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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Recommended for your Blog-Reading Pleasure

Note: BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST, you might want to come up with a list of your ten favorite children's chapter books, in order. It could be fun, and if you do it before you continue, you won't have my list polluting your clear thinking on this obviously very important issue.

OK. Do you have your list done?

Back in early January, somebody (I wish I could remember who; probably someone on Twitter; was it you?) directed me to A Fuse #8 Production, a blog at the School Library Journal website whose author was conducting a poll looking for the top children's chapter books of all time. Now, I am not a school librarian or any kind of librarian so I'm not one hundred percent sure I was supposed to participate in the poll, but hey, it was up there on the Internet, and teachers were telling their students to participate, and I'm an educator and an avid reader of kidlit even though I'm thirty-my-gosh-five years old, so I sent in my list. It looked like this:

10. Daddy Long-Legs (Jean Webster)
9. The Great Brain (John D. Fitzgerald)
8. A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
7. Ramona the Pest (Beverly Cleary)
6. Farmer Boy (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
5. Henry Huggins (Beverly Cleary)
4. Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
3. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
2. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Robert C. O'Brien)
1. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)

(Note: It would have looked different if I hadn't excluded some books, like Robin McKinley's Hero and the Crown and Richard Adams' Watership Down, on the basis that I thought they were probably more YA [or, in the case of Watership Down, adult] than kidlit, and the rules of the poll were very specific about excluding YA books. PLEASE OH PLEASE I hope this means there'll be a YA poll in the future; a year or so before she did this one, the writer did one for picture books, so my hope is not entirely without foundation, right?)

AT ANY RATE.

Since early February, the poll results have been coming out a few books at a time -- first ten books per post, then five, and now that she's on the top 20, one book per post, which means about four books per week, because the writer is torturing me specifically, of course. And when I say results, I don't mean just a list, although that would have been fascinating and it was what I was keenly anticipating when I started haunting her blog February 1st just in case my RSS reader had missed an update or something tragic like that. She writes an essay for each result, with summaries and author information and quotes from people who participated in the poll and even snippets of video and pictures of different covers for each book. It's a treasure trove for kidlitaholics like me.

It's been interesting to see where books from my list have appeared on THE list -- those which have appeared so far -- and also, it's been interesting, if you call smacking myself in the forehead repeatedly interesting, to see the books I'd have voted for if they hadn't slipped my mind at the crucial moment*, or if (which would have been much kinder, but a lot more work for the already-heavily-employed nice lady who compiled all these results from who knows how many people) I had been allowed to choose fifteen or twenty or an infinite number of books. It's also been fun to discover kidlit that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my vast kidliterary knowledge (ha). The Saturdays, where have you been all my life? My library holds list overfloweth.

*HELLO! Blue Willow!? Duh! Would have replaced one of the Little House books, I think.

So. What's your list look like?

Friday, January 08, 2010

What I've been reading, by special request

Kat asked me to blog about what I've been reading while I've been out of school. Good idea! I might be inclined to put this off and do a "Books for ______" post like I used to do, but let's face it: if I wait until a more round-number time to do it -- the end of the month, say, or even the end of my semester break -- it'll never get done, so I'll do it now.

Honestly, I know I'm going to forget some stuff. I have come to accept this about myself, this Swiss-cheesy nature of my brain. If I later remember the ones I've forgotten, I'll add them.

• Certain Girls -- Jennifer Weiner -- 4
  • This was a fun, lightish read. If you've read her previous book about Cannie, which has the brown-paper-coverable title of Good In Bed but is really quite enjoyable and is much deeper than its title implies, you'll enjoy it more than if you haven't, I think. It's the story of a mom and her young teen daughter, which, OK, if you want to sell a book to me you should always start out with that premise, I guess, based on my reactions to some of the Traveling Pants series and this book and basically every other book that involves girls growing away from their mothers and maybe I don't want to think about what this says about me so I'll move on. Jennifer Weiner writes cracklingly funny prose interspersed with thought-provoking Issues and Sad Things in almost every book I've ever read of hers -- Goodnight Nobody, I am looking at you -- and this is not an exception. Highlight: I learned more about bar and bat mitzvahs than I ever knew before. I actually had to look them up on the Internet to see if there are parents who really go as overboard-crazy with them as they do in this book and, um, there are. It's a whole cultural phenomenon that I've never even heard of, and that always makes for an interesting read if it's handled right. And it is, here.
• Prairie Tale: A Memoir -- Melissa Gilbert -- 2
  • There were aspects of this autobiography that I found very interesting. Most of those aspects were over and done in the first third of the book, during the parts that talked about making the Little House series. But maybe I'm just not cut out for celebrity bios, because the entire rest of the book just seemed like too much information mixed with a heavy dose of name dropping and self-justification. Generally, I was left with the feeling that Melissa wants us to know that she's really very different from all the other cosmetically-altered drug-addled Lifetime-Channel-staple former child stars in The Industry. Whereas by the end of the book I just didn't care. I had lost interest, It's sad, really, because I am all in favor of realizing that everyone in the world is a unique individual and that tossing people into categories without getting to know them is foolish, wasteful, and hurtful, but by the end of the book, I couldn't get the shallow, airbrushed, surgically altered, air-so-rarified-they're-completely-disconnected-from-real-life Hollywood stereotype out of my head, because this book presented a woman who fit it so well. It was well-written, I suppose, but I wish I hadn't read it. Again, this probably means that celebrity memoir isn't my best genre.
• And There I Stood With My Piccolo
  Eggs I Have Laid
  "But He Doesn't Know the Territory!" -- Meredith Willson -- 5 each
  
  • What was that about celebrity memoir? ;-) But SERIOUSLY, you GUYS, these books are WONDERFUL. Very 1950's, very witty, very lively and interesting and just... WONDERFUL. Meredith Willson, who wrote a lot of music and lyrics and was quite well-known in mid-20th-century radio and television, but is most famous for his musicals The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, also, it turns out, wrote wonderfully readable memoirs. I couldn't put this down. Maybe it's because juicy tell-all memoirs weren't the style then (you never hear, for example, about Willson's first wife whom he divorced, and the most drug-addled scenes involve the Willsons' joint efforts to... quit smoking [because it made them cough]), or maybe it's that small-town guys who happen to gradually make it big in music and radio and Broadway stay more down-to-earth than child-acting children of Hollywood personalities could ever think of being, or maybe it's that Willson was a writer by trade, but I loved these books even more than I loathed Melissa GIlbert's. If you like humor, the Midwest, show business, small towns, Americana, John Phillip Sousa, the New York Philharmonic, and/or charming, witty, clever, hilarious, nostalgic prose about any or all of the above, look for these.

