and shone like stained-glass cathedrals turned inside out. Oppressed by the size and the power of the city's architecture, he found for himself a string of holy places (only one of which was a church) to which he could and did return time after time. He sensed there what seemed to him to be the remnants of the truth, and he returned to certain rooftops and alleys the way that lightning repeatedly strikes high steel towers in an argument between tenacity and speed.

I never thought about the city as a place of light, particularly. The New York City I know is that city of tall buildings. But of course it would have had so much more light before the skyscrapers.

What You See in the Dark, by Manuel Muñoz

2011-07-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

I don't understand why this novel just sunk and got no attention. I loved it. And I only found it because I went searching for something I could teach next year, ideally by a Chicano author. On someone's list, I ran across this title, and while I'm not going to teach it (not right now, anyway--though I think it would be so fun to teach! with the film tie-in... but yeah), I'm going to buy a copy for my classroom library, and I'm just so glad I read it. And glad it got written--glad someone wrote and published it. It's a strange little outside-the-box novel, several narrative threads tied together, set in Bakersfield, California in the late 1950s. One story is that of Janet Leigh, out with Alfred Hitchcock shooting scenes for Psycho. Another story is that of Arlene Watson, waitress at a local café, mother of Dan Watson, local heartthrob. Dan is dating Teresa, a local Chicana girl. Everything ties together and it's creepy enough that I'm reluctant to say more. But read it--a quick, fun, interesting read.

In his awesome bio on his website, Muñoz says he grew up in California's Central Valley, in a family that worked in the fields, and he was a bookworm who treasured library books; "I now see why I was so fascinated by two books in particular when I was young: L. Frank Baum's terrifically illustrated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in grade school and, in high school, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Both opened with departures."

I'm going to figure out a way to teach Muñoz's books somewhere down the line. In the meantime, I'm going to read the three he's written so far, and wait eagerly for the next novel.

The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell

2011-07-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

I am slowly making my way through The Good Men Project's list(s) of "The best LGBT books of all time." Well, those lists and a million others. It sounds like I'm doggedly reading my way through all the gay books. There are so many books. Rather, I'm reading the books on this list that interest me... like this one.

I was most curious, first curious, about The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell. I've read and loved many of his short stories, and I love his short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow--but a gay novel?

William Maxwell was married, and had two children. I don't know anything beyond that about his sexual preferences. The obit from the Times is fabulous, although (because?) it does not address the issue--highly recommended if you want to know more about this guy. The Paris Review interview from 1983 is also awesome.

There is much on the internet about how this is or is not a gay novel, and about its "gay subtext." I'm not sure there is a gay subtext. It is certainly a novel about a young man who feels very strongly about his friend. Perhaps who is "passionately in love with" his friend but maybe there is something else going on there. There is something that isn't romantic love--and lust is often, but not necessarily a component--but is more than friendship in the sense that we usually think of friendship. Many of us have had these kinds of friendships: essential, perhaps more essential than many of the romantic relationships we've had. That kind of soul-fusing, heart-melding stuff they talk about in Victorian novels and R&B songs of the 50's and 60's. The novel was published in 1948, and the physicality between these boys is so different from physicality between boys today: for example, in their rooming house when they go away to college, they share a bed. Mores were different, accepted behavior was different, things are questioned now that wouldn't've been questioned then.

It is a novel about the nerdy guy who's close friends with the jock, and this friendship survives the pair going to college, the jock joining a fraternity, the jock dating a girl who is of course good friends with the nerdy guy. The three of them spend some good times hanging out, even on the girl's family porch swing. Eventually, the jock is threatened by the nerdy guy's friendship with the girl, and the good times come to an end. One of the most perfect moments is when Lymie (the nerd) is at Spud's house (Spud is the jock, of course) and Spud assumes that Lymie will sleep over as he has so many times before: "The bed's big enough," Spud says, when his mom says it's time for Lymie to go home. "We've slept together in it lots of times." But Lymie gets his stuff together to go, and

On the way down the stairs he remembered the feeling he had had the first afternoon that he came home with Spud. It was a kind of premonition, he realized. Everything he had thought would happen then was happening now. He had been wrong only about the time.

The feeling he'd had was that Spud's family wouldn't want him there, and he'd be infringing. Instead, they take him in and he spends a lot of his time there through high school and into college. Lymie's mom died when he was ten, and he and his father live in a series of furnished apartments, and take their meals in restaurants. Lymie is some kind of in love with Spud, but he's also some kind of in love with Spud's mom, Mrs. Latham, and his whole family, and Spud's home:

He had thought he remembered what it used to be like but he hadn't at all. . . . He had totally forgotten how different furniture was that people owned themselves from the kind that came with a furnished apartment; and that tables and chairs could tell you, when you walked into a place, what kind of people lived there.

Maxwell does such a beautiful job laying out the details as Lymie would notice them. So much of what I love about So Long, See You Tomorrow is the way it describes and evokes boyhood, childhood, growing up. That's so much of what I love about this one, too.

But the beginning of the end--or maybe the end of the end--is when Lymie buys Sally--his friend, Spud's steady--violets, and Spud gets so jealous.

Lymie, who from long habit should have been sensitive to the changes in Spud's mood, had no idea that anything was wrong. The person who is both intelligent and observing cannot at the same time be innocent. He can only pretend to be; to others sometimes, sometimes to himself. Since Lymie didn't notice that anything was wrong with Spud, one is forced to conclude that he didn't wish to notice it.

Of course, Spud doesn't have to be jealous of Lymie and Sally. In some sense, whether romantic or not, they are both madly in love with him. And whether Lymie is gay or not, whether he goes on to marry a woman and live a "normal" life, in some way, Spud is and will always be his first love.

I liked this book so much. It took me a while to get into it, and then I couldn't stop.

Rufus and Rose

2011-06-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I reread an Alger. I have a long history with Horatio Alger, which I'd hoped I'd documented on this blog so I could just link to it, but the very short summary is that my father collected the novels of Horatio Alger, Junior, so they were some of my first reading material and I spent many formative years going with my dad to used book stores and book sales looking for Alger titles. I've read all of Alger's novels multiple times, and when my father killed himself fifteen years ago (fifteen years in July!), I took over the collection.

So yesterday I reread Rufus and Rose, the further adventures of Rough and Ready after Rufus, the newsboy (previously known as Rough and Ready), prevents a Wall Street banker from being robbed after overhearing the plot in an oyster saloon, and is rewarded with a position in the banker's office.

It is about as thrilling as it sounds.

Rose is Rufus's little sister. "His mother had been dead for some time. His step-father, James Martin, was a drunkard, and he had been compelled to take away his little sister Rose from the miserable home in which he had kept her, and had undertaken to support her, as well as himself. He had been fortunate enough to obtain a home for her with Miss Manning, a poor seamstress, whom he paid for her services in taking care of Rose. His step-father, in order to thwart and torment him, had stolen the little girl away, and kept her in Brooklyn for a while, until Rufus got a clue to her whereabouts, and succeeded in getting her back."

Miss Manning gets a position as governess to two little girls who are the daughters of an invalid, and Rose spends much of Rufus and Rose playing happily with these girls in Washington Park--they live on Waverly Place: "Before the up-town movement commenced, it was a fashionable quarter, and even now, as may be inferred from the character of the houses, is a very nice and respectable street, particularly that part which fronts the square." Rufus and Rose was published in 1870, and rereading it, I think the most startling thing about this book is that when otherwise engaged (in finding out why Rufus didn't come home the previous night--it was because he'd been kidnapped by Mr. Martin, of course, but Miss Manning doesn't know that), Miss Manning sends the three little girls, all under ten years old, to play in the park BY THEMSELVES. Washington Square Park.

Chaos Walking

2011-06-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

I just finished the Chaos Walking series, at the suggestion of Rebecca Ryan, who said she'd liked them maybe more than Hunger Games. I started, and sent her a message saying that "I almost quit reading it but then I started again, but I am so bothered by the Junie B. Jones spelling." She told me it made sense later, but now I'm done with all three in the trilogy and I'm still bothered by it. I understand that Todd is barely literate, and I think that's a powerful thread through the story, but I don't understand why that means that "recognize" is spelled "reckernize," when Todd says it, in the sections narrated by him, whether in his speech or in the narration. But there was one part where something was spelled funny when Todd said it, then spelled correctly when said by another character--WHY? Plus why reckernize and formayshun and creacher but not slaughter or immediately or lighted?

This clearly irritated me to distraction. I think my experience of reading the series would have been different if this hadn't been a constant irritation slapping me out of the narrative.

Last week at adult young adult book club (you can come too! the third Thursday of every month at In Other Words--join the Facebook group for more info) we talked about The Hunger Games and Graceling, and while it's been a while since I read the Hunger Games trilogy, it was nice to have a refresher before reading Chaos Walking.

It's always strange to compare fantasy worlds/dystopias, and of course it's somewhat beside the point. But one thing I did appreciate about Chaos Walking was how much the series struggled with how settlers should be dealing with the native population. In that sense, you can't compare the series to Hunger Games, which are set in a post-apocalyptic North America. Chaos Walking takes place on a recently colonized planet known as New World. Chaos Walking approaches New World from an entirely different POV than the Hunger Games approach the insanity of Panem (the country in which the books are set), and the characters in each book have such different roles to play in the futures of their worlds.

Another thing I loved about Chaos Walking was how full of hope the books kept being, in spite of themselves. How determined to make a world work for the natives and the settlers.

I could say more, but instead I'm going to go write more random freewrites, using this prompt from Writer's Digest: "Use the words from your favorite song (or the song that is stuck in your head), mix them up and write a short short story using every word." So far, I've used "Moment 4 Life" by Nicki Minaj, "I'm a Lady" by Santogold, "Coat of Many Colors," by Dolly, and "The District Sleeps Tonight," by the Postal Service, with various results. But it's a fun exercise. Today: "Pokerface," by Lady Gaga, and/or "Jackson" by Johnny Cash and June Carter.

The Tillerman Novels, and Writing Race

2011-06-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

I recently started rereading Cynthia Voigt's fabulous Tillerman novels. I had read the first few when I was a young adult myself (I'm still a young adult, at 34--perhaps I read them when I was a Young Adult): Homecoming, Dicey's Song, A Solitary Blue, and The Runner. I loved them, and I think I read them more than once, though not in order, perhaps. However, there were apparently other novels in this sequence, and I don't think I read any of those: Come a Stranger, Sons from Afar, and Seventeen Against the Dealer, published in 1986, 1987, and 1989, respectively. The earlier books were published 1981-1985.

It was interesting to me, reading these, how dated they feel. Very early 80's. But I just read Come a Stranger, and I think Come a Stranger feels dated in a different way--it's a book a white woman wrote in 1986 with a black girl as the heroine, and it is very much about race--not only about race by any means, but the fact that Mina is black and the implications of that in her life is something she becomes aware of over the course of the novel--in that way that we become aware of such things as we grow up and venture outside our small and most familiar circles. Over the course of the book, Mina goes from the end of fifth grade (eleven?) to the end of her sophomore year of high school (fifteen?), and she figures out a lot of stuff, as one tends to during those years.

Rereading it, I was thinking about how it really stopped being okay to "write outside one's race," a term a writer friend brought up, saying, "as it was spoken of, in accusing or defensive tones, in the 1980s." She mentioned that she's been listening to the audiobook of Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains, which may suggest a change. I was thinking about that and I'm not sure if it does--Chains is a historical novel, while Come a Stranger is (was) contemporary.

I asked about this on the fabulous children's list listserv I'm on, and Nisi Shawl's Writing the Other was recommended to me. The library doesn't have it, but I put an anthology she edited on hold, and I've read a couple of her essays on the subject online: Transracial Writing for the Sincere, and Appropriate Cultural Appropriation. She's talking specifically about this in the context of science fiction, but it certainly has broader applications.

And then I remembered Justine Larbalestier's Liar, and the whole thing about the cover. Micah, in Liar, is biracial--but I was like, isn't Justine Larbalestier white? I found this, in which she discusses that. (Apparently this blog post/essay first appeared on Larbalestier's site, but I found it at racialicious, and I love racialicious, so there you have it. Here's her post about the Liar cover, also reprinted at racialicious.)

I'm thinking that Larbalestier addresses race from a different POV, being Australian, and that multiracial characters pose new questions for anyone concerned with people representing only their own race.

But I know it has historically been an issue in terms of white writers depicting characters of other races, and those portrayals constituting a representation of those populations within fiction (or movies, or television...), at the expense of books (or movies, or TV scripts) by authors of color. So that as an issue makes sense. But I loved so much about Come a Stranger, and it's sad to me that it will fade into oblivion partly just because most books eventually do, but also because it is a white woman's story about a black girl, written at a moment in our cultural history when that was more appropriate, but then passing through other moments in our cultural history when that was less appropriate.

I have so many more thoughts about this, but I'm not arranging them very well or very coherently, so I'll stop for now. I'll just say this:

Shawl closes her essay "Appropriate Cultural Appropriation" with a quote from Geoff Ryman: "I think that it's a good thing for the imagination to do to try to imagine someone else's life. I see no other way to be moral, apart from anything else. Otherwise you end up sympathising only with yourself...."

liar

The Lonely Londoners

2011-06-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

I just read The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon, because I'm slowly making the way through the books on EC Osondu's list that was in the Guardian, his "top 10 immigrants' tales." I was briefly at Syracuse with Osondu, and his recent collection, Voice of America, was awesome. I blogged about it here back in December.

So thank you, EC, for letting me know about this book. I don't know how I would've run across it otherwise, and I'm so glad I read it.

The Lonely Londoners is written all in what I guess you'd call patois--a vernacular English spoken by the West Indians in the book and used for the narration as well. In Kenneth Ramchand's introduction to the version I read, the Wegman Carribbean Writers edition published by Pearson Education Limited, Ramchand describes Selvon's language this way: "The language of The Lonely Londoners is not the language of one stratum in the society, not the language of the people meaning 'the folk' or the peasantry, but a careful fabrication, a modified dialect which contains and expresses the sensibility of a whole society." The book has a fabulous rhythm to it and I read maybe more for the language than for the plot. There is a loose plot, but the story revolves around the experiences and routines of a group of friends in London, somewhat centered on Moses Aloetta, but mostly using him as the common thread. You get a sense of how far from home these guys are, mostly probably permanently; how they feel about those homes they've left; how they feel about what their lives in London are, and what their lives might have the potential to become; and what their daily lives and their interactions with each other are like.

I'm not doing a very good job of summarizing this. It's the stories of a bunch of immigrants, woven together and overlapping hugely.

A couple passages I really liked:

Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.

What it is that a city have, that any place in the world have, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else? What it is that would keep men although by and large, in truth and in face, they catching their royal to make a living, staying in a cramp-up room where you have to do everything--sleep, eat, dress, wash, cook, live. Why it is, that although they grumble about it all the time, curse the people, curse the government, say all kind of thing about this and that, why it is, that in the end, everyone cagey about saying outright that if the chance come they will go back to them green islands in the sun?

Books to Read

2011-05-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

There are too many. Not too many. Lots. An endless supply. This is a good thing.

Esquire put out a list of seventy-five books every man should read. Shockingly, they included one book by a woman. She's Flannery O'Connor, but still!

There was much buzz, and Joyland magazine retaliated (that isn't quite the right word, but it'll work) with this list of 250 books by women all men should read.

Now I have even more books on my list. Not a bad thing. An overwhelming thing, but not a bad thing.

