C.B. Wins a New Award

Many thanks to Sandy at You've Gotta Read This who gave the Proximidade award to Ready When You Are C.B. Sandy has written up several guest posts for this site since she started blogging just under a year ago, I think. If you haven't visited her site please do. She reviews a wide range of books and often features guest reviews of kids books written by her own kids.

"The Proximade Award believes in the Proximity - nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this clever-written text into the body of their award."

Regular readers and subscribers know that one of the things I advocate for here at Ready When You Are, C.B. is the short story. So I thought I'd pass the Proximidade love along to some of the recent and regular contributors to Short Story Sunday. Please feel free to keep the chain going along or not as the mood strikes you. This is all just for fun anyway. And for the occasional free book I suppose.

Proximidade awards go to:

• J.C. Montgomery at The Biblio Brat who recently reviewed "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid.
• Lizzy Siddal at Lizzy's Literary Life who reviewed "The Ministry of Whiskey" by Val McDermid.
• Katrina at Katrina's Reads who reviewed "Crocodile Tears" by A.S. Byatt.
• ds at Third Storey Window who reviewed "Friends" by Grace Paley.
• gautami tripathy at Reading Room who reviewed "The Parade of You" by Barth Anderson.
• Staci Jo at Life in the Thumb who reviewed "The Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri.
• John at The Book Mine Set who reviewed "Leave it to Jeeves" by P.G. Wodehouse and who also runs Short Story Monday.
• Frances at Nonsuch Book who reviewed "The Book Bag" by Somerset Maugham.

All worthy sites. All wonderful folks. Please check them out.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace

Detective Minami! Detective Minami! Detective Minami!

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace is not like any book I have read before. When you have read as many books from as eclectic an assortment of genres as I have, it's very rare to find an author do something you've never seen before. David Peace's detective story Tokyo Year Zero stretches the hard-boiled detective genre into uncharted territory and gets under the reader's skin like no other book I've ever read.

The novel's setting, post ward Japan, is not a new one but it is a rarely visited one. This type of post war setting has been explored before, done wonderfully well in Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series and in Joseph Kanon's The Good German, but Tokyo Year Zero sets the mystery in post war Japan instead of post war Germany. While what happened in Germany is familiar territory for American readers, what happened in Japan remains largely a mystery. (It's difficult to imagine a Japanese version of The Reader becoming a best seller with a movie version playing in American multiplexes.)

Tokyo Year Zero provides an antidote to this situation. The mystery compels the reader, as with all good detective stories, but the setting also compels. Tokyo Year Zero is able to teach a great deal of history without teaching history--as the book progresses we learn all we need to know about life in post war Japan under occupation, and about life in war time Japan under military rule, because, like most detective novels set after a war, the search for answers leads back to what happened during the war.

There is a good murder mystery here, based on a real life serial killer who murdered many women during and after World War II. As a detective story, Tokyo Year Zero is a solid, successful thriller. But that's not what makes Tokyo Year Zero stand out as a novel that stretches the genre, as a novel that brings something completely new to readers. What's new is the way David Peace gets so fully under the reader's skin.

Tokyo Year Zero is set after World War II during a time when all of Japan was under massive re-construction. It's easy to see the city as one giant building site, filled with endless hammering. It's one thing to say so, but it's another to make that hammering a constant presence in the reader's experience as it is in the character's lives. Mr. Peace does this by continually littering the scenes in his novel with the Ton-ton of the hammers. Sometimes the hammering is worse than it is at others. The results can read like a prose poem:

I take a different route back up to Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters. Ton-ton. The air is more humid than ever. Ton-ton. The hammering louder than ever. Ton-ton. I want to wash my face. Ton-ton. I want to wash my hands. Ton-ton. I step inside the Hibiya Public Hall. Ton-ton. I wish I hadn't. Ton-ton. It is the inaugural convention of the Congress of Industrial Unions. Ton-ton. The now-shabby lobby of this once-grand hall is filled with counter-intelligence agents and military policemen, foreign journalists and Japanese snitches, their paperclips in their lapels and an extra ration of cigarettes. Ton-ton. Young men selling Akahata. Ton-ton. Young men whistling "The red Flag'. Ton-ton. I want to wash my face. Ton-ton. I want to wash my hands. Ton-ton. I walk through the Sinchu Gun armbands and the press-corps badges. Ton-ton. The auditorium is dark and airless, packed with men standing and sweating, either staring or shouting at the large stage. Ton-ton.....The speeches begin. Ton-ton.