• Slam -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • I had no idea that Hornby had written a young-adult novel, so when it showed up WebCat I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be about teen pregnancy, from the boy/father's point of view, which is a bit of a stroke of genius. The protagonist is a 16-year old skater (skateboarder, except you never use that word, see), son of teenage parents himself, who lives in London and who has his life turned completely upside-down when he becomes sexually active and his girlfriend becomes pregnant. The story is quirky -- the boy (whose name I can't remember and the book's in the first person so it's hard to find it on a quick glance-through) is obsessed with Tony Hawk and his favorite form of therapy is to talk to the Tony Hawk poster that hangs in his room; Tony Hawk, through the poster, manages to mysteriously "whizz" the boy into the future a couple of times -- but accessible, and should be a cautionary tale to young men who would take it the right way and who would actually sit through reading it. (I do wonder how effective it would be, though, because teenagers tend to be notoriously unwilling to listen to cautionary tales.)

• How to be Good -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • This book, about a couple whose marriage is already on the rocks when the husband undergoes a complete personality alteration and turns from a Cynical Angry Guy to an illogical do-gooder, had so much potential. At times while I was reading it, I thought it was just on the verge of being everything that it could be -- which is to say, wonderful. But it never quite makes it. It's a parable, and it does make you think about a lot of things, such as: What's the use of really caring about the world's problems if you don't do anything about them? Is it any less caring to not care and not do anything than it is to care and not do anything? And if you really do decide to do something, will that even work? But then these thoughts never really go anywhere. It's told from the point of view of the woman in the marriage, and frankly by the end of the book I loathed her, not only because of her choices and her reactions to her (granted, rather insufferable) husband, but because Hornby wrote her rather muddily; she would seem to be one kind of person and then do something out of character and before long she seemed to be an entirely different kind of person, until you lost any sense you had ever had of whatever personality the author may have intended to give her. Maybe this was intentional. Since Hornby is a genius, it probably was. But the whole novel came across, in the end, like some kind of bastard offspring of the kind of seriocomic writing at which Hornby usually excels, and the kind of literary-fiction novel that turns up its nose at those pointless books that have, you know, plots and characterization and bourgeois stuff like that. Still worth a read, even if only for the way it makes you think -- and, yeah, for more than that -- but it's not as dead-on as the name on the spine led me to expect it would be.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Books for June. NO I AM TOTALLY NOT KIDDING. With bonus extra-long Atlas Shrugged blathery section.

Atlas Shrugged was a major project during May and June. I finished it before these other few books I'm going to review, but I'll put its review last because it's so long.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I am pretty much reusing reviews for these first few books; I wrote them originally for Visual Bookshelf at Facebook so if you follow me there, they'll be pretty familiar to you (although I edited some of them a bit). (Ask me about the time I wrote a paper about a French author in French for French class and then just translated the paper into English and turned it in for English class. Not plagiarism, just... labor-saving. Right?)

1. Johnny Tremain -- Esther Forbes -- 5
   
   • I read this in late elementary school, and then I think once as an adult years ago. I knew I loved it, but it's even better than I remembered. Our family is on an American Revolution kick right now so my kids and I just listened to an unabridged audio version of this; T will be listening to it once he's done with Atlas Shrugged. The title character is fictional but the setting and many of the events depicted are real; the story is engaging for people of any age from say third grade on up, with enough grit to avoid glossing over the fact that war is unpleasant, but nothing graphic enough to turn off or frighten younger readers. Forbes is a skilled writer, and her vivid (but not in the least highfalutin') descriptions transport you to 1770's Boston, and to the turning point of one nation's history.
     
     The reader of the audiobook (it says Grace Conlin on the cover and at blackstoneaudio.com, but she's identified as somebody Cassidy by the reader herself at the end -- hmm) is awesome. If you like audiobooks and/or historical fiction, I heartily recommend this one.

     
     

2. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day -- Winifred Watson -- 3.25
   
   • This story of a dowdy spinster whose life is changed for a day when she shows up to interview for a job at the house of a society woman is arch, humorous, and overall much naughtier than you'd expect for something written in the 1930's. (Still quite chaste by today's standards, though.) Overall, a lightweight but pleasant enough read.
3. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas -- John Boyne -- 5
   
   • This book is beyond excellent. Its fable-like quality doesn't detract one whit from its gut-wrenching realism, and the Holocaust is brought home to young adult readers in a way I don't think it ever has been in any other novel. The ending is shocking and highly effective. This will be required reading for my eighth grader this upcoming school year.
     
   
   
4. White Crosses -- Larry Watson -- .5
   
   • Must confess that I didn't like this at all. The entire story is told from inside the head of the sheriff of a small town in Montana; he is an utterly unlikable character and simply spending that much time with his irrational and frequently despicable thought processes was annoying. Then there's the fact that the story is told in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness way that was absolutely maddening to endure; the narrator can't light a cigarette without going off on a two-page aside about why he smokes or some memory that is only tangentially connected to the matter at hand. Yes, people's minds DO work this way, but thought is quick - and pages of tiresome reminiscences and speculation definitely are *not*. The story could have been told in a fifty-page novella, and instead it's dragged out into a 400-page novel by means of one annoying mental rabbit trail after another.
     
     Initially I kept going because I wanted to see what happened; I began to think of skipping to the end but reviews mentioned some shocking surprise ending so I tried to hold off and see if I could guess what it was. On page 200 I gave up and skipped to the last fifteen pages. All of my guesses were *much* more interesting than what actually happened.
     
     There are probably people for whom this is just the right kind of novel, but for myself, I prefer my crime stories to crackle a bit more, and my thoughtful literary rambles to be in the company of someone I can enjoy more than this wretched arse of a sheriff.

And now on to Atlas.

I am coming to terms with the possibility that I may never sit and write out the long, articulate, scholarly assessment of Atlas Shrugged that I've been planning to write and even halfheartedly started last night. And rather than let that failure keep me from doing my Books for June post, I'll go ahead and do a quick paragraph or two about the book and give myself permission to move on.