Strength in What Remains

2011-05-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

I will read anything Tracy Kidder writes. I don't care what it's about. It helps that I trust him--the only one of his books I couldn't get through was his very first one, The Soul of a New Machine, but what I love about his other work is the people in it. The people in it, and how he gets into the story by knowing them and appreciating them also by recognizing how much he can't understand about them. He puts himself into the narrative and one thing I love is how he never claims or even implies neutrality, he gets so close but he always recognizes that he is Tracy Kidder with a perspective on the story, and he always remains aware of that perspective and keeps his readers aware. It's part of what makes me trust and respect him. And admire him.

I taught his book Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003), my first and only time teaching a college-level intro research/writing class. I didn't do a very good job, and one of the consequences was that my students didn't love this book anywhere near as much as I do. There was a lot of "Why are we reading this? I don't even care about Haiti! This isn't a class about Haiti and doctors!"

I've gotten better--and stricter, and more confident--about helping students understand that reading about any subject can make you a better and more critical reader, and researching any subject can make you a better researcher, and writing about any subject can make you a better writer. But yeah.

If I ever taught Mountains Beyond Mountains again, I would approach it so differently. I have learned so much about teaching since I tried that.

I didn't read Kidder's next book until now. A teacher friend at school loaned it to me months ago, and I told myself I had to get it back to her before the end of the school year, so this weekend I moved it to the top of my list and read all weekend. It was chemo weekend, so that was part of it, but it's also just such a good story. I don't read much non-fiction, but Kidder's books flow so beautifully that I don't care, and that's often one of my main problems with non-fiction. I like an arc.

Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias, a refugee from Bujumbura who ends up in New York City. I didn't know jack about Bujumbura before I read this book--now I know a lot about it, and it made me think (again, some more) about how big this world is, and how little I know of it. But all around the world they hear too much about the United States--how can I not even know Bujumbura exists?

Bujumbura is next to Rwanda. Both were colonized by Germany in the late nineteenth century, then became Belgium's after WWI. Apparently the European colonizers inflicted a racial system on Bujumbura, persuading them that their two major groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, were essentially racial groups, not castes. Kidder says in a historical note at the end,

European colonists brought a myth with its own long history, a myth tailored to account for what looked to them like an anomaly: civilization in darkest Africa, kings and aristocracies and peasants, an advanced social order a little like Europe's. Tutsis, many colonists seem to have believed, descended from the biblical Ham, the banished son of Noah. Tutsis had degenerated through long contact with the inferior race of native blacks, the Hutus. But Tutsis were still Caucasian under their black skins.

I'm sure Kidder came to this story because Mountains Beyond Mountains is about Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health, and Deo was training as a doctor in Bujumbra, and eventually discovers Farmer's books when getting his undergraduate degree at Columbia. (Deogracias has a terrifying, horrible life in so many respects, but he is also one of those hugely blessed people--first of all, he has a friend wealthy enough that his family is able to buy him a plane ticket to NYC and get him out of Bujumbra. Then, flying into NYC from Bujumbra, he meets an immigrant from Senegal who works at the airport and brings Deo home with him and finds him a job. A lousy job, but a job. The luck and coincidences continue--he ends up living with a couple in their SoHo loft, attending Columbia, then he goes to Harvard's School of Public Health, then Duke for med school! Certainly, he deserves every bit of this, but who ever gets the luck they deserve?!)

This is a captivating, beautifully written book, about so many things I am able to live my life without examining. I am so glad I spent a weekend with it. Highly recommended.

The Chronology of Water, a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-05-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

I initially was interested in this because my friend Cheryl Strayed was talking it up on Facebook. Though I just checked and it turns out Lidia and I have six mutual friends.

Anyway. So I put it on hold at the library, and I just picked it up last week, and I had another book I had to read first because someone else had a hold on it, and it made me crazy to have to wait. So I read the other book quickly and then read this one in two days.

This is definitely a more pomo book than what I'd usually turn to, but it's beautiful. I started reading it, and cried a lot, and thought oh shit I'm going to have to read this all at home and have another book I'm reading at school when my students are doing silent reading. But then I finished it, so not an issue. But I did cry a lot.

It's one of those books that's hard to summarize, because it manages to be about a lot. Lidia's early life, and her love of swimming, which helps her make it through a lousy childhood and get the hell out. All the sex and drugs, starting in high school. (In the intro, Chelsea Cain says that "some really famous edgy writer--I didn't recognize her name, but I pretended that I did--had given a talk at a conference about the State of Sex Scenes in Literature and she'd said that all sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Luknavitch." It's odd to have that be one of the few things you know about a book before reading it, but there is a lot of sex in this book, and it is well-written.) It's also hugely about writing, being a writer, and how writing can help save you. In what is right now my favorite segment, "Dreaming in Women," Yuknavitch talks about a bunch of the writers who've been important to her, and ends with, "I am not alone. Whatever else there was or it, writing is with me."

She opens the book with the story of the daughter she gives birth to in her 20's--stillborn.

After the stillbirth, the words "born dead" lived in me for months and months. To the people around me I just looked... more sad than anyone could bear. People don't know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us. They'd accidentally say stupid things to me, like "I'm sure you'll have another soon," or they would talk to me looking slightly over my head. Anything to avoid the sadness of my skin.

So true. I haven't known that kind of grief, but people's response to grief--she nails it.

She talks about how she thought about opening the book with her childhood, but "Your life doesn't happen in any kind of order. Events don't have cause and effect relationships in the way you wish they did. It's all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common." This is an idea she returns to again and again, and it was especially interesting encountering it as I'm reading The Things They Carried with my students, and realizing this time around that the non-linearity of it is so hard for them. They're used to beginning, middle, end. But it's a book about memory and living with memories, and that doesn't happen beginning, middle, end. I'm doing a much better job teaching it this year. It's still a hard book--it will always be a hard book, one of those amazing hard books that I love watching them experience and take something away from--but hopefully it's slightly less frustrating for them this go-round, or at least they understand why they're frustrated, which makes a big difference.

In an interview at the end of The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch is asked about forgiveness, specifically forgiving her abusive father and her alcoholic mother who didn't get her and her sister away from the dad. She says,

When my daughter died I broke. Open. Into stories. For the first time in my life, I wanted to know what my mother's story was. Badly. So I asked her. When I explored what my mother's story had been all I felt was compassion for the girl of her. Someone should have done something to save her. No one did. It's a wonder she was alive at all.

Maybe forgiveness is just that. The ability to admit someone else's story. To give it to them. To let it be enunciated in your presence. It's your job not to flinch.

She has a lot to say about forgiving her father, including this:

...forgiveness isn't the best I have to give him. Even as a dead man, the best I have to give him is an acknowledgement that I came from him. And I did not kill myself. I am living beyond his life, his end and pulse. I am trying to put things into the world that alchemize the dark and turn it to something beautiful and smooth you can carry in your hand. A small mighty blue stone.

I'm glad I read this book. It's not the kind of book I'd usually pick up--I'm not such a memoir person, and I like me a more conventional narrative, usually--but I'm glad to have this inside me. I could say so much more but I think that's enough. Read it, and I think that what will jump out at you will be other lines, other pieces. There's so much here.

Also from "Dreaming in Women":

"Make quiet for Emily Dickinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it."

"I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

That chapter might ultimately be why I'll need to buy myself a copy of the book.

My Own Two Feet

2011-04-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

I finished Beverly Cleary's second memoir, My Own Two Feet, and I loved it. I'm going to buy it for myself and other people too. I love YA, I read tons of YA, but I don't entirely understand why this book was published as YA. It's the story of Cleary's life after her high school graduation (from Grant High School in Portland!), through her two years at junior college (free!) in California; then two years at "Cal" (now Berkeley); library school at UW in Seattle; a year working as a children's librarian in Yakima, Washington; and her jobs during WWII running first the library at Camp Knight, and then the library at the Oakland Area Station Hospital (previously a hotel she'd gone dancing at when at Cal). The memoir ends shortly after the war does, with Beverly settled as a housewife, first in Oakland then in Berkeley ("I told Clarence I wanted to move to Berkeley. Now."), and finally making herself write. She's always wanted to be a writer, but realizes she never knew what she'd write about. So settled after the war, she remembers "the procession of nonreading boys who had come to the library once a week when I was a children's librarian, boys who wanted books about 'kids like us.'" Henry Huggins comes out of this, and the book ends with Cleary depositing her first advance royalty check.

Over the course of the book, she also marries Clarence Cleary, works as Christmas help at the Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley, and when she's working in Yakima, she lives in a boarding house with a bunch of old men, who take turns picking her up at work on the evenings when she has to work at the library until 9.

Clarence's boardinghouse room at Cal is later Dustin Hoffman's college room in The Graduate.

Cleary has a moment in library school when she finally gets the glasses she's known she needed for years, but her mother told her to drop out of college instead (apparently glasses are so horrible? Her mom is weird), so she went without. "When I put on glasses and walked out onto the street, I walked into a new world. I could see individual bricks on buildings, street signs were suddenly legible, lines on the sidewalk were sharper."

In Yakima, she is confused when children call her "Stir," but another library employee explains that the Catholic school kids are "in the habit of addressing their teachers as 'Ster, short for 'Sister.'"

During the war, when working at Camp Knight, she notes that

Men from big cities spoke contemptuously of "those farmers" and looked down on fresh-faced small-town boys from the Midwest who saw war as an adventure. This did not sit well with me, once a farmer's daughter, and I finally snapped at one man, "You eat, don't you?" After a moment of startled silence, he said apologetically, "I never thought of it that way."

There are so many anecdotes and details in this book that I loved. When running the army hospital library, Cleary orders The Impatient Virgin, Tawny, and other books by Donald Henderson Clark, "an author I had never heard of," often requested by enlisted men who "pounce" on these titles, "usually saying, 'I didn't think you would have these.'" The Multnomah County Library doesn't have anything by him, but I'll track something down--I'm curious now.

Beverly Cleary

2011-04-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

I am sure I tried to read Beverly Cleary's memoirs back in the day. Ramona Quimby is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. I love the books about Ramona, and while I only owned Ramona Quimby, Age 8, I checked the others out from the library over and over. I also read Cleary's other books multiple times--Ralph S. Mouse was so important for a while, and Leigh Botts, the hero of Dear Mr. Henshaw, still is very important.

But I must have started the first memoir, A Girl From Yamhill, and just found it boring. I don't think I ever made it as far as My Own Two Feet, which is a lot better. A Girl From Yamhill is Cleary's early memories of living in Yamhill on a farm--until she's like six--and then her life in Portland until she goes away to college.

So I think I never made it out of Yamhill. The part of the first memoir that takes place in Portland is more interesting. Cleary had to memorize one hundred lines of poetry of her own choice, every year of high school! Awesome.

Cleary talks about how they read Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and were inspired to write their own:

Portland.
Shipper of wheat,
Grower of roses.

Oregon.
Feller of trees,
Catcher of salmon.

She was obviously totally my kind of nerd in high school too; she and her best friend Claudine studied their The Century Handbook of Writing and worked the examples of "faulty diction" into their conversations.

Our conversation became sprinkled with gleeful vulgarisms we had never used before. When I announced my presence by noisily tap-dancing on the Klums' wooden porch and probably annoying all the neighbors on the block, Claudine said she was nowhere near ready for school.

"I suspicioned you weren't."

Claudine's reply was something like, "This here shoe-lace broke."

Later, Beverly is dating a boy she isn't that into, and when he kisses her, "Being kissed by Gerhart was disappointing. I had expected a kiss to feel more like the time in Yamhill when I stuck my finger in the electric socket, only nice."

She chooses to recite "Patterns" by Amy Lowell for a dramatics class, which cracks me up. When Beverly rehearses it, Claudine says, "Wow! You're sure brave!"

I'm still reading My Own Two Feet, and loving it. "How terribly--I pulled a word from my reading vocabulary that I had never spoken--risqué. Black lace underwear! Gosh!"

Chemo sucks.

2011-04-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

I have a brain tumor. I've probably had it my whole life, but I found out about it when I got hit by a car in 2003, had a CAT scan, and the doctors were like, "You might want to have that checked out."

I wrote a lot more summary of previous events, but I've written about this so much, so moving right along: I had the tumor mostly removed (my neurosurgeon couldn't get it all because he was afraid he'd mess up my vision), got an MRI every year and it stayed away, moved back to Portland, and after my second annual MRI, the neurologist was supposed to say, "Looks great, see you next year," but instead she said, "It looks like there's new growth," and she referred me to an oncologist.

He put me on a miraculous little chemo pill, and I was on that for almost two years, no side effects, and the tumor wasn't shrinking, which would've been the best case scenario, but it wasn't growing either. I kept living my life. It was terrific.

But then I had another appointment post-MRI; again, the doctor was supposed to say "Looks great, see you next time," and again, he said, "Actually..." So now I'm on the old-school chemo, the hardcore IV stuff. Went in for the first time on Friday, and I'll be going every two weeks... a round of chemo is six weeks, three sessions, but as long as it seems to be effective, I'll keep doing it.

I'm generally a pretty positive person. But I made a list of my least favorite things about chemo:

1) nausea
2) fear
3) the bad taste in your mouth
3) the woman in the chair across from me who says, "What are you here for?" I'm wondering, "Is this standard etiquette? The appropriate topic of discussion?" But I answer her: "A brain tumor." She says, "Oh my god!" which thank you, is not helpful. I ask, "What are you here for?" She says, "Breast cancer" and gestures. Then, thank god, she leaves.

I started making a list of the best things about chemo, and I got as far as
1) Megan going with me

but then I realized that fuck it, I don't have to make a list of the good things about chemo. Chemo sucks.

I See the Promised Land

2011-04-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

I just finished Arthur Flowers' new book, I See the Promised Land; A Life of Martin Luther King Jr. Arthur was my teacher at Syracuse University, and one of the many things I loved about this book was how loud and clear his voice was, telling me this story.

Also, there was all this stuff I didn't know, or didn't remember knowing! Like the children of Birmingham and the Children's Crusade in 1963, the kids marching because so many of the adult protesters were in jail.

And the way Arthur tells this story, the details he chooses... there have been a million books written about MLK, but these details were new to me:

During the Birmingham bus boycott, King

ask one old woman walking by if she wasn't too old for this, ask her if her feet not tired.

My feet is tired she say, but my soul is rested.

He like that.

He like that a lot.

Made his heart full to bursting.

He quotes J. Edgar Hoover calling King

"The most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country." Even better, "That goddamned nigger preacher."

He also talks about how King was "dismayed" when the SNCC called him an Uncle Tom, and points out that

(Actually Uncle Tom has gotten a bad rap. Check the text, he wasn't that bad. Did what he could with what he had. Wasn't no Gunga Din.)

The rhythm, the details, the humor. I love that Arthur Flowers.

This is a graphic novel of sorts, illustrated by Manu Chitrakar, a "Patua scroll artist" living and working in Bengal, and designed by Guglielmo Rossi, an Italian designer. There were a lot of beautiful things about the illustrations, and the design was so cool. But it seemed strange to me to have such an American story be illustrated by such a not American artist. I completely appreciate the idea behind it--"Turning King's journey into a truly universal legacy," as it says on the cover--and I would have been able to get behind this idea much more if the people looked more like actual African-Americans and white Americans. Instead, they often look Indian. There are a lot of moustaches. Also, there are many images of political protests--and the protests are holding either signs without text on them, just empty white (which I liked) or signs that appear to have Arabic characters on them. I did a search online and on the publishers' website and was unable to find any information about the language or translations for the text on these signs.

