Chulito, by Charles Rice-González

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.