Atlas Shrugged is a lot of things. It's a novel, yes, but I think Ayn Rand's primary goal was not so much to write a story as it was to create a novelization of a philosophy. It's a rite of passage of sorts, for conservative/libertarian types like myself. It's on a lot of people's "Books that Changed My Life" lists. It's 1200 pages of tiny print, or sixty-three hours of audio if you prefer. It's an icon, a product of its time, a warning for all times, especially (it sometimes seems) for ours. It's sometimes so engaging that you can't put it down, and occasionally so boring that you feel you absolutely must stab your eyes out with forks if you can't skim just a weee little bit.

Rand hung her philosophy on a frame consisting of a ripping good story; the basic plot is as follows. It's sometime in the near future -- that is, the near future to people in 1958, which is when the novel was published, although I think it took over a decade to write -- and for several years, industrialists and other major movers and shakers have been mysteriously vanishing. Meanwhile, Dagny Taggart, the only major female industrialist in the US, has been building her family's railroad empire to ever-greater heights, while her brother Jim, the titular head of the organization, is a whiny jerk who is in tight with a bunch of Washington bureaucrats whose aim is to place serious regulations on industry for various reasons of their own. The regulations are crippling major industries and continue to do so in increasing degree throughout the novel. We learn about Dagny's early love affair with a young man, a childhood friend who was also destined to be a great industrialist but who has, for reasons no one understands, become a notorious playboy and run his family's company into the ground, and we watch her have an affair with a married steel tycoon who is also a major industrial player. Dagny is perplexed and angered by what she sees as the defection of her fellow industrialists, as more and more of them (and more and more important ones) continue to vanish; she is determined to get to the bottom of that situation, while she is also determined to keep her own company going against all odds. There's so much going on in the novel on so many levels that it's difficult to write a brief summary of it, especially without giving away key plot points that are best discovered in context, so I'll leave it at that, but just trust me that it's a better and more interesting story than I'm making it sound.

Rand's writing has that mid-20th-century utilitarian feel to it -- not trash-novelish, but not high literary style either. She uses words to tell a story and get across ideas, and she does a good job of that. This book being what it is, there's an extremely high level of infodump -- that is, stuff the author knows or believes, and that she wants you the reader to know or believe, so she puts it in the mouths of her characters. The most extreme example of this is the entire 55-page chapter (and remember, this is tiny, close print, probably over 400 words to a page) consisting of one man's speech over the radio. It's about three hours long in the audio version, and it's a barefaced, unashamed, obvious plot device used by Rand to include an explicit handbook of her philosophy within the pages of her novel. I honestly wish she hadn't; I think a discerning reader will have already gleaned nearly everything included in that speech from the story itself, and that for the purposes of plot (the radio incident in and of itself is an important plot point), the address could have been much, much shorter and still had the same effect. Still, that's my only major gripe with the story; otherwise I think it's highly worth reading.

Now for the philosophy itself. You can find a great deal of information about Rand's ideas - she called her philosophy Objectivism - on the Internet, so I won't give a detailed exposition of it here; I'll just say that its primary tenets are that man exists for his own sake, and that the individual is paramount. Much of what she says I agree with, vehemently, to the point of cheering aloud while reading from time to time. Others of her points, not so much. Just a few examples:

I agree with Rand about the evil of punishing achievement, drive, and ability. Perhaps the strongest theme in Atlas Shrugged, being set, as it is, against a backdrop of industry, is the idea that achievers should not be penalized by being enslaved by the government (or their own guilt) for the benefit of those who do not achieve. Her novel lays out in relentless detail what can happen when great minds -- people who can and do make things happen -- become the property of a mass of parasitic humanity who want to 'mooch' (Rand's word) off them. Some of these passages look like they come from this morning's paper.

I also agree with Rand about the value of the individual and of individual rights. Individual rights, individual liberties, individual responsibilities, individual freedoms: any government interfering with these is a dangerous government.

I don't so much agree with her when it comes to the one-on-one, human-relational aspects of her philosophy, though. Rand promoted the idea that altruism is not just something that can't and shouldn't be legislated (in this I agree), but that altruism -- self-sacrifice for the sake of others -- is actually wrong whether you do it by your own choice or not, and that true morality can only mean living for your own best interests. It's not as bad as that sounds, or as simple; in the various relationships within the novel, this idea plays out in many ways: A man is no longer obligated to be faithful to his wife if she is not holding up her end of their marriage contract. A man is not obligated to do anything for anyone if he does not get an equal value in return. Personal pleasure is the highest law of human relationships. Adherents of Objectivism put a fine point on these ideas, I've found, by pointing out that if giving love makes you happy, then that is your return on your investment, so giving love is OK. But that's not enough for me, because there are always going to be situations where (in my opinion) good morality, whether based on religion or personal ethics, holds that self-sacrifice is important even if the sacrificer gains nothing, not even pleasure. I found it interesting that in all 1200 pages of this novel, there is not one mention of how a mother should behave toward her children. There are virtually no children in the story at all, except for one family (presented positively but very briefly) who dropped out of society so as to avoid having their children indoctrinated in state-controlled collectivist-socialist schools. (You can just imagine what I thought of that. ;-) ) My idea of love is different from Rand's, it appears. I would be interested to see if she addressed the subject of parental love in particular in any of her other writings. To my knowledge, she did not have any children herself.

Also, I obviously don't agree with Rand's idea that religion is a crutch for the weak and it's bad bad bad to believe in anything supernatural ever at all ever. Fortunately, while this was mentioned a few times and in a few ways in the novel, it's not pervasive enough to have ruined my pleasure in reading it.

Soooo. Not so much with the "a quick paragraph or two", I guess, but there's a WHOLE lot more that I'm not covering here and that I simply don't have time or energy to go into at this point. I would love to discuss this novel with other friends who have read it. T's reading it right now, or rather listening to it, and we'll be able to have good talks about it soon without my having to worry about spoiling something for him inadevertently. (We were supposed to be keeping more or less together in the story, but I was a BAD GIRL who couldn't put the book down while I was camping this month, and finished. TOTALLY on accident, of COURSE.) If you've read it and want to discuss/debate/enthuse/whatever with me about it, please contact me and we'll have a go at it.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Reading survey, and books for March/April. Sort of.

I know I owe a books post. Or two. OK, here goes:

• Listen to Helen's Babies, by John Habberton, available at librivox.org. Charming, funny, pleasant for the whole family.
• Don't bother reading Handle With Care even though the bones (no, um, pun intended) of the story are good and the issues are interesting, because a) the writing it not up to Picoult's usual level and b) the ending is the most jerkish mean horrible unforgivable ending she's ever written and that's saying something. I read it first like I always do now and it STILL spoiled the book for me.
• Fifteen continues to be wonderful, of course.
• I know I'm forgetting something here but you'll have to excuse me, because I'm taking a gorgeous and wonderful algebra class and a mind-numbingly dull California History class and the combination has simultaneously mashed my brains all up AND sucked away all my spare reading time, as is usual during term-time. (<- one of my favorite Lewisisms.)
  