Found and Blackbird

2011-04-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

I just read Found, by Jennifer Lauck. Lauck was adopted, and according to her, it fucked up her life. Granted, her adoptive family saw some serious tragedy, and her adoptive brother was nasty about Lauck being adopted, but Lauck talks a lot about the essential maternal bond between mother and child, and how much she lost by never bonding with her birth mother as an infant... so she searches for her--this is largely that story. Lauck ends up really coming down hard on adoption practices in general--much of which is valid, I think, but some of it is over the top. I don't know. She's a mom now herself, and her descriptions of her relationships with her kids are pretty great. And I appreciated this:

It is distressing to learn that the U.S. leads the world as the single largest adoption nation. It seems startling to me that Americans are so fast on the scene of international disasters, and we scoop up orphan children and have them adopted into U.S. homes before body counts are added up.

Imagine if a collective of Chinese emissaries rushed to our shores after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina and took off with Louisiana babies. Or say a collective of Australian humanitarians came to Manhattan after 9/11 and hauled away orphans. These scenarios are ludicrous, and yet this is what American representatives are doing under the guise of being helpful.

She goes on to talk about what we could do for kids in crisis situations that would actually BE helpful.

---

After reading Found I put Lauck's first memoir, Blackbird; A Childhood Lost and Found, on hold at the library, and I've just finished it. Blackbird felt like a more successful book to me--Lauck is still clearly really close to some of the stuff in Found, and I know that for me, it's really hard to write about anything so close.

The best part about it was that yesterday I had it on my desk at school, and one of the freshman girls in my struggling readers' class said, "I read that book! Omigod I loved that book!" She's someone I haven't gotten to know, because she's absent more than she's in school. But it made me so happy. It also made me think again how true this passage is--I'd marked it before she said anything:

Just like that, I'm back in a school again. The thing is, when you aren't like everyone else, when you aren't normal, school isn't real, and that's how I feel here, like it's not real at all. There are other kids and there is a teacher, but I don't see them, don't become part of what they are part of. They belong here and I don't, and that's just the way it is.

I never felt that way about school, but Lauck put words to something that I've seen so many of my students dealing with.

My response to the Stephen Elliott interview at The Days of Yore

2011-04-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

Cheryl Strayed posted a link on Facebook to an interview with Stephen Elliott of The Rumpus on a site that features interviews of artists "about the years before they have money, fame, or road maps to success" and "inspires you find your own." Your own money? Fame? I would guess your own road map to success? Anyway I thought it was an interesting interview.

He says this:

I realized there were two types of writers. There were writers that started at a young age because they had something in them that had to come out. These were the spoken word poets, people that…. were writing because they had this scream inside of them and they had to get it out in such a way that someone else would receive it. That doesn’t mean they loved to read. They might. They may or may not have even been interested in other people’s screams. But this is where it came from, their urge to write.

Then there’s this other group of people that, usually in high school, first year of college, they read something that impacts them so much that they want to be part of that tradition. More often, I think you see them in MFA programs. They love literature, so they want to be writers.

One is not better than the other. People come from different places. I was coming out of a need to communicate, because I was in an abusive home and lived in group homes for years, and I didn’t have anybody to tell. That’s always been why I’ve written, to communicate, not because I loved literature.

I’m trying to decide if I disagree with this, or if I’m just afraid that I’m the other kind of writer, not the kind that had something in them. But… maybe some of us are both, somehow. I think I do disagree. I don’t like pronouncements like “there are two types of writers.” I think there are as many types of writers as there are writers. Or almost as many. Also, the stuff I read that impacted me, I read younger than my final year of high school. I always think of Horatio Alger. Except that might not have impacted me in the “I want to be a writer” way. But somewhere along the way, reading Alger and Dylan Thomas and Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams, I decided (realized? understood?) that being a writer was the best thing. You got to make up stories, make up people and actions and places. I’m sure I also had things in me that had to come out, but I also wanted to be a part of the tradition of Dickens and Ntozake Shange. Traditions. Later stuff impacted me, but so did earlier stuff. And I was a writer before the end of high school.

I might have kept writing because of later stuff that happened. Writing might not have stayed as important to me if my dad hadn’t killed himself, if I hadn’t needed that outlet. Except I think it would have.

Elliot also says:

What we think of as talent is actually just the desire to sit alone and write every day. I had my reasons for writing. Other people have their reasons. People write and write for years, and the ones who do it continually every day achieve the ability to communicate their own aesthetic vision.

This makes sense to me. I have known many very "talented" people who quit writing, making art, playing music, doing what they were so good or promising at. I have known a few who kept on keeping on, and some of them are successful now. If you quit, it doesn't matter how much initial promise (talent) you had. If you keep doing it, that initial promise does matter, but you might just trump a lack of initial promise by dedication and perseverance. And luck.

Tender Morsels

2011-04-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, which I put on hold at the library when it was pulled from Bitch magazine's list of "One Hundred Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader." I talk more about the list here and here. But basically they posted a list of "100 young adult novels that every feminist should add to the stack of books on their bedside table" on their website, people complained about three of the books, so Bitch "reconsidered" those books and ended up removing them from the list. The books were Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce, and Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. I read the other two and blogged about them, but a friend had said she read Tender Morsels and it was good but hard to read. I started it, but got cold feet. Living Dead Girl was really hard to read--I didn't want to do that to myself again so soon. So I read all the Ender's Game books (well, five of them, anyhow) and a few other things (Hush, The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson for my bookclub, Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett... um and I forget what else [and I didn't blog about them because I've been finishing my novel]) and then I came back to Tender Morsels.

I thought this was one of the most interesting, thoughtful books I'd read in a long time. About family and the decisions we make because of them: what they want, what we want, what we think they want, what we think they should want. But not only because of family. About growing up, and loyalty, and reality, and the ways we deal with reality. This was wonderfully a book like none I'd ever read. A terrific fairy tale. And yeah, a feminist book, absolutely.

Hush

2011-03-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

I just finished Hush, by Eishes Chayil (a pseudonym meaning "woman of valor" in Hebrew). I'd never read a novel set in the Chassidic community before, though I took the bus through the Chassidic community in Williamsburg twice a day for a year on my way to and from work, and I lived within walking distance. But you can be a goy walking through Williamsburg and that doesn't mean you know anything about what's going on around you. I knew that the Chassidic community goes to great lengths to maintain their isolation from the outside world.

That's as far as I got in my review. I started reading other reviews of it, and I thought this one by a California rabbi was interesting, and there are many things about the book that he "gets" more than I possibly could, though he acknowledges that he is not Chassidic and says he would love it if a Chassidic reader would read this book and comment on the accuracy of it.

However, the book is, as he notes, primarily narrated by a young girl--the narration goes back and forth between Gittel at nine and Gittel at seventeen then eighteen. He says,

"The worldview portrayed in the book is absolutely terrifying. Anyone that is not exactly like 'you' is an enemy or at best a heathen. The self absorption and ignorance about almost everything is shocking. Characters in Hush describe any custom they have as 'The Torah say', even when the Torah certainly does not say the thing they are quoting. Characters in Hush subscribe to every possible superstition Jewish culture has to offer. And perhaps worst of all, every kind of prejudice about 'outsiders' that I am sure outsiders can sense in their real life interactions with the community. Characters in Hush have no working knowledge of what most communities call common sense and the facts of life."

I would argue that this is largely colored by the narration. It isn't what the author would argue that the Chassidic worldview is--it's what Gittel sees as the worldview in her community. And we learn what Gittel knows about the world, and therefore what she assumes others know.

This interview with the author is also fascinating.

And this review, by a Jewish woman, is recommended as well.

I liked this book a lot. I think I didn't understand a lot of it, being so far outside the community in which it is set, but at the same time, Gittel is a strong character and I liked watching her grow. Horrible, what happens, one of the big events in her life that makes her grow, but so clearly, honestly illustrated.

This is one of those books that I obviously can't talk about coherently, but I want to talk about it because I want people to read it.

Orson Scott Card and Ender

2011-03-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

I am reading my third book by Orson Scott Card in about a week--I started Ender's Game last weekend, after picking up a copy in a thrift store--a lot of my students had talked about it, and even kids who didn't like reading had said it was a good book. So I knew I wanted to add it to my classroom library, but figured I'd add it to my "to read" shelf first. My "to read" shelf has about a hundred books on it--okay, my "to read" bookcase--and a lot of them are library books and a lot of them are borrowed books. I try to read those first, which isn't really possible because it's not like I'll ever read them all--I read a couple, I pick up a couple more... but I do try to read library books and borrowed books before I read my own books. Except I wanted to get that copy of Ender's Game out of my house and into my classroom--plus I picked it up and glanced at it and it was, like, magnetized to my eyeballs or something. Completely fascinating, though not the kind of book I usually find completely fascinating. It's closer to "hard" sci fi than anything I usually read, and it's all about battle ships and aliens and brilliant little kids recruited to save Earth. But it's more the story of those little kids than anything else, and I wanted to know how things would resolve.

So then I found Ender's Shadow already in my classroom library, and I took that home to read. When I finished that, I put the other three in the original series on hold at the public library, then I realized I didn't have to wait, I could go down the hall and get them from my school library! So now I'm reading Speaker for the Dead, and after that I'll read Xenocide and Children of the Mind. Maybe then I'll be done for a while. Maybe. But it turns out that Orson Scott Card has been busy--the wikipedia entry for "Ender's Game (Series)" includes an impressive flow chart listing these titles and many others, including a bunch of short stories. And that's just the books and stories he's written about what has become known as "the Enderverse."

Of course, by the time I was nearing the end of Ender's Shadow, I'd gotten so curious about the writer. I was somewhat shocked and horrified to learn that he is Mormon! I would add, "Like, really Mormon!" but I don't think that Mormon is one of those labels that exists in degrees. You're either Mormon or you're not. You believe it and live your life according to it or you get the hell out. At least that's what it looks like from here.

But I'm now in the middle of Speaker for the Dead, and knowing about Card's Mormonism, I am even more impressed by his broad knowledge of political history, including a complex understanding of how religion plays into this. In his fabulous introduction to the edition of Speaker for the Dead that I'm reading (1991), Card says, "My real life is being with my wife, with my children; going to church and teaching my Sunday school class..." but he talks so much about his reasons for writing Speaker of the Dead, and what he was trying to do. Here's the essay on Google books. I think it's valuable reading for anyone who's a writer or curious about writers. He talks a lot about the process of writing this book, and how many times he started over. He notes that most fiction deals with adolescents and with "footloose heroes." He wanted to write another kind of story, and so far (I'm about halfway through), he seems to be succeeding. He's the kind of ambitious, creative, thoughtful writer that I'd take this trip with even if he doesn't succeed, though, because even if he screws it up, he'll screw it up well.

Sisters Red (and more about the Bitch list)

2011-02-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, maybe I'm not done talking about the Bitch list--um, Bitch magazine's list of "100 Young Adult Books For the Feminist Reader".

I wrote about this some here, in my review of Living Dead Girl, one of the three books removed from the original list. But I just finished Sisters Red, another book removed from the original list, and I'm all annoyed again. I'm also grateful to Bitch, because I thought this was a wonderful and moving book, and it's probably not one I'd have picked up otherwise because it's about werewolves. I've done a pretty good job of avoiding the whole vampire, zombie, werewolf thing. But this is a great story.

This was the first book to be removed from the Bitch list, based largely, apparently, on a negative review at Book Smugglers blog. It turns out that the compiler of the Bitch list hadn't read Sisters Red, but instead put it on the list based on reviews of the book. She also refers to the book as Sister's Red which makes me very crabby and gives her even less credence.

Anyway, I liked the book a lot. I found the most moving part to be the relationship between the sisters, Scarlett, who is very dedicated to killing werewolves, and Rosie, who is less dedicated but feels hugely indebted to her sister, for understandable reasons: Scarlett saved her life when Rosie was attacked by a werewolf, and Scarlett is permanently scarred and disfigured as a result.

This is a story about growing up, and making up your own mind about who you want to be and what you're going to be, considering all the factors, including what others want or expect of you. It's about loving other people and loving yourself and trying to take care of everyone, which is sometimes--usually--close to impossible to do. Especially when there are werewolves around.

Living Dead Girl: Feminist Novels (also, the Bitch list)

2011-02-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

I just finished Living Dead Girl, which was hard to read but I had to read it all in one sitting--it's short, and also I had to know what would happen. It's the Stranger Danger story--the life of the girl who's taken away; her story as she might tell it. Ick.

I put this book on hold at the library because Bitch Magazine made a list of "100 Young Adult Books For the Feminist Reader," which they describe as "100 young adult novels that every feminist should add to the stack of books on their bedside table." Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, and Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce were on the original list, but there were complaints about them being "triggering" for rape survivors, so staff members at Bitch reread (and/or read) those three titles then removed them from the list. Several writers, including Scott Westerfeld, asked to be removed from the list themselves, since they considered that it was now an embarrassing list to be a part of, and Bitch refused to take those authors off. I don't want to say more about this because I've spent too much of my life on it already (here's the original post and the zillions of responses if you're interested--and I do think it's interesting!), but suffice to say that Bitch's removal of these books from their list made them the first I put on hold at the library. It also made me less likely to ever buy another issue of Bitch--I'll spend my money elsewhere. Whoever was taking responsibility for the list should have read all the books on it and been prepared to stand behind their choices, but instead it seems that no one even read all the titles, and there isn't any clear statement, much less consensus, on what makes these titles feminist or must-reads. As one of the gazillion posters, Walter Underwood, notes, "Bitch is not clear about what sort of list this is. Is it favorites or authoritative?" He observes that "If it is authoritative, then there are some books on there that I don't think make the cut for 'every feminist' to read." Plus they're implying that you must be literate to be a feminist, then, which is--okay, back to my review of Living Dead Girl.

This was not a pleasant book to read. But it was well-written and it was a story I hadn't really thought about: the girl who is abducted by the scary man, and the years she spends living with him. She talks about how on TV talk shows, audience members always blame the victim: "Why didn't she speak up?" "Why didn't she do something?" but the book does a great job of showing why she doesn't speak up, why she doesn't do anything, how frightened and isolated she is.

Now I'm reading Sisters Red.

Other interesting posts about the Bitch fiasco:

Margo Langan's (author of Tender Morsels) blog post

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog

There are many more, and both these posts link to many of them.

Trash

2011-02-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

I just finished Trash, by Andy Mulligan. Set in "an unnamed Third World country" (though we know the author divides his time between his native London and Manila), it's the story of three boys growing up in Behala, "rubbish-town," the city dump. Raphael, one of the three boys, describes himself in the first sentence of the novel as a "dumpsite boy."

Raphael makes an incredible, life-changing find in the dump, and this novel is the story of that find. It is described--repeatedly--as a "thriller" in the Guardian, but I don't know if that has a different connotation in England, because it wasn't what I think of as a thriller. However the Guardian article is interesting because apparently Trash was shortlisted for a major YA award then withdrawn from consideration. Man, children all over the world are living in conditions as bad as these, but we have to protect rich (relatively) kids from reading about it?

Anyway. I liked this book a lot. Stayed up late to read it and then finished it at school during silent reading time, when I am usually too busy patrolling my students to really get sucked into a book. But this one is so... suckable?

It's also an interesting commentary on the greed of so many of our politicians, almost always at the expense of the poor children like the heroes of this novel. One of them describes the vice-president's house this way: "Look at the towers, man--it thinks it's a castle. It thinks it's in a fairy tale."

This isn't a fairy tale.

Summarize this...

2011-02-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

I'm back to teaching, and so happy about it. Also exhausted. But I had some medical stuff so took some time off, and now it's the new semester and I'm back! And I get to teach a writing class for struggling writers. It's an elective, so they're sort of choosing to be in it, but the administration is saying to some students, "You really need to be in this class," so that's not quite a choice. However, it does seem like most of them do want to be there. I'm so excited about it--however, the first day I didn't have all my students, and I might still not have all my students, but today was the second day of class, and I thought Okay so I don't even know who's going to show up, much less what they need--what the hell am I going to do? So today we learned about Bessie Smith. We read three brief biographies about her (which was overkill--two would have been plenty, even with some of the details different), and learned about the controversy around her death. We read part of this. Then we listened to two Bessie Smith songs and read the lyrics. We listened to "Sing Sing Prison Blues" and "Sinful Blues".

We talked about each song, and I had them write a one sentence summary of each stanza, then a one-to-two sentence summary of each song. I had a million ideas about activities we could do--write a letter to Bessie Smith, write the thesis statement for your essay on Bessie Smith, etc., use what you learned today and what you heard to write your own one paragraph biography of Bessie Smith--but this ended up being simpler than any of them, which was fine. I also found myself in the position of explaining not only that the Hudson was a river but also that "Sing Sing" came from the name of the American Indian tribe, Sint Snick, from whom the land was "purchased" in 1685. (Yes, I got this information from Wikipedia. Perhaps this makes me a bad teacher.)

But our conversation about "Sinful Blues" was pretty great. I didn't put a lot of thought into my choice of songs, honestly--I had the CD at school, and I listened to a few of them and thought these two might be interesting to discuss and relatively easy to understand/summarize. The lyrics to the songs are also really different--"Sing Sing Prison Blues" is more repetitive, more reliant on rhyme, and "Sinful Blues" is more complex lyrically and gave us a lot to talk about. The singer changes her mind about how to handle the situation in every verse. My class agreed that they know people who do that about their girlfriends or boyfriends.

The most interesting moment of the class, at least for Ms. Nelson, was when I found myself explaining the double entrendre in the second verse:

Look here folks, don't think I'm rough,
'Cause I'm a good woman an' I knows my stuff,
That's why I'm sinful as can be.
My man may look low, but I can't keep
'Cause he knows a lot of little dirty tricks,
That's why I'm sinful as can be.

Yeah.

Listen to "Sinful Blues" on youtube.

Overheard the Best Exchange at the Pizza Place

2011-02-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

Me and Ida waited for ever for our calzones at Good Neighbors tonight, but at least I got some eavesdropping in.

Guy: So what are you reading these days?
Woman: I've been trying to read Infinite Jest, but ugh.

She talks about how David Foster Wallace is obviously really smart, and she has to read it with a dictionary next to her and look up a bunch of words, but he goes off for like three pages on these random things, so she's set it down and maybe she'll try again sometime--"Like when I retire." She says how maybe if she were in college and didn't have anything else to do but try to figure it out, then that might be okay, but she's too busy.

Guy: Yeah, when I retire I'm reading Infinite Jest, Don Quixote, and Underworld by Don Delillo.

The Things a Brother Knows

2011-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

I just finished Dana Reinhardt's The Things a Brother Knows, and it's one of those books that I'm just so happy it's in the world. Wow, that's an incredibly awkward sentence, but it's the truth. I have so many students with parents/siblings/cousins overseas, and The Things a Brother Knows is about the little brother of a soldier who comes home fucked up after three years in... probably Iraq, but unnamed. It was awesome--so much about the people, so little about "right" and "wrong." Highly recommended.

And did I mention, it's beautifully written? Reinhardt gets it so right. This is a novel about a boy and his brother the fucked-up soldier, but like all fabulous books, it's about a lot more:

"One of the things about walking I always appreciated is the way you don't have to look someone in the eye."

"I hold her against me. Her skin on my skin. Her chest pressed against mine. It's the single most amazing feeling in all of human history. Nothing has ever felt better, and I don't care if anything else happens, or if this is all there is, because I can't imagine anything feeling better than this feels right now."

"There are parts of the adults around you you're never meant to see."

The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

2011-01-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

I think some version of this post will be in issue #2 of my zine, The Hundred Most Influential Writers in My Life to Date, As Best I Can Remember and Mostly Not Including Zines. Ursula Nordstrom isn’t on my list of my hundred most influential authors. However, she was an editor working with so many writers on my list, including (but perhaps not limited to) Russell Hoban, Maurice Sendak, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shel Silverstein, E.B. White, and Louise Fitzhugh. Many of the books that were so important to me as a kid, and continue to be so important to me, might not exist if it wasn’t for her.

Someone mentioned The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom on the amazing children's lit listserv I'm on, and the library doesn't own it, but it seemed worth buying, so I did. And I read it in a week, with fiction going at the same time! It was captivating, and it was a book I’ll be glad to own and refer to—I’ve found that it’s good to own poetry, essays, and volumes of letters, though I’ve decided that most general fiction and non-fiction can be gotten from the library. I tend not to buy a book for myself unless I’ve already read it and I’m sure I’ll read it again, plus usually I want to loan it out.

Nordstrom was the director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls (Harper Junior Books as of 1968) from 1940 to 1973, and she worked for Harper's in the Children's Books department from 1931 on, retiring in 1973 but continuing to work as a "senior editor" until 1980, and then retiring fully.

She discovered Maurice Sendak in 1950 when he was "a self-described 'twenty-two-and-a-half'-year-old, working in the window display department of F.A.O. Schwartz" (footnote, page 41)--their meeting was arranged by the store's children's book buyer, Frances Chrystie, a long-time friend of Nordstrom’s.

The first letter in the book is Nordstrom's note to Laura Ingalls Wilder when Nordstrom was still the assistant for the editor, just having finished her first jacket copy ever, for On the Banks of Plum Creek. Later in a letter to another writer, talking about why Harper reissued all the Little House books with illustrations by Garth Williams, she mentions that when they’d done an exhibition about the Little House books, she’d asked Mrs. Wilder to send “anything she thought would be of interest. She sent us Pa’s fiddle! I stood in the middle of the department holding Pa’s fiddle and hardly able to believe it!” Included in the book of letters are many exchanges with Garth Williams, including bits about arguments she had with people at Harper's over carbon pencils, offset printing vs. letterpress, and suchlike. It’s wonderful. Williams did the illustrations not only for the Little House books as I know them, but for Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and many others. Apparently when he did the illustrations for the Little House books, he and his wife and their kids “made the long and careful trip through Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, all the Wilder country.”

Nordstrom also worked with Margaret Wise Brown on Goodnight, Moon and many other titles, and she started working with John Steptoe when he was still in high school, corresponding at times with his mother when he wouldn’t respond to her letters and phone calls. She published two young adult novels about the “black experience” by a Jesse C. Jackson in the 1940’s and 1950’s—Call Me Charley, published 1945, was “among the first novels for young readers to address the issue of racism in contemporary American society” (footnote). She also edited and published I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip., by John Donovan, which according to Leonard Marcus, the editor of the letters, “included the first reference, in a book for young adults, to the homosexual experience.” She published M.E. Kerr and many other controversial writers—I didn’t know, until I read this, just how controversial Harriet the Spy, Charlotte’s Web and other books had been when first published. In a letter to George Woods, long-time children’s book review editor at the New York Times and as well as a children’s book writer published by Harper’s, Nordstrom talks about a review of Sounder published in the Times that questions the book’s appropriateness for children and raises questions about its treatment of violence and attitudes toward moral outrage (paraphrased from the editor’s summary of the review), and she says, “You have remarked that I have never complained to you about any review, or the lack of any review. And I don’t intend to start now. But oh is there any prettier sight in the world than the sight of someone sticking their neck OUT???” And this is why I say that these books that were so important to me as a child might not exist if not for her.

She got outraged by much hullabaloo over the naked boy in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, responding to a letter from someone at an elementary school in this way:

I am indeed distressed to hear that in the year 1972 you burned a copy of a book. We are truly distressed that you think it is not a book for elementary school children. I assume it is the little boy’s nudity which bothers you. But truly, it does not disturb children! . . . Should not those of us who stand between the creative artist and the child be very careful not to sift our reactions to such books through our own adult prejudices and neuroses? . . . I think young children will always react with delight to such a book as In the Night Kitchen, and that they will react creatively and wholesomely. It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak’s work.

A few months later, she issues a press release responding to censorship of In the Night Kitchen, specifically an item that appeared “without any editorial comment” in School Library Journal saying that a librarian in Louisiana had anticipated patrons’ discomfort with the naked little boy in the book and had “solved the problem by diapering the little boy with white tempura paint.” The writer of the news item goes on to suggest that “Other librarians may wish to do the same,” a suggestion which horrified Nordstrom—she makes an important distinction between a private individual who might do whatever he wants to a book he owns, but “it is an altogether different matter when a librarian disfigures a book purchased with public funds—thereby editing the work of the author—and then presents this distortion to the library’s patrons.”

Apparently Nordstrom also had a hand in the creation of Free to Be You and Me, the record of which was an essential part of my childhood; in a letter to Mary Rodgers, author of Freaky Friday and many other novels, she says, “The great Shel Silverstein told Marlo Thomas the great Marlo Thomas to look me up while she is in NY making a t.v. special" (sic).

Russell Hoban had initially envisioned Frances as a vole; Nordstrom wrote to him asking if Frances couldn't be something a little less mousy, and Garth Williams, who illustrated the first Frances book (the others were illustrated by Hoban's wife, Lillian) had the idea to make her a hedgehog.

Nordstrom herself had a “long-time companion,” Mary Griffith. Before reading this book, I had no idea that Margaret Wise Brown and Louise Fitzhugh were also lesbians. Maurice Sendak is gay, too, which is not mentioned in here but which I learned from a New Yorker profile of him. All of this is interesting--did Nordstrom help queer children’s lit? Which is to say, children’s literature would certainly not have been as cutting-edge without Ursula Nordstrom. How much did her sexuality shape/influence her worldview, and how much did it make her open to writers others might not have taken the time to nurture? Not that there were so many others, anyway, it seems—children’s lit developed into what it became in large part because of her contributions. I am sure she was not the only smart thoughtful editor interested in publishing, as she put it, “good books for bad children.”

Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

2011-01-11T22:41:00.000-08:00

I just finished Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi--I'd read good things about it so put it on hold at the library, and it was high on my to-read list, but when it won the Printz award for 2011, I knew I wouldn't be able to renew it, so I read it next.

Okay, I might've anyway. It looked really good. Set in the future, taking place in what used to be the Gulf Coast of the U.S. but is now just the Gulf Coast, the main character is Nailer, a boy maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. When asked how old he is, he says, "I don't know how old I am. But I made it onto light crew, and I made quota every day. That's what matters where I come from. Not your stupid age." Nailer works as a "ship breaker," stripping wire and other salvageable material from the oil tankers that are washed up on shore where he lives. He is surviving, barely, but he is surviving.

He has adventures. Stuff happens. It's a page turner and one of those books you want to read in every spare moment to find out how it will end.

One of the things I love most about it, though, one of the things that makes it more than a good story, is what Nailer learns (the conclusions he comes to?) about family over the course of the story. His father is a drug addict and a murderous asshole, but a wise half-man (part of a strong and quick race of slaves created by scientists from the genes of dogs, tigers, hyenas, and humans) tells him, "You are no more Richard Lopez [his father] than I am an obedient hound. Blood is not destiny, no matter what others may believe."

Nailer thinks later about family:

Family. It was just a word. ... But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant. People used it everywhere. ... It was one of those things everyone had an opinion about--that it was what you had when you didn't have anything else, that family was always there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever.

But when Nailer thought about it, most of those words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and think they could get away with it. Family wasn't any more reliable than marriages or friendships or blood-sworn crew, and maybe less. His own father really would gut him if he ever got hold of him again; it didn't matter if they shared blood or not. ...
But Nailer was pretty sure that Sadna would fight for him tooth and nail, and maybe even give up her life to save him. Sadna cared. Pima cared.

The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.

Also, over the course of the novel, Nailer learns to read--this is important when he goes off into the world and finds another job, though at first it seems like a waste of time. Also, he is offended when others view his illiteracy as a weakness on his part. Then reading becomes something he just does without thinking about it, and at the moment when he realizes that: "Nailer was amused that he could actually make out the meanings now. He was going to drown, but hey, he could read." It's handled in such a delicate way--not preachy, just matter-of-fact. I feel like I should have more to say about that but I don't, right now.

This is a great book. Highly recommended.

By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham Part 2

2011-01-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

I finished Michael Cunningham's latest. I liked it more after finishing it, but I still wasn't blown away.

I do like that a "second-rate" artist represented by the art gallery owned by the main character is a Bard alum: "a kind and rather feckless young man named Bock Vincent, three years out of Bard, who lives with his much older girlfriend in Rhinebeck [although I don't think they'd live in Rhinebeck] and who is able, in a somewhat limited way, to talk about wrappings and bindings and their relationship to holiness..." Later it is said that "He was an oddball (even by Bard standards) when Peter met him.... Bard took a gamble on him. As did Peter."

But if the thing I like most is that my alma mater makes a random, somehow meaningful appearance and helps to define a secondary character who sort of represents the main character's disenchantment with his work? That doesn't say much for the book.

By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham

2011-01-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Michael Cunningham's latest because it was on the shelf at the library in the "Lucky Day! Hot titles. Available now" section so I figured why not. It's sort of irritating me, in an engaging way. I went looking up reviews and this, from the Washington Post review, is nicely put: "With its eroticized reflections on modern aesthetics and liberal guilt, it's like watching a bi-curious college professor annotate an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue." Cunningham's (or rather, his character's?) comments on art are interesting. What's also interesting is that I read the Washington Post and New York Times reviews and they are as different as if they were reviews of different novels, I think. I don't want to read more reviews, at least not until I finish the book. Then maybe I'll have more to say. But I might not. There's not much there. Like I said, it's engaging, but it's not something I have to think about a lot, not a book I'll be turning over in my head as I'm falling asleep. Probably not a book I will think of again in six months, five years, ten years, and be like, "Oh, that's like--" or "Oh, what was that novel where--"

The Sky is Everywhere

2010-12-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

I finished The Sky is Everywhere the same day I started it. I stayed up late Monday night finishing Mockingbird and read The Sky is Everywhere all of Tuesday, all 275 pages of it. I cried a lot, and I laughed more than I might have expected to laugh, but mostly I nodded. Jandy Nelson knows from grief.

You find out on the first page, in the second sentence, that the narrator of this novel has lost her sister. The first sentence is, "Gram is worried about me." The second sentence is, "It's not just because my sister Bailey died four weeks ago, or because my mother hasn't contacted me in sixteen years, or even because suddenly all I think about is sex." So you can tell how this book is about grief, but it's also about more than that. Even if you didn't feel like reading a book about death and loss, you might have a hard time putting this one down.

And life is never all about one thing, as Lennie (the narrator) is learning. You don't just grieve. Life goes on, full of everything it's full of. It's sad and also happy and then when you've lost someone you fill guilty about being happy because she's dead, but you can't help it, you're happy anyway.

Lennie is grieving her sister but she's also falling in love for the first time. Which is not convenient, but when are these things ever convenient?

But Lennie asks her sister's boyfriend, the only person who understands this loss and this grief in a similar way, if he feels more alive since... "I'm afraid to ask this, like I'm revealing something shameful, but I want to know if he feels it too.

"He doesn't hesitate. 'I feel more everything since.'"

And Lennie doesn't say this then, but she observes it later, trying to explain how she feels to Joe: "'Now I'm someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time.'" She thinks about what she's just said: "...I know now how close death is. How it lurks. And who wants to know that? Who wants to know we are just one carefree breath away from the end?"