Oops, forgot I was still listing. OK. On with the survey. You might already have read this if I'm your Facebook friend.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
L.M. Montgomery

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have several copies of Anne of Green Gables

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Maybe a little. But it's not like this is a scholarly paper, so I'll let it slide THIS TIME.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
As a child: Justin from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Yes, I had the preteen sweats for an anthropomorphized super-intelligent rodent.

Later: Stan Crandall in Fifteen, which I can understand, having just reread the book, and that sounds a little bad considering that Stan is and always will be seventeen.

Adulthood: Mr. Rochester and Captain Wentworth. (Shhh!) (OK, not really. But if I WERE going to have a literary crush, they'd be at the top of the list.)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Anne series, I'm thinking.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
When I was ten I spent hours and hours at the library and I had a different favorite book every few days. But probably really Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and not just because Justin was the cutest, sweetest, smartest rat on sometimes two legs and sometimes four.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I try to block these from my mind. Maybe the new Wally Lamb? Sorry, Mr. Lamb. I'd say it's nothing personal but I know that would do no good. Nine hundred pages or whatever that was, and ten years of work, it can't help but be personal. But at least you tried.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Probably We Are All Welcome Here, Elizabeth Berg. Or maybe Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos. That's not counting re-reads.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Aside from the Bible? :) A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Is there some kind of lifetime achievement award? Give it to Beverly Cleary. You know she's been publishing beloved bestsellers for SIXTY YEARS? Please don't die for a long time yet, Mrs. Cleary.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. And I'd love to see a new BBC Anne, as long as they hired Canadians or people whose accents could pass for Canadian.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Well, I'm touchy about this. Most of my very favorite books, as much as I might like to see them as movies, I just KNOW they'd change a ton of stuff and it would make me mad. So for most of my favorites, unless it's a classic or period novel being handled by the BBC, hands off please. (The abovementioned Water for Elephants is a possible exception because it's written in such a way that it would make a very marketable movie without changing a word, and also it would maybe be worth the pain of seeing a few changes to see a really excellent director and DP and art director team up on it, because it has enormous visual potential.)

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
It involved Mr. Rochester. It was over a decade ago. That is all I'm going to say. (Mostly because, truth be told, that's all I can remember. I'm not as young as I used to be.)

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
I know there have been several but I can't think of them offhand. Maybe that YA series whose title involves something about Angus and thongs and snogging.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Les Miserables, but it was worth it. I do wish he'd abridged that long chapter about the Paris sewer system, though.

16) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I've not read a lot of Russians but what I have read tends to be pretty bleak and I didn't like it much. (Anton Chekhov, I am looking at you.) I've not exactly majored in French literature, but I have read a few more French authors than Russian ones, and I do think I like those (Verne, Hugo, Leroux) better.

17) Umberto Eco?
Does Umberto echo? I dunno.

18) Roth or Updike?
I've read two Updikes and thought they were OK but overrated. Never read Roth.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Never finished anything from either.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare. But I like Chaucer too. OK, I'm man enough to admit it, I like the one thing I've read by Chaucer which is the one thing everybody has read by Chaucer (except Chaucer scholars, who have read two things) and that's the Canterbury Tales. Some funny parts, some interesting parts, some totally incomprehensible parts, the end. So to repeat: Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen, but I love Eliot too. That was mean to make me choose.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I own everything by Dickens (thanks to an awesome birthday B&N gift card many years ago from my husband) and I keep swearing I'm going to read through everything he wrote in chronological order, but instead I've read the same four or five of his novels that everyone's read (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and of course A Christmas Carol) and that's all. I've read the first 100 pages or so of Pickwick about three times, but so far apart in between that I always forget and have to start over. There, I've confessed. You can take away my literary snob card now.

23) What is your favorite novel?
I can't answer this question because my head just exploded. Thanks so much.

24) Play?
The Philadelphia Story

25) Short story?
Something by O. Henry, I think.

26) Work of non-fiction?
Mover of Men and Mountains by R.G. LeTourneau. Or MiG Pilot by John Barron, about Viktor Belenko. Or What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel somebody. Pool. I just Googled it. Oh wait! I absolutely cannot leave out A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary. BEST MEMOIRS EVER. Is it super callous and selfish of me to say that I hope that she lives long enough to publish a third installment?

27) Who is your favorite writer?
I don't want to choose. You can't make me. Elizabeth Berg and Kazuo Ishiguro and Charles Dickens for the way they put words together. Cynthia Voigt, Anne Tyler, and L.M. Montgomery for the characters they create. Sara Donati, Charlotte Brontë, Audrey Niffenegger, Mary Doria Russell, and many others for the stories they craft. Jane Austen, Beverly Cleary, and Jan Karon for the way it makes me feel to read their books. Even this small exercise has caused me much pain. My poor exploded head was just beginning to heal from question 23 and there it goes again.

28) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
JK Rowling. I don't dislike her writing as much as Nicholas Sparks', but she's more overrated (just my opinion, of course) because she has so much larger a following than Sparks does. (This has nothing to do with any of the "sorcery books are evil" reasons for not liking Harry Potter. I just think the books are mediocre at best. Excuse me while I flee before this screaming angry horde.)

29) What is your desert island book?
the Bible

30) And ... what are you reading right now?
I just finished Fifteen and I haven't yet picked my next school-semester-in-session light comfort read-before-bed book. (I don't think that sentence had enough hyphens.)

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Books for February. ON TIME even. How shocking!

I actually read several books that were new to me this month. I didn't write everything down as I went along, so I hope I'm not forgetting anything.