He says, "'But if you're someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time, aren't you also someone who knows the best thing can happen at any time, too?'"

And it isn't coincidence that the guy who says this to her is the guy she's falling in love with, who's falling in love with her.

Which is how it happens. Grief and joy mix up together and that's just how it is. Lennie thinks: "My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy."

And she tells her sister later, "I can't stand that you're going to miss so much."

Yeah.

"I drop on my back, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?"

I'm quoting out the sad parts mostly, the parts that made me cry so hard I had to stop reading. But there is so much to this book. And it works like grief does: you cry, you grieve, and you learn. It maybe doesn't get easier, but you figure out how to manage it, how to live in it, and weirdly you figure out, maybe for the first time, how to be grateful for how much you have.

It made me miss my dad, remember how that felt at first and compare it with how it feels now. It also made me so grateful for my sister. Some of Lennie's grief is about she isn't a sister anymore, and she's always been a sister. I am so lucky and grateful to be a sister.

The Sky is Everywhere (Part 1)

2010-12-28T11:16:00.000-08:00

Such an accurate description of the way grief and loss will shock you into deep sorrow, over and over:

"This boy beaming before me, however, seems to glow in a class all his own. He must be from a very friendly part of the Milky Way, I'm thinking as I try to tone down this nutso smile on my face, but instead almost blurt out to Sarah, 'He looks like Heathcliff,' because I just realized he does, well, except for the happy smiling part--but then all of a sudden the breath is kicked out of me and I'm shoved onto the cold concrete floor of my life now, because I remember I can't run home after school and tell Bails about a new boy in band."

I will have more to say about this book. But that's on page 9, Lennie's just gone back to school after her sister died. So right on. So what it's like. And the voice is totally true.

Mockingbird

2010-12-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

I have read three books this year with titles related to mockingbirds: Mockingjay, The Mockingbirds, and Mockingbird, which I stayed up too late last night reading so I could finish it in one sitting. None of these three books could have been called anything else--well, they could have been, but I do think these are the perfect titles for each book.

I can't imagine three more different books coming so close to the same title, either. A dystopic futuristic novel; a story set in a ritzy private boarding school; and the story of a ten-year-old girl with Asperger's who has just lost her beloved older brother in a school shooting.

Mockingbird blew my mind. Narrated by Caitlin, the ten-year-old, this is a short and moving novel. Caitlin isn't trying to be moving, it's just what her life is.

Many of the scenes that take place at school happen either with her counselor, Mrs. Brook, or at recess. Caitlin hates recess, hates the noise and the chaos; in fact, she describes that awful anxious feeling you get in the pit of your stomach as "a recess feeling." I know exactly what she means.

Mrs. Brook thinks Caitlin has to work on empathy, and on making friends. When she makes friends with a first-grader (she's in fourth grade), and impresses him by burping her ABC's, he asks her if he can get all his friends so they can be impressed too, she agrees. They think she's awesome, and she notes, "I feel like Snow White because now I have a bunch of little dwarf friends who love me. I may not know how Scout's overalls feel but I think I know how Snow White's shoes feel because now I know why Snow White was happy." (Her counselor keeps telling her to put herself in --'s shoes, and even though she's explained what she means, it's too abstract for Caitlin to really understand--but then she gets it!)

Her brother loved the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird, and was like Jem, and called her Scout. References to the movie and the book keeps showing up throughout the novel, and it's a beautiful illustration of so many things, not least of which is how much you lose when you lose someone you love--not just that person now and forever, but all those references you held in common.

(The Mockingbirds is also referencing To Kill a Mockingbird.)

The Gathering, by Anne Enright

2010-12-20T17:58:00.000-08:00

This book took me a long time to read. I started it probably a month ago, and set it down quite a few times. I usually have several books going at once, but I tend to read fiction pretty quickly, since I like to stay in the world while I'm visiting, if that makes sense. But I read at least several YA novels and a collection of stories since I started The Gathering. This is partly because the subject matter of The Gathering isn't always easy, but I think it might be more because I am out of the habit of reading really challenging contemporary novels, written for adults.

But I kept carrying it around with me/keeping it next to my bed, and I kept picking it up again. I kept loving it, too, and I have never been one to stop reading a book I'm loving. So this morning I finished it, and while I got it out of the library, I'll probably end up buying a copy--coming from this broke, library-loving reader, this girl with her bookshelves full, who essentially has to dispose of a book every time she adds a new one to the shelves, that's extremely high praise.

Enright is an Irish author, and the back cover compares her to many great contemporary woman writers (Munro, Didion) and she is compared twice to Edna O'Brien, but one of the blurbs that compares her to O'Brien also notes that "Enright is more interestingly placed among experimental, if otherwise diverse, Irish writers..."

Which is also why this novel took me a while to read, and while I found it challenging. Its structure is interesting, and perhaps experimental. The story of a large family, it flips back and forth between the grandparents' early courtship, a summer visit that three siblings pay to the grandparents during their childhood, and the funeral of one of the siblings, among other moments. I never had a problem following the shifts in time, and while I was certainly aware that Veronica, the sibling who narrates the book, couldn't have known many of the details she discusses, this didn't bother me--and Veronica is very open about it. It isn't so much a novel in which Veronica relates events, but one in which she tries to recreate events as a way of making sense of the events that followed.

It is, ultimately, an amazing book about family. As Veronica notes, "I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them, instead." And as we see Veronica living in her grandmother, her brother, her daughters, we see how true this is. At the funeral, Veronica says, "just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive."

It is also about how we present our families to outsiders, but how ultimately they only make full sense (or mostly full sense) to us, and us to them.

It is also a novel about leaving behind those who die. For one thing, Veronica notes that she feels she should console her father "for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped." I know so completely what she means. I know that feeling absolutely, but I never had the words for it before.

It is also about childhood, or remembering childhood. Veronica observes, "I look at my own children and I think you know everything at eight. But maybe I am wrong. You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have you cut yourself open to find."

And it is a novel about grief, which may be why I kept putting it down, and also why I had to finish it.

This is one of those amazing books that is four or five stories in one, layered so richly that you might have to read it four or five times to notice everything, or at least notice most of it. It took me a long time to read because it was hard work. But Veronica imagines her grandmother thinking this: "If Ada [the grandmother] had reached any sort of conclusion in this life, it was a little one. People, she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed."

This, this last, is not the only thing in this book that I will keep thinking about.

Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems: "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Jean and Jean-Paul"

2010-12-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

I'm writing about Charles Simic, formerly #92 on my list of my hundred most influential writers, now #93 (I forgot L.M. Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables books, and the list is sort of chronological). Simic is important to me because of Dime-Store Alchemy, his book of prose poems about Joseph Cornell. So I am spending all this time trying to date and identify the origin of my obsession with Cornell. In my search, I'm reading through the blog I kept when I lived in Brooklyn, stillinbrooklyn.blogspot.com, and I found this poem,, from Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems. I went to all that work to type it in (I tried to just put in three lines:

but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

but realized "okay, except you really have to read the whole thing,") and as always, I learned so much from writing the poem over again--it forces you to read it in a different way, to interact with the words and the language more and differently than you would otherwise. Anyway, I decided that since I went to all that work, and since the poem continues to be so wonderful and so true, here it is again:

ADIEU TO NORMAN,
BON JOUR TO JEAN AND JEAN-PAUL

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up

at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's
I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems
at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press
which they will probably not print
but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of the night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

yesterday I looked up the rue Fremicourt on a map
and was happy to find it like a bird
flying over Paris et ses environs
which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise which I don't know

as well as a number of other things
and Allen is back talking about god a lot
and Peter is back not talking very much
and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's
although he is coming to lunch with Norman
I suspect he is making a distinction
well, who isn't

I wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues
the Seine continues
the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all
the Bar Americain continues to be French
de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb
and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!)
and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes
and so do I (sometimes I think I'm "in love" with painting)
and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it
and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people
under them
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it

1959

Voice of America

2010-12-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

I got E.C. Osondu's new collection of stories Voice of America, out of the library because we were at Syracuse University together in the MFA program, and I didn't know him well, but what I knew I liked. I wanted to support him as best I could, and at this juncture that does not mean buying a brand-new hardcover book, it means putting it on hold at the library. I buy very few new hardcover books for myself, and most of the books I buy come from garage sales, library sales, and thrift stores. This doesn't do the authors a whole lot of good, but it benefits my students, who are mostly who I buy books for.

But I think that I'll be buying several copies of E.C.'s book as gifts. I want everyone I know to read it. These stories are beautifully written, but they're also about characters who are so hugely underrepresented in our literature. They are primarily the stories of Nigerian immigrants to the U.S., though many take place in Nigeria.

I was commenting to a friend that many of these stories are also told from the viewpoint of women, or with the women's point of view as central and important, which E.C. does so thoughtfully.

I put this book on hold to support a friend, but wow.

Angry Management

2010-12-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

So for two nights in a row, I had to stay up to finish books. First Chris Crutcher's Angry Management, then Daisy Whitney's The Mockingbirds. I am a longtime Chris Crutcher fan. I didn't discover his work until I started teaching, when I started facing the reality that many kids, most kids, aren't readers like I was. Many kids grow up not reading--it's not something they do outside of school, it's not something they choose to do, it's certainly not something they love. Often, it's not something they do even in school. It's horrifyingly easy to avoid, and most kids don't have a reason not to avoid it.

As a teacher, one of my greatest pleasures, one of my hugest victories, became being able to help a student who considers books a waste of time, stupid, lame, find a book that he or she (too often he) loves. I have given so many books by Chris Crutcher to so many students. But first I loved his novels my own self. They're all great, but Whale Talk might have been the first one I fell in love with. I also love/d Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, which has just about the best premise of any novel ever: the fat kid and a scarred up girl have a close friendship--they're brought together through being outcasts, but their friendship transcends that. However, the fat kid starts swimming and losing weight--but he's afraid that if he loses weight, he'll lose his best friend. Read the title again. There's a lot more to this book than what I've told you--Crutcher has been a counselor working with kids who've been to hell and back, and his books have some hard truths in them, because kids deal with a lot of hard truths.

He's also written about his books being censored, and several of his essays about censorship are central to my censorship unit. Speaking of, (hint to teachers!) nothing like a censorship unit to get kids to read. "Many adults don't want kids to read this," is such an excellent way to get non-readers to pick up a book, and often they won't put it down because first they have to figure out why adults don't want them reading the book, and then they have to finish it as a big fuck-you to all those stupid adults. More power to them.

So I was very excited to read Angry Management, but I'd be curious if it did anything for readers who haven't read Crutcher's other books. In the foreword, Crutcher describes it as three "novellas" which bring together "characters I've created separately over a fifteen-year span. In this book, they've stayed the same ages they were when I created them. Hey, the Hardy Boys have remained teenagers for more than three quarters of a century."

The premise that holds these novellas together is that all of these students are in an "anger management" group together; this is how they meet, learn a little about each other, and get the chance to interact. Angus Bethune, who's featured in a fabulous story in Athletic Shorts, Crutcher's book of short stories out of which I love to teach "The Pin," gets to be friends with Sarah Byrnes, and they help each other figure some stuff out. There is also a lot about Montana West, a character in The Sledding Hill, not one of my favorite Crutcher novels (if only because others are more wonderful).

Crutcher has worked with a lot of kids with lousy parents, and a lot of kids who've ended up in foster care. Montana is one of those, and her adopted little sister, Tara, is another. Montana's parents want to give Tara back, give up on her, and I think the most moving passage in this book is when Montana's trying to figure out how to help Tara: "How can she [Montana] tell her mother that feeling bad feels right when everything in your world is wrong; that at first you need your foster parents to make things familiar, which in this case means fucked up. It makes such sense at a heart level, but even for a wordsmith like Montana West, it's impossible to articulate. It's so true, and it sounds so crazy."

So everyone should read Crutcher. But maybe this book isn't the place to start. Read Whale Talk, and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, and Athletic Shorts, then all his other novels, then this one. I'm curious to hear from any Crutcher fans who disagree...

The Mockingbirds

2010-12-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

I just finished the most remarkable YA novel: The Mockingbirds, by Daisy Whitney. Alex hooked up with this boy--"What's his name? Remember, Goddamn it, remember. Carver. . . . No, it's Carter. Definitely Carter."

And she slowly--with the help of her friends and sister--comes to the realization that he date-raped her. She knows her fancy boarding school won't do anything about it--the administration "totally ignores everything because [it] ... destroys their notion of who Themis students are--of who they're educating to be future leaders of the world and all that stuff." But her older sister, when she was a student at Themis, started The Mockingbirds, an underground society made up of students, that administers justice in situations like Alex's. If you bring someone before the Mockingbirds, and they are found guilty, they have to give up what is most important to them. The quarterback quits the football team, theater kids have to stop being involved in theater, that kind of thing. Alex's rapist will have to quit playing water polo.

One thing I love about this book is how much it foregrounds the students, and their willingness and ability to step up and take care of each other when the adults refuse to acknowledge what's going on. But Alex does have one good teacher, who gives the author, herself a victim of date rape, the opportunity to have someone in her novel say things like:

"You don't have to have been fighting him off the whole time for it to be date rape. You don't have to have been saying no the entire time, either. In fact, it doesn't even matter if you were having the time of your life, Alex," she says, her words precise, like individual slices of certainty. "What he did to you was nonconsensual, and it doesn't suddenly become consensual because for one moment you put your hands on his back. That one moment doesn't wipe the slate clean and make you sober. You were drunk. And you said no. That's why it's date rape."

So yeah, at some moments it might get a little preachy. But the above is spoken by a teacher, who's allowed to and even supposed to be preachy. I'm just glad this book exists. It presents a messy situation and a protagonist who feels guilty about her own behavior--she was drunk, for one thing--but it is clear about labeling the situation as what it was: rape. And the protagonist gets to have a boyfriend! Her life isn't over after she's raped!

I also love the narrator's thoughts about everything after the "trial," which ring so true for many essential battles we fight in high school and college and throughout life:

...Justice doesn't . . . erase what happened. It doesn't make you who you were before. I'm becoming someone else--someone else I'm figuring out how to be.

I wonder briefly why I went through it, why it was worth it. Because in some ways, nothing changed. This is just how it goes, this is how it feels to take a stand. It feels like life, like chocolate cake, like just another average school night; it feels like wanting to be alone. You don't parade in the streets, you don't dance on the grave. You sit on the steps and you watch the school go by and the moon rise higher in the sky and it feels like...

Like normal, actually. It feels like normal.

I want normal. I like normal. I did this for normal.

June Jordan

2010-12-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

I just started reading June Jordan's essay collection, Some of Us Did NOT Die. I'll probably have more to say about it once I'm finished, but to start, it's amazing.

All I knew about Jordan before I started reading it was a little bit about her "Poetry to the People" project. So of course, I looked her up on Wikipedia--which describes her as "one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century." Um, I don't think I can name any other Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century. I think that's what we call damning someone with faint praise. Anyway Wikipedia also informed me that June Jordan was the first to say, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." I don't remember ever hearing that attributed to her--or to anyone. Oh, citing your sources.

Hmph.

2010-12-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

I went to the Portland Art Museum the other day, and was surprised and happy to see a small Catherine Opie show and an even smaller Alice Neel show. It's my local museum now, and the local museum has always been so important to me, since I was a kid growing up in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts was a short bus ride from me, and it was free, and by the time I was in high school, I knew that collection so well. I had my favorites that I visited: Lucretia, of course, and the mummy, and "dead boy," and that little tiny beautiful girl in the really ornate frame... that's what I remember off the top of my head. There is also that enormous Chuck Close painting, the Magritte Renée loved so much, and "Mrs." Nathaniel Allen.

I miss the museums in New York too, of course--I got to know parts of the Met's collection pretty well, and I love the Whitney, and MoMA was in Queens for much of my time in NYC, and always so expensive (the Met is donation only, and the Whitney has a student/educator membership rate, so I was able to join), so I didn't get to know that collection as well, mostly only going on the occasional insanely crowded free Friday night. Same with the Guggenheim, but that's such a weird museum anyway. I was content to go two or three times a year and walk up the spiral and then down again. It's such an awkward way to view art.

Anyway, so here I am in Portland, missing New York museums, but also missing the awesome Minneapolis museums I grew up with. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts was classic and close and great. PAM is weird. First of all, there's the weirdness of the Jubitz Center, their modern art wing, a separate building which is accessible only through what feels like a secret passage in the basement. That's where the Opie show was, and the Neel show is in the basement passage. The Opie show is mentioned on the website, but I don't remember reading anything about it in the members stuff that's sent to me. The Neel show isn't mentioned anywhere on the website, and there is no way to search the museum holdings. As I recall, all the Neel paintings were long-term loans, but geez.

That's all I have to say about that right now.

Obama's "A Letter to My Daughters"

2010-12-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Reading Debbie Reese's post about Obama's children's book and the controversy over the inclusion of Sitting Bull on his list of "thirteen groundbreaking Americans" (quoting back cover copy), I went to this link included in her post, and read about the 1862 U.S.-Dakota war. This war took place in Minnesota and resulted in the "largest mass execution" in American history--38 Native Sioux men executed, at the order of President Lincoln. I learned a lot of Minnesota history growing up in Minneapolis--I learned over and over again about the French voyageurs--but I don't remember ever hearing about this war, much less the execution.

I recommend Debbie's post, even if you're not from Minnesota. She has some interesting observations about Obama's book, specifically about the inclusion of Sitting Bull within it, and about the illustration of Sitting Bull.

Al Capone Does My Shirts

2010-12-02T17:05:00.000-08:00

I just read two amazing books long after I should have read them, but I stayed up late and got up early to finish them, reading them back to back. If you haven't read Gennifer Choldenko's Al Capone Does My Shirts, and its sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes, you have an exciting reading experience ahead of you. I don't know why it took me so long. Maybe since I've been teaching high school, I've been more focused on YA. Maybe I'd heard about the first book (published in 2004, so while I was teaching middle school) as "a book about autism" so I didn't make it a priority. Which is shameful enough in itself, but even more wrong because these are not novels about autism. They are about Moose Flanagan, whose family moves from Santa Monica to Alcatraz Island (outside San Francisco) so Moose's dad can take a job--really two jobs--as electrician and guard at Alcatraz, and Moose's sister Natalie can go to a special school in San Francisco. Natalie is different--now, in 2010, her condition would probably be diagnosed as a form of autism, but in 1935, when the novels take place, she is dismissed as "weird," "retarded," and other things just as bad and worse. It is suggested--and would be the typical thing to do at that time--that Moose's family should put her in an asylum, but Moose's family has rallied around Natalie, especially his mother, who wants to try everything possible--maybe not to "fix" her, but to let her have some kind of life. So they uproot themselves and move to Alcatraz.

But while these books are in large part about Moose's family and the ways in which they adapt to live with and care for Natalie (and that part of the story is moving and complex and fabulous, by the way) they are also about a middle-school boy who, in the middle of his seventh grade year, leaves his friends to live on Alcatraz Island, famous prison and home to many murderers, kidnappers, and other infamous criminals. Alcatraz is sort of the setting of the story, but I would say that's also a major player, one of the characters.

These books are awesome. Read them. I don't think I have more to say about them right now.

Portland

2010-12-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

I didn't realize it until after I left Brooklyn, but Sahadi's was one of the things I would miss most. My friends, museums, Film Forum, and Sahadi's.

Portland is amazing, and the food here is great--I have found fabulous restaurants of nearly every kind, though the (east) Indian food is just not as amazing, and WOW I MISS ROTI! And Bed-Stuy. But that's another story.

But there's this tea that I would buy at Sahadi's, Pompadour brand tea, and I brought two boxes of their Rosehip and Hibiscus Flowers tea with me when I moved. But then I found it at a little shop on Hawthorne, and I was happier than I expected to be. However, last weekend Emilyn and I tried to stop there, and the store was gone! I was sadder than I expected.

However, today I went to the Bipartisan Cafe, at 79th and Stark, and just up the block was International Food Supply. They don't carry Pompadour brand, but I found Rosehip tea that has hibiscus flowers in it, plus I bought some Turkish Delight as a gift. So I am very happy. Shop at International Food Supply, 8015 S.E. Stark. I will go back when I need yogurt and some other things. It was very exciting, I was sorry I only needed tea.

East Side Story

2010-11-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

On this freezing cold (relatively, yeah--but it is cold out there!) day, I decided to watch one of my random movies from the library, settling on East Side Story, which I'd never heard of, but it looked interesting if not great. Plus it's from the library so it's free, so I check out way more movies than I ever watch, and watch just a few minutes of some and return most unwatched. But this seemed a good afternoon for East Side Story, so I went for it, and I watched the whole thing, all 88 minutes of it.

Trailer...

A totally cute gayboy movie, this film has more to it than that. It tackles--without them being the focus or the premise--gentrification, assimilation, and specifically gentrification by gays, in this case (but not only in this case), rich white gay men. However, of course, many of us don't fit into just one category. We can be queer and part of the community being gentrified, for example.

It has a lot of great moments, including the exchange between the closeted gayboy who tells his grandmother he has something important to tell her. She totally already knows he's gay, and she's just glad he's finally going to tell her--but then he tells her something else, and she has to reduce and shift her excitement hugely. None of us have ever been in that position. Ever.

But I think the best part in this sweet but honest and true little movie is the closing shot, which is a Latino nanny holding the Chinese baby adopted by white couple Adam and Steve, with the proud fathers saying goodbye and the nanny and their daughter watching them go.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

2010-11-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

I read the first of these books several years ago and loved it, but never read the others. But I bought #2 at a library book sale, and then I put #3 on hold at the library. I have now finished #2 and #3, and put #4 on hold--who knew there were four?

The third book, Girls in Pants, is not the best by most standards, and other readers haven't liked it as much--the consensus seems to be that #1 was the best, and they have gotten worse ever since. But I loved the third, and cried and laughed most of the way through, I think because I'm nostalgic about that period of life--the summer after your senior year of high school, before you leave those friends you've known forever, who've known you forever, and who are your friends in a different way than any friends you will ever have again. The kinds of friends who can walk into your parents' houses without knocking, who know your parents and your siblings and maybe even your grandparents or your aunts and uncles or your cousins or your neighbors. The kinds of friends who are family in a way no one else will ever be. I think that once you have your own family, and maybe children, there are friends, especially other friends with children, who are family in another kind of way, but I didn't realize before I went away to college that my friends in the future would be close friends, but they would not know my family, they would not know my family history, and for those reasons there would be a distance between us that I did not have with earlier friends. Of course, you grow apart from those earlier friends too, but what you share? It stays there.

Friends can be family later on in your life, but never in the same way. Which is not entirely a bad thing. But this book--these books, but especially the third--made me remember that and miss it.

Amy Bloom

2010-11-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

I just finished Amy Bloom's new(ish) collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. I think she is very unlike any other writer I love--she lives in Connecticut, and when I was in college, I got a ride partway to meet a friend, with a fellow Bard student who was friends with her daughter. They lived in the same wealthy Connecticut town. Now, having done some research, I know that that must have been her first husband (she then had a serious ten-year relationship with a woman, and is now married again), and she was wealthier then than she has been since. But I still think of her as a white, upper-middle-class, Connecticut, therapist (now full-time writer and professor--formerly at Yale, now at Wesleyan), writer. Not what I usually read.

Nevertheless, I always love her stories. It's like reading Cheever--the stories are not about people I know, but the details are so real, so vivid, and there is enough overlap because her characters are thoughtful, well-drawn human beings.

Also, she is one of the few writers I read who deals with interracial relationships in a real, true way; when others write about/mention these relationships, the race is irrelevant, as we're supposed to believe it is, in our post-racial society. Or it's the whole story. But Bloom, while not foregrounding it, also very deliberately does not erase it. Four of these stories are about Julia, a white woman who had two children with her black husband, one her stepchild (his child by an earlier marriage) and one her child with Lionel. These characters were in earlier stories of hers, as well. The stories are not about her being white and her children being black, but that is part of the reality of the situation.

I will keep reading her books. Every book she writes.

More Pat Murphy Interview Quotes...

2010-11-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

& these tips are from this interview. A bit dated (the interview is from 2000), but still great, and in this age of the Kindle, perhaps more relevant than ever:

10 WAYS TO KEEP BOOKS YOU LOVE IN PRINT

#1
Review the book you love online in a newsgroup, on a webzine, on an e-commerce site, or on a personal web site. This is an easy way to tell a lot of people about a fabulous book. People pay attention to reviews. Hey--authors read reviews. With a good review, you can make an author's day.

#2
When asked what you want for your birthday, or Hanukkah, or Christmas, or any other gift-giving occasion, answer with your favorite author's current book.

#3
Give books as presents. If someone has a favorite author, buy that author's latest title. If the gift recipient doesn't have a favorite author, buy a book by an author you like. If your friend likes the book, you've done the author a big favor by creating a new fan.

#4
Ask for books by your favorite author at your local library. If the library doesn't have a book, request it. Checking a book out of the library helps establish that there's a demand for that author's work. Demand leads library systems to buy books.

#5
Tell writers how much their work has affected you. Go to readings—even if you can't afford to buy the book. Urge your local library bookstore or your school to invite the writer to do a talk, a reading, or a class visit. Sometimes writers just need to know that someone is listening.

#6
Talk about books and authors at work, among friends, and in other not-necessarily literary environments. If you belong to a writing group, recommend your favorite authors to the group. If you add a book to your reading group, tell your favorite bookstore what you've done and buy your books there. The bookstore may put them out front on
display.

#7
Point to good books in the bookstore and tell people, even total strangers, "That one is great." If you see someone looking at a copy of a book you like, encourage them to buy it.

#8
Carry around a copy of a book you love. Read it on buses, in waiting rooms, and in other public places. Be prepared to wax eloquent about it—spontaneously or only when asked; that's up to you.

#9
Just because a book is out-of-print doesn't necessarily mean you can't get it. Lightning Print Inc. is currently asking for suggestions for books to reprint. You can vote now at their web site: http://www.lightingprint.com/scripts/TitleRequest.asp?nav=bookstores.

#10
Nominate your favorite authors for awards. Any year that you are a member of the World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate and vote for the Hugo Award. Nominate gender-bending works for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (http://www.tiptree.org/) and works with gay or lesbian content for the Lambda Literary Award. If you subscribe to Locus Magazine, you can nominate works for the Locus Poll and Survey. And yes, it's worth taking the time—awards make a difference to an author's sales and that helps keep books in print.

Above all else, keep reading!

& something else from that interview, extracted, apparently, from Murphy's lecture notes for a lecture on pulp novels from a class she taught on science fiction: "All art provides unearned instant gratification: a gratification necessary to our psychic well-being. C.S. Lewis was once moved to observe that the only people to whom the word 'escape' is a pejorative are jailers."

Yeah, more great stuff:

"When I teach writing, I sometimes have students describe a character's home or car. 'Don't describe the character,' I tell them, 'but show me what the character is like by showing me where they live.'"

The City, Not Long After

2010-11-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Still reading Pat Murphy books, and I bought two copies of The Wild Girls remaindered at Powell's, one for me and one for Megan. I also bought a cheap massmarket used copy off The City, Not Long After, since in this awesome interview she says that The City, Not Long After is one of her three favorites of her books and the library doesn't have it! Published in 1989, The City, Not Long After is a post-apocalyptic novel set in Seattle. Reading it, I kept thinking how Parable of the Sower is so much better, but then I realized the world is big enough for more than one post-apocalyptic novel. It's fiction, Elissa.

Plus Murphy's and Butler's post-apocalyptisisms (heh) are so different. Butler's America dies because of, according to Publishers Weekly, "global warming, pollution, racial and ethnic tensions and other ills." Murphy's America is struck by a plague spread by monkeys representing the peace movement. And the best part of The City, Not Long After is that the few survivors ultimately end up in a war, of course--the bad guys, led by General Miles, are conquering city after mostly-abandoned city in their effort to recreate "America," but then they try to take over San Francisco, a city of artists and poets and ghosts that don't necessarily think recreating America is such a good idea. Ms. Migsdale tells Foursquares' (their name for General Miles) representative, "You seem to think joining together into a larger and more powerful nation is automatically good. We don't necessarily agree. Personally, I've always thought that nations were tremendously overrated. I can't say I was particularly proud to be an American; I never cared much for America as a whole, though I liked my neighborhood well enough. I've always favored a somewhat looser structure, more like the city-states of early Greece."'

But unable to convince the Americans to go away and leave them alone, given the choice of fighting a war or surrendering, San Francisco's citizens insist on fighting a Gandhi-style war, and instead of killing people they are simply marked as dead, with DEAD by and the name of who "killed" them painted on their face, and the agreed-upon CERTIFICATE OF DEATH placed in their pocket or on their chest. The certificate read, "Please consider yourself removed from combat. Look at it this way--we could have killed you. If you don't stop fighting, we really will kill you next time. Signed, the People of San Francisco."

Okay, so it's not Parable of the Sower, but it's pretty damn good.

The Last Lecture

2010-11-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

Last year a student told me I have to read The Last Lecture, it's the best book she's ever read. I'd never heard of it. But she's a thoughtful, good kid, and she was so excited about this book. So I put it on hold at the library, it came, and then it sat on my shelf of library books unread for a long time. I renewed it several times. But it's little, so finally I just read it.

Apparently it's huge; a quote from the book, "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," is, according to Amazon, the seventh most highlighted quote of all time on Kindle.

The student knew nothing about my exciting health stuff, so she didn't mention that this is a book written by a dying man. But yeah.

It's also a book about learning to be humble, about living your life as fully as you can in the time you have (something that feels more urgent when you know you don't have a lot of time, but something that is good for all of us to do anyway), a book about giving people a chance to "surprise and impress you," and just generally a book about wisdom. Wisdom gained, that most people don't get the chance to pass on. This guy has--had--a lot of wisdom, too. Full of short chapters with pithy titles like "A Bad Apology Is Worse Than No Apology," and "Don't Obsess Over What Other People Think," this is a short book worth reading, filled with lessons one man wanted to pass along. He was a smart guy paying close attention. Note that I did go through Erma Bombeck and Andy Rooney phases (when I was reading every book in my house), but if you did too, then this one might be for you.

Pat Murphy, Max Merriwell, Mary Maxwell, and Weldon Merrimax

2010-10-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

I just finished Pat Murphy's/Mary Maxwell's/Max Merriwell's fabulous trilogy, read out of order. In order, they are There and Back Again, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell. I read There and Back Again first, then Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, and then Wild Angel. Which I think was just fine. I loved them all, but I think Wild Angel might be the only novel not by Horatio Alger that I've read that's set in the California gold rush during the 1850's. It's definitely the only novel I've read that's set in the California gold rush during the 1850's featuring a heroine raised by wolves. Excellent.

There and Back Again is an old school sci-fi novel with rockets and aliens, Wild Angel is as described above, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell takes place on a cruise ship, yet they are most certainly a trilogy. Fun reading. But thoughtful too. Highly recommended.