1. Last Light, Dawn Light, Night Light, and True Light -- Terri Blackstock -- overall, 3.5
   
   
   
   • This is a Christian fiction series that was recommended to me by a friend. Like most Christian fiction, the writing is not... excellent. And unlike some Christian fiction, these are Very Christian, so if you're of a different persuasion you might not be terribly interested. However, I found the plots and the premise of the series really compelling, enough so that the slightly weak writing style -- and it's not terrible, it's just not great; think of a level between, say, Harlequin and LaHaye -- wasn't a deal-breaker. Blackstock tells the story over the course of four novels of a community that's plunged into darkness and chaos by an astronomical event that behaves like an EMP. (if you don't know what an EMP is, you might need to go to Survivalist Freak school -- or Google, whichever floats your boat -- for a few minutes and come back.) There was nothing in the books that my husband and I and most of our real-life friends haven't already considered and planned for, but -- and this is what I liked best about the series, to be honest -- for the millions of people who go through life completely dependent on technological gadgets (she typed on her laptop), not thinking about any potential life-altering disasters beyond a sick babysitter or a fender-bender, this series is a real eye-opener. What do you do if absolutely nothing electronic -- nothing with a circuit board in it -- ever works again? What will your neighborhood do? What will your city be like? What becomes important then? What would be important now if something on that scale might possibly someday happen? What if it's not that exact disaster but one of a different brand? All interesting questions, all things that I have heard previously-oblivious people discussing after reading this series.
     
     As novels, as I've said, these are readable books. The plots get a little more contrived in each episode, and are less centered on the disaster that forms the backbone of the story and more on the kind of drama that could occur anywhere under any circumstances, but the pace is good and most of the dialogue doesn't stand out -- which dialogue shouldn't, because if it does it's almost always because it's bad. My favorites of the four books were probably the first and the last -- the first for Survival Freak School reasons, and the last because the story in that one really will break your heart and make you think about your faith in God in new ways.
     
     Verdict: If you are a Christian or you don't mind overt Christian fiction, do read these, unless you REALLY can't stand better-than-mediocre-but-not-amazing writing.
   
   




2. The Breakdown Lane -- Jacqueline Mitchard -- 4.5
   
   
   
   • You may have read Jacqueline Mitchard before; I will never forget sitting in our library, the first time I'd gone to the library alone since LT's birth two years earlier, and read nearly the entirety of The Deep End Of The Ocean in one bleary-eyed sitting. I really, REALLY like Jacqueline Mitchard, Oprah endorsement and all. (Whatever I may think of the woman, her politics, or her show, she does frequently pick good writers.) The Breakdown Lane, which is actually a few years old, did not disappoint. The thing about Mitchard's books, at least the ones I've read, is that they take extraordinary circumstances and find the ordinary life in among the drama. Here she tells the story of the end of a marriage: one of the seven original plots, right? But this is not your ordinary divorce: after twenty years, a husband tells his wife that he's going to take a little 'sabbatical" from the family, and takes off to live, incommunicado, in a commune. Meanwhile, his ballerina/advice-columnist wife is left at home with a seriously depleted savings account, a newly-raging case of multiple sclerosis, a rock of a fifteen-year-old son with learning disabilities who steps up to care for the family by, among other things, taking over his mother's column, a self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter, and a toddler. This sounds like the makings of a pity-party trainwreck, but that's absolutely not what this novel becomes. (Nor is it a saccharine Anthem to the Human Spirit, which would almost be worse.) Mitchard's prose is intricate and grand and everything in between; her story is at once completely original and as old as sin; her characters are the rare type who are so real and beautiful and lovable and flawed that you are actually mad that you can't hope to run into them somewhere and tell them what you think of them. (I absolutely loved 15-year-old Gabe and his cool head and his alternative education; I also really liked Matt, who comes into the story rather late. But really, everyone's brilliantly done down to the two-year-old.) Please do yourself the favor of reading this. (Thank you, Rosina, for telling me about it.)

Monday, February 02, 2009

Books for December and January

(I know I read a couple books that aren't mentioned here, but I can't remember what they were -- other than The Hour I First Believed, which I already reviewed at length -- so I ended up making this post a sort of homage to one of my very favorite authors.)

Years ago, when we took a trip to the art museum in Fresno, my husband and I encountered a painting that we just couldn't stop staring at. It was a nude (shut up; it's culture) on an enormous canvas, this larger-than-life depiction of a round-limbed, well-padded woman in a meadow. The thing about this picture that kept us standing in front of it staring for I don't know how long was the fact that the more we looked, the more we saw that simply blew us away. Looking from across the room, we saw a well-done painting of a lovely girl in an idyllic scene. Standing closer, we noticed more detail and precision; as we kept looking it began to seem as if the woman was going to step out of the frame and into the museum -- the artist had done so careful and exquisite a job with shading and contrast and I don't know what all else magic that artists do with their brushes because frankly I can't even draw a stick figure with any skill.

Reading an Elizabeth Berg short story is kind of like that. Her plots viewed from afar are engaging and original. Her skillful prose makes you want to read slowly to savor it. Viewed extremely closely, her stories not only reveal details about her very knowable characters, but they reveal things about you, the reader, that you may never have actually known about yourself. Her writing, as I've always said, is thick with phrases that make me realize that really I've always thought what she just said; I'd just never thought to think it in those (absolutely perfect) words before. There have been times reading her novels late at night that I have actually cried a little bit at her sheer undeniable rightness.

I read three Elizabeth Bergs in December and January. One is a novella retelling the Nativity called The Handmaid and the Carpenter. If you've only ever thought about the Nativity in Luke's timeless words, or if you can't get the thought of childhood Christmas pageants (your own or the Herdmans') out of your head, you really need to read this lovely little story, which fleshes out the story beautifully, if a little imaginatively at times. 4.25 out of 5.

I also read a collection of Berg's short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: and Other Small Acts of Liberation. This was my favorite read in a long time: an absolutely delectable collection of stories that are by turns hilarious, poignant, thought-provoking, and downright tear-inducing. Ideally, if you like Berg, you'll buy this, so that you can spread the stories out so as not to run out of them all at once. Many (but not all) of the stories center around a girl or woman who is struggling with weight or eating (or who has decided not to struggle with weight or eating) or dealing a major and painful life change. Some stories are whimsical; some make you feel like you've been punched in the stomach; all are lovely and worth every minute you'll spend reading them. I have spent a lot of time over the years pondering our culture's perception of beauty and thinness and where real women and girls fit into that, but with this collection, Elizabeth Berg made me think about the issue in ways I never had before. I am trying not to make this sound like a set of didactic morality tales or Very Special Episodes, but in case I've failed, they aren't that at all. 5 out of 5.