And so so different from the first novel I read by Pat Murphy! Wow.

There and Back Again

2010-10-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

So I read The Wild Girls, right? And loved it. Loved it so much that I put all of Pat Murphy's other books on hold at the library. But it looks like The Wild Girls may be Pat Murphy's only book that is realistic fiction. I just finished There and Back Again, which I loved, but which falls into that sub-genre of science fiction that's all rocket ships and worm holes (and it was written in 1999, which I think of as well after the rocket ships and worm holes sub-genre peaked). I am not terribly well-versed in this sub-genre, but There and Back Again was so captivating.

But she has an Afterword--or her pseudonym, Max Merriwell, has an Afterword--in which s/he explains and/or points out that her/his novel is modeled after The Hobbit and is a hero's journey.

Which totally makes sense.

So this book that I just finished is an old-school sci-fi novel, a hero's journey modeled after The Hobbit, captivating and enthralling and really fun, by the author of The Wild Girls! I'm excited to read Pat Murphy's other books. Which is good, since all the holds got filled at once so they're all waiting for me at home.

Messed Up

2010-10-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

I just read another awesome book. Totally teacher-written, so much from a teacher POV, although ostensibly it's first person from R.D.'s POV. Somehow, I think, it manages to be convincingly both, and I think it would ring true to an R.D. reading it. But I'm a teacher, not an R.D., so what do I know. Anyway, he rang really true to me. I've known too many kids like him.

Messed Up by Janet Nichols Lynch is a novel about R.D., smart and interesting, but his mom had him at 14 and is now in jail, his dad was never around, and he was living with his grandmother and Earl, her beau, until she found a new man, Hairy, and left town with him, leaving R.D. with Earl. Which is okay, until Earl dies. R.D. doesn't tell anyone at first; he can already sort of drive (having already failed eighth grade, being almost sixteen, and helping Earl with the mechanic's business he runs out of the garage), he can already forge Earl's signature, and he learns to cook (one of the most moving and special parts of this novel, I think).

The teacher-ness doesn't really show up till the end, when R.D. and his friend Jeanette go into the shop room and wonder why these classes aren't being offered anymore. I was not the only one outraged and frustrated when the shop teacher at the middle school I worked at retired and was not replaced--R.D. speaks the truth for a lot of kids at a lot of schools when he tells Jeanette, "Most of the kids I know who took shop are in double math now. It's sort of funny because about the only time I ever used math was in shop. You gotta figure real careful or everything turns out messed up. It's the only class I ever got an A in." Thank god for the cooking and childcare programs at the high school I teach at--the classes are always full, and a lot of kids who might not end up going to college (which is FINE!) are loving them, feeling proud of their achievements, and learning real-life skills that will help them find jobs!

This book is so spot-on at a lot of moments. It was fun to read like that. For example, R.D. is at a school dance when "The music stops and I hear a girl scream, 'Let go of me.' It's that thing where you're yelling to be heard over the loud music and suddenly the music stops and it's you just yelling." Who hasn't been in that situation?

And R.D.'s class reads "The Gift of the Magi" right before Christmas, and when he "feel[s] the tears coming, I pretend to cough and sneeze so I can walk up to the front of the classroom and get a Kleenex." He raises his hand to tell the teacher "they really need to get their money back on those hair thingies to get the watch back cuz sometimes people buy things from pawn shops and they'll never get the watch back if they don't jump on it, and anyways, the dumb lady's dumb hair will grow back for free so what's she whining about?" His teacher says he's missing the point; He observes, correctly, "I'm not though, or I wouldn't need a Kleenex."

It works out okay for R.D. in the end, although his earnest first-year teacher who got the class with all the "bad" kids who've been held back quits half-way through her first year since she knows she's not going to get rehired next year--R.D. comes in over Christmas break when she's packing her stuff and she tells him, "'I uh... well, I haven't been reelected for next year.'" He asks what that means, and she says, "'It means fired. They don't want to call it that, but that's what it is.'" Yeah. No Child Left Behind. Except for the kids we don't give a shit about.

But R.D. gets emancipated, goes to an alternative high school, and gets a job prepping in a fancy restaurant. R.D. is one of the bad-ass smart kids dealt a bad hand who gets just enough breaks that he makes it out. Yay for happy endings.

The Wild Girls

2010-10-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

I just read an awesome book. It would've probably been my favorite book if I'd read it when I was 12, and it might just be my new favorite book right now. I read it in bed all morning, and I laughed and cried and laughed and cried, often but not always at the same time.

About becoming a writer and being 12 and your parents not getting along...

Joan is 12 in 1972 when her dad gets a new job in San Francisco so her family (she, her mom and dad, and her older brother Mark) moves from Connecticut to Danville, "a little suburban town about a half hour's drive from San Francisco."

When she breaks a glass helping her mom unpack, her mom tells her to go explore, so she does, and she meets "the Queen of All the Foxes," a.k.a. Fox, a.k.a. Sarah, who right away takes her hunting for newts.

She spends all summer with Fox, and when school starts and she sees Fox (Sarah at school), "I almost didn't recognize her."

They are sort of friends at school, good friends outside of school, and they write a prize-winning story and take a creative writing class at Berkeley the next summer, taught by Verla Volante, who in their first class asks "a lot of really strange questions. Not like most teachers, who ask a lot of questions that they already know the answers to. Verla asked weird questions, and she said stuff like: You're the only one who knows the answer to this question. Questions like these don't have right or wrong answers. If you don't know the answer, make up the answer. Later on you can figure out if it's true."

Joan (later known, at least in the woods with Fox, as Newt) loves Verla's class of course, and likes the other "loose nuts" in the class. She learns to write stories that help her make sense of her world, and quote Verla's aphorisms liberally including "Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story."

This book is much more complex and much better than I'm making it sound. You should just read it.

Walter Dean Myers: The Dream Bearer

2010-10-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

But then I read a YA book that I loved (see review of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You here): The Dream Bearer, by Walter Dean Myers, which I was delighted to see he dedicated to Miriam! Yay! (Miriam is his agent, who I used to work for.)

I forget how well Myers does 12-year-olds. The last book I read and loved by him, this year's National Book Award nominee Lockdown, is among my favorites of his, up there with Autobiography of My Dead Brother and, always, Monster. But The Dream Bearer's main character, David, still has his big brother at home, which makes David a younger twelve than he might be otherwise.

Anyway, I loved this book. I read it till I finished it, in spite of much else to do--which isn't always an indicator of a great novel, but in this case I think it is. It's so much about family and, of course, about dreams.

Mr. Moses, the dream bearer of the title, tells David a lot of wise things. One of them is, "David, we build our dreams deep down in our souls. We use everything we ever knew and everything that's ever touched us. You've got a strong heart and a strong mind. If this old world can be changed, it'll be because you've nudged it toward the dreams you build. I got faith in you, David. I got a real true faith in you."

I don't know if it's a book that will appeal to 12-year-olds. But I'm going to be recommending it to every adult I know, especially those of us who work with children.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

2010-10-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Peter Cameron's novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. One of the blurbs on the back, James Cameron's (listed as author of The Misfits but better known and beloved for Bunnicula), compared it to Catcher in the Rye, and yeah it's sort of a 2004 update. Rich New Yorker kid (James went to Sty instead of a private school, but same difference really) with divorced parents, a wealthy lawyer father and a thrice-married mom who owns a Chelsea gallery.

It's no more YA fiction than Catcher in the Rye is, but since it was published in 2007, then it's YA. Similarly, had I read it when I first read Catcher in the Rye, I probably would have loved it, but at 34, I found the hero to be spoiled and annoying, and sorry I'm just not that interested in reading about rich white teenagers dealing with their dislike of their peers and questioning whether they're interested in starting their freshman year of college in the fall (Brown, of course!).

But I did finish it. Which says something. It was a fun read. & I was thinking how the passages I marked at 34 so aren't the passages I would've marked at 18:

"I walked deeper into the woods, down a slope, and into a sort of culvert, through which trickled a narrow stream. The stream smelled a little funky and I was glad it was dark, so I couldn't see how polluted it was. ...I squatted down and covered my face, pushing the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes. They fit perfectly, like two halves of a whole, and my hands were exactly the right size to cradle my skull. It seemed like another example of how well human beings are designed, that you were shaped to comfort yourself."

"I always feel humbled by people who speak more than one language. I envy them. It seems with two (or more) vocabularies, you could not only say so much more and speak to so many more people, but also think more. I often feel I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thought, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish." (This does not feel like the thinking of any 18-year-old to me.)

James' awesome grandma: "Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is you should be doing. I know that sounds very Pollyannaish but it's true. People who have had only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is not to be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You mustn't let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."

When Nanette (the grandma) eventually dies and leaves everything in the house to him, as she told him she would, he uses "some of the money my grandmother left me" to put it all in "a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City" against his parents' advice--they wanted him to have it all "liquidated" but he says storing it "seems reasonable to me. I'm only eighteen. How do I know what I will want in my life? How do I know what things I will need?"

I just realized that it was Peter Cameron I saw "in conversation" with Sherman Alexie at the Strand after both their YA novels came out--Cameron's, reviewed above, which he never intended to be YA but was marketed as such, and Alexie's Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which Alexie very deliberately wrote as YA. Their take on YA was so different: Cameron thought his novel being marketed as YA really reduced it as literature (he was so infuriating and ill-informed!) and Alexie was pleased to be directly writing for a demographic that was already reading and loving his stuff.

Yay! West Indian Food in Portland!

2010-10-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

This cart doesn't have roti--the guy working said he's been bugging his mom to make some, though, and I said, "Tell him some white girl came and asked for it"--but the jerk chicken and chickpeas over rice--for $5!--made me really happy. It's called Caribbean Kookpot, it's open Wednesday through Saturday afternoon till 7:30, and it's on Mississippi just above Fremont.

Uglies

2010-10-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

I just finished Extras, the fourth and final book in the Uglies series, and I'm now even reading Bogus to Bubbly, "An Insider's Guide to the World of the Uglies," which I got out of the public library by mistake (I thought it was one of Scott Westerfeld's other novels).

This series plus the insider's guide made me so happy.

Hah! I'm loving all the fake history in Bogus to Bubbly. For example, from "another document uncovered by the Awesome Librarians clique": "In cities like Diego, the pretties with the greatest resistance to social programming and brain surge [the operation to make us all dumber, fun-loving-er, and less likely to challenge our current society] often became teachers and librarians." God I wish that's how it was. Except that is sort of how it is. But I wish it was more like that.

As I posted on Facebook this morning, "I just finished the last book in the Uglies series, Extras--when do you ever finish a series so happy about the final book? It ends PERFECTLY." How brilliant, to have the final book show us how Tally's rebellion played out around the world--the final book takes place about three years after the third one, and the main character is a post-ugly (what else should I call her, really? A fifteen-year-old? She does observe, very early on, that "It still pretty much sucked, being fifteen." Some things just won't ever change.) in JAPAN! Aya lives in a city ruled by a Reputation Economy.

I also love the quotations Scott Westerfeld opens each section of each book with. He talks a lot about beauty, understandably, and the epigraph for part 2 of the first book, Uglies, is from Francis Bacon: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." He discusses this further in Bogus to Bubbly when he goes into all the research he did on neoteny, the halo effect, and the other hypotheses he used in researching and creating the Uglies series.

Also why I love Bogus to Bubbly: Westerfeld can explain each of the devices in his series by saying things like, "...bungee jackets allow my heroes to jump off tall things and not die, which is very useful for an author." He also observes that "It's cool how inventions that start out just for fun often wind up as part of the plot." CREATIVE WRITING TEACHERS! TAKE NOTE!

Peace, Locomotion

2010-09-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

Today I read a lot. I called in sick: it was chemo Friday and also the Friday of my first week back at school after my stroke two weeks ago. So I would've called in anyway but I had extra reason.

I slept 11 hours then finished Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes, his take on Sophocles' Antigone which my sophomores loved last year--it has all the elements, love, incest, the gods--but it's also got the distinction of having the only movie version (from the 60's, in the original Greek) that multiple students suggested I never show again. Wow.

Anyway I finished The Burial at Thebes then read Scott Westerfeld's Uglies which a number of my students have been obsessed with--I wanted to read the copy I'd bought at a yard sale before I brought it in and put it in my classroom library, so I did that, put the other three on hold at the library, and read Jacqueline Woodson's Peace, Locomotion, the "companion book" to Locomotion. In this book, Locomotion (sometimes Lonnie) is in 6th grade, and when he tells his new teacher, Ms. Cooper, that he is a poet because Ms. Marcus, his teacher last year, said he was, Ms. Cooper says "Until you publish a book, you're not a poet, you're an aspiring poet, Lonnie." Thank god that stupid evil Ms. Cooper goes on maternity leave three months into the year and the excellent Alina takes over.

You should all read all of Jacqueline Woodson's books. Peace, Locomotion takes the form of Lonnie's letters to his little sister, Lili. Miss Edna (Lonnie's foster mom)'s oldest son Jenkins comes home from (a) war, messed up and without his leg, but Miss Edna tells him, "This wasn't the dream none of us had, but it's our lives now and we need to be living it, sweetie."

Rodney, her other son, asks Jenkins how his leg is doing and he says "I don't know, it ain't here anymore." When Miss Edna comes out of the kitchen to ask what all the laughing is about, Rodney tells her, "I don't know, Mama. You the one who said sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying." Jenkins adds, "And sometimes you just gotta laugh."

Lonnie tells Lili this in a letter and adds, "It's true, Lili. Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh."

Thank you, Jacqueline Woodson.

Matt de la Peña

2010-09-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to read Mexican White Boy with my students this year. Thanks to everybody who's been helping me buy a class set!

I read all of Matt de la Peña's books over the summer, and they made me so happy. Finally some good YA fiction about Latino boys. (If you know of other books, I want to hear about them!) And of course it's not just about Latino boys, but I'm happy to have a book I can bring to my students and say this is awesome for all these reasons and one of them is that the main character is Latino. Because it doesn't happen anywhere near enough.

From We Were Here, about Miguel and Rondell, who run away from the group home they're in and take off for the Mexican border as if that might really let them start over:

I picked up a rock and thought how weird it was that people call 'em aliens. Like they're from outer space and look like damn Martians. All green with big-ass Rondell heads. And not just aliens but illegal ones too. I wondered who made up that term. And how weird is it that they put cops all along the border so no Mexicans could sneak in? But on the other side it was straight crickets. Nobody was there making sure American people like me and Rondell didn't sneak into Mexico. Shit like that is weird if you really stop and think about it.

Also awesome in this low-key incidental way: some of the characters from Ball Don't Lie are also in We Were Here. I like when that happens. He's got a whole world set up.

Also, Mong says, "It's not about what happens to people. It's how they figure out what it means." There's some smart stuff in this book. Earlier, Miguel says, "I looked at him and then leaned back and crossed my arms. I started calming down, which pissed me off even more. I hated that something some damn counselor could say would make me calm down when I didn't even feel like it."

I'd love to read We Were Here with my students, but we'll start with Mexican Whiteboy.

Mockingjay (A Review Without Spoilers)

2010-08-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

I got my review copy of Mockingjay on Tuesday morning, since they didn't send out any advance copies. I took it on vacation and read it between hikes, finishing it Friday morning, three days after I got it. If I had been home, I would've finished it sooner.