Early in January, I read her latest novel, We Are All Welcome Here. If I hadn't already said that The Day Ate Whatever I Wanted was my favorite read in a long time, I'd say it about We Are All Welcome Here. In fact, what the heck, I will say it. We Are All Welcome Here is an utterly unique story, set in the 1960's, about Diana, a 13-year-old girl, and her mother Paige, who is paralyzed as a result of a bout with polio suffered during her pregnancy (in fact, Paige gave birth to Diana in an iron lung). Somehow Berg manages to infuse this slightly bizarre-sounding, heartbreaking, based-on-a-true-story tale with beautiful magic. Paige, Diana, and their live-in helper Peacie are brilliantly and realistically drawn. There's not a self-pitying moment in the entire novel; the story is vivid and even upbeat. The main drama is split into several subplots, whose topics include but are not limited to: the Freedom Rider movement, single-mother sexuality, teenage drinking, sweepstaking, absentee fathers, well-intentioned-but-by-the-book social workers, and Elvis Presley (who contributes considerably to the aforementioned magic). Please do yourself the favor of sitting down for a few hours to devour this lovely story. 5 out of 5.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Book review and it's not even the end of the month.

Let's face it; I've not exactly been Miss Johnny On The Spot with my monthly book review posts this year. I wanted to review this one while it was still fresh and post it now in case I forget later. Plus this is actual content, which is hard to come by nowadays. And it's also a little long to be thrown in with all my other reviews. OK, shut up, Rachel, and get on with it. (Yes ma'am.)

The Hour I First Believed -- Wally Lamb -- 2.25
I loved (and still love) She's Come Undone, and liked I Know This Much Is True well enough, so when I saw that Wally Lamb had come out with a new book I got it from the library to give it a try. Sadly, it doesn't measure up to either of his previous books. The first 400-ish pages (that is to say, the first half) are a compelling and disturbing, if somewhat overly-drawn-out, retelling of the Columbine shootings and their effect on Wally's fictional protagonist, Caelum Quirk, a teacher at Columbine, and his equally fictional wife, Maureen, a school nurse there. Caelum was a highly unlikeable character: he's emotionally wooden (an issue that I was sure would come up at some point, but it didn't), rather obtuse, and also unevenly written. Lamb tends toward overdoing it in his extremely detailed chapters about the school and the shootings, but who can blame him, really? In spite of its flaws, this first half of the book holds up well enough.

In the second half I got bored, though, and when you've written a nearly-800-page novel, you really don't want to start boring people. As part of the fallout from the shootings in Columbine, Caelum and his wife (who is battling an addiction to tranquilizers) have moved back to his family's farm in Connecticut, willed to Caelum by his aunt. Just as Maureen is starting to get better, sort of, things really go haywire, very badly, and while Maureen is serving time in prison, Caelum and a tenant he's installed in the farmhouse -- a women's studies major from Tulane who wound up in Connecticut with her husband after Katrina -- begin unearthing Caelum's family history, and needless to say, All Is Not As It Seemed. This is spread out over four hundred pages, consisting largely of made-up century-old letters, articles, and diary entries -- and let's not forget the tenant's doctoral thesis, all sixty pages of it. There are a couple of twists as the end gets closer (one of which, I have to say, was a bit shocking, which at this point was a good thing, but since it was part of the very predictable Family Mysteries theme, it lacked the punch it might have had coming out of a clear blue sky). In those same last 100 pages or so, there's also an increasingly heated subtext that's basically a diatribe against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the Iraq war, and anyone who ever voted Republican ever (you know, I'd say I hated this regardless of the author's politics, because I would, but you never see it happening from the other side, at least not in novels that are intended for the mainstream market). Then the diatribe gives up on the whole "subtext" thing in the afterword, and then the novel's finally over.

Also, OK, look, male writers (or, hey, female ones too; this is an equal-opportunity complaint). I have to say it. Please, please stop writing detailed accounts of your characters' masturbation sessions. I am begging here. Nobody needs to see that. OK? Thank you.

All right, so it's not ALL terrible. There's some good symbolism, although I got tired of being whacked over the head with it (I get it: praying mantises = triumph over adversity, thank you very much). The first chapter, wherein Caelum encounters Dylan and Eric at the pizza parlor where they worked and has a normal conversation with them, with no clue what's coming in just a few days, is really very good. The character of Velvet is a bright spot in the book, someone I felt I could know and maybe do know. Maureen wasn't so bad once I got to know her. Lamb's a good writer, although I think he needs a new editing team; he seems to fall victim to the same foible that has sunk Diana Gabaldon so low. He knows (or imagines, in the latter half) so much about his subjects, and it's all such interesting stuff, and much of it throws light on some very important topics (small sample of the many Issues in this novel: the treatment of women in prison, school bullying, PTSD, war, Hurricane Katrina, teenage prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, child molestation, incest), and he just can't bear to leave any of it out -- and his editor didn't make him leave it out. (If I'd had the editing of this novel, I'd have wanted to cut it probably in half. Or make it a really punchy novella that grabbed you and wouldn't let go. Or I would have left the first chapter alone as a short story and thrown out the rest. But that's just me, and I'm neither a writer nor an editor, a fact for which I'm sure Mr. Lamb, the publishing industry, and the rest of Western civilization can be grateful.)

Overall, I think the guy just tried to do too much. He admits something in the author's notes that I had pretty much suspected from the beginning, given the ten years since the release of his last novel and the forced feel of much of the text: he had a deadline, a contract, and waiting readers, and nothing to give them. He follows his admission with the story of how the novel was inspired, but the bottom line is that this novel felt like work. Work for him to write, work for me to trudge through waiting for the good parts that kept getting fewer and farther between. The effort he put into it is so evident that I feel really bad not liking it, and I kind of hope that other people do like it, because tenderhearted me can't stand the thought of even Wally Lamb (who I'm pretty sure would hate me to my core if he knew me, based on that afterword) sitting with his head in his hands, washing down Tums with vodka, and looking back on ten years' wasted work writing a book that ended up tanking. Good luck, Mr. Lamb, and here's hoping for your sake that my opinion is the minority view.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Books for November

School books. That's what I've read. Fat wordy textbooks. Thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of words. Notebooks full of notes. The thing is, it doesn't make very good review copy, does it? "Kail's style is not as dry as you'd find in most psychology textbooks, and his insights into the psychological impact of aging are spot-on, but his characterization needs work." Hmm.

I do try to sneak in a few minutes (usually literally) of "free reading" at bedtime. In November, I managed to get all the way through The Blue Castle (and enjoyed it hugely, by the way). Which is, what, a hundred and thirty pages, maybe?

The thing is, COLLEGE IS SWALLOWING ME WHOLE. And I'm only taking six units, may I remind you. Any more than that and I would have no life at ALL. I would have to give up... TWITTER. And FACEBOOK. And then everyone would just assume I had died.

I will have about a month's worth of break between semesters, and I am putting out a reading recommendation request as if I were going on vacation. Everyone tell me: what have you read lately that you think I would like? Something not too light and not too heavy -- something in which I can completely lose myself, please, and preferably something without the phrase "disconfirming speech", or any paragraphs full of facts about the changing nature of sexual drive in middle-aged men*.

So, if there's anyone still out there who hasn't completely given up on the idea of my ever posting anything worth reading ever again and gone away, please do me this kind favor. Thank you very much. Now I'm off to take notes about the nature of communication in committed romantic relationships. Don't you wish YOU were.

*Honestly, Human Development is kind of fascinating, but it's not exactly pleasure reading.

Monday, September 29, 2008

a literary diversion to take my mind off more weighty matters

I first conceived of the idea for this post earlier this week while reading my nightly soul-soothing chapter or two of fiction, but I held the writing of it out as a reward for finishing my homework. Aren't I a good girl? Now I'm done, and I'm going to pretend that I don't have an exam next week that I could be studying for, and also that C's birthday party being a week away is no reason why I should be working on her present which is only half-finished right now, and I'm going to see if I can stay awake long enough to type a coherent post instead.

Our topic today, because it's my blog and I said so, is:

Rachel's Favorite Literary Couples.

(Now that's original, isn't it?)

In descending ascending lesser-favorite-toward-most-favorite order, or nearly thereabouts -- at least, I'm going to save my very favorite(s) for the end.

Judy and Jervis in Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster.
I don't really have a problem with the age difference (which is not as great in the book as it is in the film, which I've never seen), or even with the very slightly skeeve-ish adoptee/sponsor relationship between these two, and I do really love the whole secret-admirer/you-know-me-but-you-don't dynamic in this story. (This is also what I like about You've Got Mail, by the way.)

Erik and Christine in The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.
OK, so this is definitely not a healthy relationship, even though the book does give you a million miles more insight into the psychology of the whole thing than the musical does. (Truly, I think they deprive the viewer of some seriously pertinent information in the musical... not that I don't like it, but I'm not sure I would like it as much if I couldn't understand some of the motivations and such that are clearer in the book.) But just on the strength of their last interaction, when Christine kisses Erik on the forehead, and on Erik's emotional description of said interaction when telling the Persian about it, they made the cut.

Father Tim and Cynthia in the Mitford series by Jan Karon.
Things I like: They find each other late(-ish) in life, and fall very much in love (but not straightaway), which is something that I think more young people need to read about because it's important for people of all ages to understand that passion is still possible past the age of fifty. (I was as bad as anyone about this. I remember wondering in my late teens why people over fifty bothered to marry at all. It's not like they were going to do anything at that age. Sheesh. They're old.) Also, the way the narrator lets us see Timothy's vulnerability and insecurity as he slowly "unbuttons his caution" enough to let himself fall in love is extremely endearing. (I just wish there were even the slightest possibility that someone would be complimenting my legs at the age of fiftysomething. Trust me, there's not.)

Jane and Stan in Fifteen by Beverly Cleary.
They're here simply because I love the innocence of teen relationships during that era (the 1950's). I love that the major climax of this story written for young teen girls occurs when a girl gets a boy's identification bracelet. This was the kind of relationship I used to daydream about (and I do not use that term lightly; we're talking protracted periods of staring into space here) as a girl, and I was sorely disappointed that my real-life teen relationships were not like this at all -- which they couldn't be, really, because, let's face it, I didn't live in 1955. (Plus, Stan was gorgeous. The dip in his hair! The white button-down shirt! *sigh*.)

Barney and Valancy in The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
This is the only LMM relationship on the list, because LMM's love relationships always seemed rather poorly-drawn to me*, especially when the males would conveniently disappear for entire books. I don't think Montgomery had a healthy grasp on what a solid and happy relationship would look like, since she didn't have a lot of life experience to draw from. But she did nicely with Barney and Valancy, who don't have to be normal and happy; they can get away with being quirky, because she asked him to marry her thinking she had less than a year to live and he accepted as a favor out of pity. Part of the appeal of this book is watching these two mismatched people fall in love without really meaning to. Another part is discussing The Question with other KS-list members: Did they, or didn't they? (They did. They totally did.) (note: when you read this, which you must -- it's the law -- feel free to skip the nature-book passages. I always do. You don't miss anything other than a rather transparent attempt on LMM's part to slip in some of her beloved flowery, poetic prose into a novel written well past the era when it was welcome.)

*if I had a least-favorite literary couples list, LMM would be at the top with Emily and Teddy. Gack. OK, moving on.

Jamie and Claire in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon.
This is another couple who married for reasons other than love and wound up (of course, because these are romance stories after all) falling for each other. Watching their chummy friendship spark into something deeper is delightful. Watching them reignite it when they get back together after twenty years apart is also very nice (although I could do without a lot of the other stuff in that book). In the later books they falter a bit, mostly because the quality of the stories overall starts to slack off, but in Outlander and in Voyager -- wow. As a bonus, this couple also scores points for promoting middle-aged married romance.

Henry and Clare in The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
You can't help but become engrossed in Henry and Clare's story, because you have to if you're ever going to figure the darn thing out. Niffenegger's novel is complex and utterly unique, and so are her leading characters, and so is their relationship. What can you expect when you have a couple who meet for the first time when he's an adult and she's six, and then meet again for the first time when she's around twenty and he's around... twenty-eight? And yet the whole thing works very well when you manage to untangle everything (the process of which is simply delicious), and their deep love for each other is fully believable.

Elizabeth and Nathaniel in the Wilderness series by Sara Donati
Donati does a simply brilliant job of drawing out the sexual and romantic tension juuuuust long enough, and her two characters are wonderfully drawn, very real, complicated human beings who make you root for their happiness. And spending your honeymoon together hiding from danger in the wilds of 1790's upstate New York certainly has its advantages from a togetherness point of view.

Lucy Snowe and M. Paul in Villette by Charlotte Brontë
A heroine who is nobody's fool, an anti-Byronic hero with a disreputable coat and the occasional attitude problem, an up-and-down teacher/student relationship between equals, religious differences in an era when that really mattered to a lot of people, unrequited love that becomes requited, and some very, very sweet final chapters. Throw in an opium dream or two, a legendary resident ghost, lots of paragraphs in French, and a secret passage with a mysterious crone inside and you've got the makings of a rippingly good love story. (Just please, for your own sake, don't read the last page. I'm tempted to tear mine out and rewrite it.)