I was partly slowed down because I read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, the first and second books in this trilogy, back to back in March. (I blogged a very little bit about The Hunger Games here.) I remember that a major complaint about Catching Fire was that so much of the beginning of it was summary of The Hunger Games, and while that was frustrating, I think Mockingjay could have used a little more summary. I was grateful for The Hunger Games Wiki when I started Mockingjay; it helped fill me in on some of the details that had slid out of reach. There are so many characters in these books, and I didn't remember who Beetee or Plutarch was, or what happened to Cinna. In fact, as I recall, we don't quite learn what happens to Cinna, though it seems clear what probably happened--but then it's assumed in Mockingjay that we know.

Anyway. Although I don't think this book really stands on its own, it's a great ending to a fabulous trilogy. So read The Hunger Games if you haven't already, and I'll be surprised if you don't want to keep going and see the story through. I think these books are so realistic in their fantasticality: nothing happens that feels impossible. I do take issue with how Collins settles the question of whether Katniss will end up with Peeta or Gale. I love how it isn't clear throughout the book which way she'll go, how you can see her questions and feel how much she values each relationship. Also, Peeta has changed so much, and really, Gale has too. But when you get there, I think the end feels too easy. I don't want to say more, it would be too much of a spoiler, but this is the one thing that feels pat: the answer to Peeta or Gale? which is a complex and interesting question, until it's resolved. Not like I have a better idea for how it could end. I expected one of them to die, and I guess that would have been more irritating in many ways.

In her acknowledgments, Suzanne Collins thanks her late father, "who laid the groundwork for this series with his deep commitment to educating his children on war and peace." This series does closely and thoughtfully examine war and human motives for violence. It's interesting to see how different characters, raised in different ways and essentially in different cultures, though in the same country, have such variant views of values, inequity, the world.

At one point, Plutarch, one of the key leaders of the rebellion, observes, "Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction." But he adds, "Who knows? Maybe this will be it... The time it sticks. Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race. Think about that."

But this is a realistic revolution in the sense that many of the revolutionaries have their own agendas, beyond equality, beyond a better world. And they have their own yearning for power at the expense of anything else. We see the ways in which the personal intersects with the political, and each person brings their own worldview and their own experience into every decision made.

This is a thoughtful, captivating story, and I'm happy to have it in me. At one point, reading alone in my room, I called out, "Good! Good. That's what you were supposed to do, Katniss!" I hadn't been sure she would, but I was hoping so hard. And later in the story, I burst into tears, shocked with grief. Not all good books need to do that to me, but it does usually mean something when I start yelling at a character. I cry more often than I yell, but even that is a signifier: when I cry and I have to calm myself down by reminding myself, "Elissa, it's a book. She's not real. It's not happening." But I still cry, because it is happening.

Lamb

2010-08-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished a fabulous book, Lamb by Christopher Moore. It was so good that I had to restrain myself from putting all his other books on hold at the library (school is about to start and I already have thirty books checked out--teachers can get a special library card that allows them to renew stuff over and over and over and over and over if there's no hold on the book).

I seem to be one of the few people who hadn't heard of Lamb until recently. Rachel loaned it to me saying, "You have to read this." Emily was talking about it and saying how great it was. So two good recommendations by smart thoughtful people with complementary senses of humor--I went for it, as unappealing as it seemed.

Lamb is the story of Christ's life, told from the point of view of his childhood friend Levi, known as Biff. Biff is brought back to life in modern times, taken to a hotel room by an angel, and told to write the story of Christ as he knew it. The irritating angel guards him closely, not letting him leave the room, watching soap operas on TV while Biff writes.

Biff finds a Bible in a drawer (thanks, Gideons!) and sneaks it into the bathroom, where he reads the gospels and is irritated--by their inaccuracy, by the huge gap of time left out,* and by the omission of his own self and his importance to the story. (There is a Levi in the New Testament, a follower of Christ, but he is a very minor character.)

In the course of the story, during those missing years, Levi a.k.a. Biff and Joshua ("By the way, his name was Joshua. Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, which is Joshua. Christ is not a last name. It's the Greek for messiah, a Hebrew word meaning anointed.") go looking for the three wise men. They find the first one in Afghanistan just outside Kabul, the second in China, and the third in India. They spend years with each man, studying Buddhism, kung fu, and yoga, among other things. Biff also learns about sex, from various concubines and prostitutes and the Kama Sutra, knowledge he shares with Joshua, who is celibate at his fahter's request. After many years away from home, traveling, they bring their Divine Spark thing back to Jerusalem and turn it into the Holy Ghost. (I think I understand the Holy Ghost a lot better now, actually. Thanks, Christopher Moore.) Then Jesus starts preaching, gathering followers, and doing the stuff we all know about from the bible.

There were many things I loved about this book: how much research Moore clearly did, for one thing. But I also loved the references, most of which I'm sure I missed. But they celebrate Jesus' birthday "with the traditional Chinese food," and even Hans Christian Andersen makes a guest appearance, when a demon they meet outside Kabul has "dinner-plate-sized cat's eyes," just like one of those dogs in "The Magic Tinder Box." Appropriate in what could be viewed as one of the greatest and most enduring fairytales our world has seen.

I love that Joshua has a sense of humor, even laughing so hard at one point that he sprays tea out his nose. In his afterword, Moore notes, "It's more than a small anachronism that I portray Joshua having and making fun, yet somehow, I like to think that while he carried out his sacred mission, Jesus of Nazareth might have enjoyed a sense of irony and the company of a wisecracking buddy. This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do." His "Author's Blessing" at the beginning also reinforces this so nicely:

If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it.
If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil.
If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape.
If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions.
All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.
May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them.
May you find perfection, and know it by name.

I think this really illustrates what a thoughtful book Lamb manages to be. While managing to be funny.

And Moore does right by Mary Magdalene. As he notes in the afterword, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that she was a prostitute: "No whore references, period." She's an important, thoughtful, well-drawn character in the book, smart and interesting and convincing.

There are too many apostles to keep straight, which is the same problem I'm having in my novel about the fourteen daughters of Ed. But that's not Moore's fault, and since the apostles don't even start to show up until the last fourth of this novel, it's not the biggest problem. I can see how any more focus on them would derail things.

So yeah. I liked this book so much. Do unto others..., and all that.

*As Moore notes in his afterword, "Of the time from Jesus' birth to when he began his ministry in his thirties, the Bible gives us only one scene," which is Luke 2:46-7, Jesus at the age of twelve "in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers."

My hundred most influential writers (for now): the final list

2010-08-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

1. Dr. Seuss

2. Russell and Lillian Hoban

3. Maurice Sendak

4. Tomie diPaola

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder

6. Horatio Alger, Jr.

7. Shel Silverstein

8. Hans Christian Anderson

9. The Brothers Grimm

10. Bible authors and editors (including King James)

11. Virginia Hamilton

12. The d’Aulaires

13. Roald Dahl

14. Natalie Babbitt

15. Louis Sachar

16. Frances Hodgson Burnett

17. Robert McCloskey

18. E.B. White

19. Louise Fitzhugh

20. Betty McDonald

21. Astrid Lindgren

22. Beverly Cleary

23. Carol Ryrie Brink

24. Booth Tarkington

25. Lewis Carroll

26. C.S. Lewis

27. Lynda Barry

28. Louisa May Alcott

29. Katherine Paterson

30. Scott O’Dell

31. Shakespeare

32. Madeline L’Engle

33. Lois Lowry

34. Paula Danziger

35. Judy Blume

36. Lois Duncan

37. Antoine de Saint Exupery

38. Anne Frank

39. Mark Twain

40. The “anonymous” author of Go Ask Alice

41. Dylan Thomas

42. George Orwell

43. Ray Bradbury

44. Charles Dickens

45. Charles Baxter

46. Tracy Kidder

47. James Baldwin

48. Douglas Adams

49. J.D. Salinger

50. John Steinbeck

51. F. Scott Fitzgerald

52. Flannery O'Connor

53. Sandra Cisneros

54. Oscar Wilde

55. Tom Stoppard

56. Samuel Beckett

57. Sophocles

58. Gabriel García Márquez

59. Alice Walker

60. Tom Robbins

61. Erica Jong

62. Franz Kafka

63. Margaret Atwood

64. Grace Paley

65. Jamaica Kincaid

66. August Wilson

67. Kurt Vonnegut

68. Joseph Heller

69. Tony Kushner

70. Sherman Alexie

71. Cindy Crabb

72. Toni Morrison

73. Sarah Schulman

74. Maxine Hong Kingston

75. bell hooks

76. Louise Erdrich

77. Rebecca Brown

78. Junot Diaz

79. E. Annie Proulx

80. Raymond Carver

81. Stuart Dybek

82. Ron Hansen

83. Angela Davis

84. Audre Lorde

85. Alice Munro

86. Walter Dean Myers

87. Thomas Kuhn

88. George Saunders

89. Lucille Clifton

90. Octavia Butler

91. Andrea Barrett

92. Charles Simic

93. Jacqueline Woodson

94. Yusef Komunyakaa

95. Chris Crutcher

96. Lisa Delpit

97. Neil Gaiman

98. Joan Didion

99. Anne Carson

100. Jonathan Swift

I am finishing up issue #1 of a real-life paper zine about this list, entitled The Hundred Most Influential Writers in My Life to Date, As Best I Can Remember and Mostly Not Including Zines. Blogs are great, they do their job, but I think a paper zine is the ideal format for this project. If you'd like a copy, please email me for more info.

Writing Dialogues: Jolene!

2010-08-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

I made a CD to use with my summer students, thinking we'd write from it, imagine different songs as background music in different scenes--they turned out to be really into dancing (except the second graders, but that's another story) so we ended up dancing a lot, and the three hits of summer 2010 in my classroom turned out to be "Supersonic," by J.J. Fad; "The Love You Save," by the Jackson 5; and "Jolene," by Dolly Parton. All three of these were, "Can we hear that song again?" hits.

My students were having conversations about "Jolene" as they were leaving class, as in "That's messed up, Jolene needs to get her own man," so this seemed like a good opportunity for an exercise driven by student interest.

So we wrote plays, and I ended up passing out the lyrics to "Jolene" so we could talk about them, and write the play of "Jolene"--what happens next? Does Jolene leave the singer's man alone, since he's the only man for her and Jolene can have any man she wants? We discussed who the characters were in this play, gave names to everybody who isn't Jolene, brainstormed some potential settings, and got to work.

Jolene #1, by the third grade class

Jolene goes to Maba's house and rings the doorbell. Maba opens the door.

Jolene: I really want your man. Can I please get him?

Maba: N-O. No.

Jolene: Yes I can.

Maba: Come in.

Jolene: Can I have a drink of water please?

(Maba brings her water.)

Jolene: Thank you for the water. And where's Jack?

Maba: Jolene, Jolene, please don't take my man just because you can.

Jolene: Let's split him.

Maba: Split him in half? How do we split him?

Jolene: You can be his wife, and I'll be his girlfriend.

(Maba gives Jolene a wedgie. Jolene jumps out the window.)

Maba: Sorry?

THE END

Jolene #2, by the fourth graders

Michaela sees Jolene at the mall.

Michaela: Jolene!

Jolene: (looks back) It must be my imagination.

Michaela: It's not your imagination, it's me. You can't take my man, because he's the only one I love. Let's have a deal. Let's let John pick who he's gonna be with.

Jolene: It's a deal.

(John comes over.)

John: I don't know who I want to be with.

Michaela and Jolene: PICK ME! No, pick me! Pick me!

John: Stop saying pick me! I have an idea. You could both have a race. The winner gets the man.

Jolene and Michaela: (They shake hands.) Deal!

The fourth graders had to go write their own endings in their journals.

Marente's end: They ran to the tall building and ran back and Michaela won.

Kristine's went like this: Michaela and Jolene become friends, they both dump John.

Jolene: You can have the man.

Michaela: No, why don't you have the man.

Daquani got off to a slow start, but I left him alone after I asked him, "What does Jolene say when Michaela says that?" and he said "I don't know. I gotta see." I totally know how that is.

Lifetime goals

2010-08-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

I used to want to be Alice Munro, who didn't publish her first collection of stories until she was 37 (which used to seem very old, but doesn't seem so old anymore at all). But then she started whipping them out, these complex and incredible stories masquerading as boring rural historical type things. She's 79 now, and still going strong, writing more and more amazing stories. I'd still love to be her. And that can still be a goal. A lifetime of writing and living and paying close attention to things others don't notice. I'll have a lifetime of this, even if it isn't eighty years' worth--which is not to say that it won't be. Going strong.

But I'd settle for being Toni Cade Bambara, who was 56 when she died. That would give me another twenty-two years. I could do a lot in twenty-two years. I'd be so happy to settle for that, if that was what I was given.

"Settle for." Don't take that the wrong way, Ms. Bambara. I am not implying disrespect, not in the least. Your stories full of joy and love and so much power... note the sarcasm in "settle for." I'm sure you would. You knew a few things about sarcasm. And know that while I'm pretty sure my students wouldn't appreciate Munro's stories, they get "Raymond's Run", and I love reading it with them. They connect with it, get pissed about it, and they love it.

But anyway. You take what you can get, and you do the most you can. I am writing, and teaching, and living my life.

From the porch

2010-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm on my porch reading with my coffee when a young family bikes by: mom with the baby in the bike seat, hipster dad with a cool hat and a ridiculous moustache, and a six- or seven-year-old trying to keep up with his parents. As they move past my house, this is the segment of the story that I hear:

Mom: "It's a light rain, it'll dry fast."

Little boy:, "I'm tired, mom! It hurts!"

Mom: "I know, honey. We'll get there."

Steinbeck today: summer reading

2010-08-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'm reading East of Eden, which I've never read, and I tend to be the sort of reader who loves one book by an author so then reads all the others. Steinbeck has been one of my most influential writers on the basis of The Grapes of Wrath and Travels with Charley, two very different books that I read for the first time in high school. I've read The Grapes of Wrath four or five times, and Travels with Charley more times than I can count. I still have the copy of Travels with Charley that I stole from the Washburn branch of the Minneapolis/Hennepin County public library, and I didn't steal many books from libraries. Sometimes I took them without checking them out, usually because I had too many fines on my card, but I usually returned those. I only kept them if I needed them. I've been carrying this copy of Travels with Charley around for twenty years now.

So why didn't I ever read all of Steinbeck? He's written a lot of books, but that doesn't usually stop me. It's probably partly because I didn't like Of Mice and Men (though I should give it another shot) or The Pearl (which I'm still not sure I need to revisit). I might have read Cannery Row. I also might have read The Red Pony. So I didn't read all of Steinbeck because while two books knocked me flat, others bored me. He's no Horatio Alger.

I'm about a fourth of the way through the 600-page East of Eden. Published in 1952, set at the turn of the last century ("You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900"), Steinbeck ruminates on how people then must have felt about the century just ending, and from this vantage point, he is so clearly looking at it from the middle of that next century. Smack in the middle of the Cold War, back from WWII where, according to that estimable source, Wikipedia, he "served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA)," Steinbeck--okay, Steinbeck's narrator--tells us:

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming, the story of Adam Trask and his evil monster wife.

I don't read many novels that have such a visible author/narrative voice. I'll keep reading, but I wish Steinbeck would put himself a little more in the background and just tell his damn story. Though I do love how much it's about place, and how much he loves that Salinas Valley he came from.

I could keep going on. About the women characters--I don't remember the women in The Grapes of Wrath feeling so two-dimensional, and he was fifteen years younger when he wrote that. What happened? But this is enough for now.

Portland style

2010-08-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

The girl next to me at Ristoretto is so specifically Portland styley. Gray sleeveless jersey dress, knee-length, with a plaid flannel shirt unbuttoned over it; brown cowboy boots; a cute hat over her short tousled hair.