OK, we're down to the top 5. I'm thinking I should have done this in installments.

Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion by Jane Austen
This is my favorite Austen novel. Honestly, I would like this relationship better if one or both of them had spent their years apart secretly but ardently pining for each other, but the prosaic fact is that it appears that they didn't devote too much energy to their regrets until they were thrown together again. And I could just scratch that scheming Louisa's eyes out, except that she becomes a pitiful character later on and also I guess she didn't know she was stealing Anne's man, so I guess she gets a pass. And the idea of all those wasted years when they could have been together is really depressing and makes me hate Lady Russell a little, even though she's not as evil as they make her out to be in the otherwise-brilliant film. But the letter... at the end... oh my gosh. MOST ROMANTIC ENDING EVER. The first time I read this, I was reading in bed, and I literally gasped out loud and put my hand over my mouth and had to explain to my drowsy husband in an excited whisper what was happening. He was amused (at me), but not moved by the story. Maybe this sort of thing only really works for girls. I'm thinking yes.

Squire and Mrs. Hamley in Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
I'm re-reading this right now and it was actually this relationship and my reaction to it that made me decide to write this post. Such a tender, lasting love between these two rather unlikely partners -- the bluff, loud Squire and his gentle London lady of a wife. You know almost from the moment you meet them how it's going to end, but getting to know them along with young Molly is a beautiful experience. It was for me, anyway. Have tissues handy.

Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I thought about leaving them out just to avoid the cliché but I couldn't. They're simply too awesome. My favorite scenes in their growing relationship are the ones when Elizabeth is staying at Netherfield, and Mr. Darcy finds himself fighting his growing attraction for her. The idea of being desirable and interesting enough to chip away at a man's will without even wanting to certainly has a twisted kind of appeal, doesn't it?

Jane and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Speaking of drawing out the tension. Ahem. The first time I read this novel -- blissful hours, every one -- when I got to the part where Jane has just rescued Mr. Rochester from the fire and he's in the hallway faltering through that speech about good genii and how when he first saw her he knew she would do him good in some way, it was the middle of the night and I just kept reading that exchange over and over with that full, light, exciting falling-in-love goosebumpish feeling, wishing I could go back in time to the moment when I hadn't read that passage just so I could have the pleasure of reading it again for the first time. When I re-read the book, I try to make myself forget that that part's coming, hoping I can recapture that first-time OH MY GOSH startlement, but of course I never quite can. (I can hear you sloooowly backing away now. Come back! Come back! I'm really not crazy, I swear!) And their whole story overall is just as compelling. I could do without the St. John thing, but those episodes had to happen in order to reach that ending where they could finally come together with no barriers as relative equals. (Plus there's that endearing exchange near the end when she's sitting on his knee and he's all jealous about that pipsqueak of a St. John who actually can't hold a candle to him.) *huge. sigh.*

And my very most favorite literary couple of all time (well, as far as I've read, anyway):
Admiral and Mrs. Croft in Persuasion by Jane Austen
I love, love, LOVE this tight-knit pair. Their affection for each other is lovely to behold, she who literally sailed to the ends of the earth with him (or, well, OK, to the East Indies... but not to the West Indies, because we do not call Bermuda or the Bahamas the West Indies, you know), who would rather be rolled in the ditch with him than driven safely by anyone else, and he who doesn't try to hide his love and affection for his wife of who knows how many years. (Actually, I get the impression that she's considerably younger than he is, so this doesn't exactly qualify as a geriatric love affair. Also, I can't remember why, but I have the impression that they've suffered disappointments in trying to have children. But I could definitely be wrong on both counts. Hmm! Time for a reread!) As an aside, the film with Amanda Root is sublime in its depiction of the love between Adm. and Mrs. Croft (and, well, in everything else too). At any rate, this is marriage the way I think marriage ought to be: devoted, affectionate, leavened with humor, and unabashedly honest about the pleasure they find in one another's company.

And that's that. What a pleasant way to spend two hours. It was therapy, really, considering how it took my mind off the state of the world and all its various woes. Now I want to see your lists, please. (They can be shorter than mine; I can't expect everyone to be as long-winded -- or as boring -- as I am.)

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Books for -- man, what *was* last month? Oh yeah. August.

It's just as well that I forgot until 11:30 pm that I needed to make bread for communion tomorrow (the only breads you can find unsliced for purchase in town are long loaves of French bread, which don't fit on the platters, and round loaves of King's Hawaiian, which I personally loathe), because while I was working on the Irish soda bread, which I haven't made in YEARS, I remembered that I hadn't shifted the laundry either, and that waking up tomorrow morning to find nearly all the clothes we wanted to wear sitting in a wet lump in the washing machine would not get our Sunday off to a cheerful start.

Then I had the baking time to fill in, and I thought, hey, I can write a books post! Or I can work on the Super Secret Stealth Surprise knitting project! I could hand-wash my hand-washables! I could watch a TV show on hulu.com! I could get started on next week's reading for Comm-05! All of a sudden 25 minutes -- oops, make that 20 now -- are not enough for everything, and can I stay up all night again? (I guess it's also a good thing that I did get in a 3-hour nap this afternoon, after having under four hours of sleep after the observatory trip.)

I guess I'll just content myself with doing the books post and save everything else for tomorrow. Maybe.

OK, so. Books. This is easy. I re-read some Austen (S&S and P&P -- am saving the delicious Persuasion for last; I wonder if I could talk T into reading it to me, just for variety? I wonder how long that would last before I had to, um, make him stop?), and I read a new book by Joanna Trollope called Friday Nights, which falls into the (very full) "not badly done but I'm not going to go around recommending it to everyone" 2.5-3.5 category. Trollope is a very good writer most of the time from a technical standpoint -- her dialogue rings true, her characters do what real people would do, her settings are tangible without being over-discussed -- but there was something a little, well, boring, about this book. It was almost like a creative writing exercise; I can see the handout now. "Create half a dozen or so women friends, each unique and of varying ages. Explain how they came to be friends. Give each character a rich past and/or a compelling issue that needs resolution. Now throw in a variable, e.g. a man, a death, a world event [Trollope chose "a man"], and show what happens to the dynamics of the group as a result in 70,000 words or less. Due at the end of term." She would have earned her A, no question, but the borderline formulaic-ness of the story turned me off a bit. Still worth a read, especially if you've liked her other stuff.

Perfect; there's the timer. Gah, the wire rack's in the dishwasher, dirty. My planning lacks. But then we all knew that.

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