Very soon the hammering becomes too much to bear, and the reader is forced to tune it out, to just try to skip over it or ignore it. But it's not easy to do; it never lets up for long. It began to drive me so crazy that I could not help but wonder why Mr. Peace included it. Why deliberately try to drive your readers nuts? Tokyo Year Zero is more than a detective story. It is the story of one man's attempt to remain sane in a world that appears to be actively trying to drive him mad. The first person present tense narration combined with the constant repetition of hammering, other construction noise, even the narrator's own repeated thoughts, give Tokyo Year Zero a sense of immediacy unlike any I've ever encountered before. By the end of the book I had the sense that I was sharing Detective Minami's journey into madness.

It's not a place I want to go, but Tokyo Year Zero is a novel that takes the reader places. Isn't that what a good novel is supposed to do?

Tokyo Year Zero is the first of three novels. Part two, Occupied City, is due out this August. If the publishers would like to send me an Advanced Review Copy, I'd be happy to read it. (Wink-wink.)

For further reading, Wendy has a very good review up at Musing of a Bookish Kitty.

"Waiting for the Zephyr" by Tobias S. Buckell

"The Zephyr was almost five days overdue."

A short story can give a reader a slice of life too small for a novel, or maybe too rich for a novel is what I mean to say. A story can focus on one character, one moment of time, one crisis, in a way that implies a novel's

 worth of plot both back story and sequel. Someone we identify with, a problem we've lived through.

This can even happen in a piece of science fiction like "Waiting for the Zephyr." Young Mara, a 17-year-old farm girl, dreams of leaving the countryside to see the wonders of the big city. What's different in "Waiting for the Zephyr" is that Mara's country side is isolated and in decay as a result of economic calamity and war. Lacking any usable source of oil, American cities have turned to nuclear power and kept their lights blazing, leaving the countryside to get by on wind turbines as best it can. The plains of the Midwest now something to be sailed across instead of driven over. The Zephyr, a large four-masted trading ship comes through town once every two years; this time Mara wants to be on it when it leaves.

A 17-year-old country girl wants to leave town; her family, afraid for her safety, wants her to stay.

You can find "Waiting for the Zephyr" in Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams.

If you'd like to participate in this month's round of Short Story Sunday's please feel free to use Mr. Linky below. Everyone is welcome. I'll start a new links list next week.

It Was Raining, She Was Probably Very Bored

I shot this little video a few weeks ago. In her defense, Dakota had been cooped up in the house all day because it was raining outside.

Where The Wild Things Are -- The Movie???

Wednesday I saw this on Huffingtonpost.com and still can't quite get over it.





What do you think? Will it be genius or a terrible, terrible mistake?

The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Illustrated by Dave Gibbons

Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.
Rorschach's Journal October 12th, 1985

The Watchmen by Alan Moore is an easy way to make yourself look cool if you happen to be a middle school English teacher. Just leave a copy of it on your desk and try to act normal when the students ask you about it.

The story concerns a group of retired and semi-retired superheroes.  Long past their prime they have all moved on to other things.  One runs a major corporation, one works for the government, one published a tell-all memoir.  One has recently been murdered.

The murder is the McGuffin, as Alfred Hitchcock would call it, the event that sets all other events in motion and appears to mislead the audience and the main character down the garden path.  Who is killing former superheroes?  Why?

The novels moves backwards and forwards in time, filling in the large cast of characters' back story as the plot moves along, picking up speed as it goes.  It was not easy for me to get into The Watchmen, I found the first few chapters a bit of a slog, but once I was in--I was in.  The Watchmen are a fascinating group of characters.  Only one of them has superpowers; the others are just ordinary people with a penchant for dressing up in costumes and fighting crime.  This is a strange thing to do and finding out just what makes each of them tick, what made them become superheroes, is a big part of the fun. 

Figuring out just what is going on in the novel's present day is the other part.  The "plot" to kill off superheroes is set against the general angst of the mid-1980's when America seemed to be going off-track, crime was up, fear over nuclear war ran high and few seemed to know what to do.  Add to this an alternative reality setting that features a long standing Nixon presidency and you have a bleak looking future.  The Watchmen are here to help us, but are we worth helping?

The Watchmen was considered a ground-breaking graphic novel when it was first published in 1985 and it's fair to ask just how well it has held up over the last 20 plus years.  I'd have to give it a mixed positive review.  Much of it is fascinating reading.  It asks a lot from its readers, which is fine with me, and it largely delivers the goods in return.  The narrative is complicated, often spliced together in alternating story lines that feed off of each other and into each other both visually and narratively.  The mix of words and pictures is among the best I've seen, not that I'm an expert on graphic novels.  All of the characters, even the minor, non-crime fighting ones, are interesting and three dimensional.  There is one character who sits reading a horror comic throughout the novel.  This character comments on the events around him as does the comic he is reading while at the same time providing a deconstruction of comic books themselves and giving us a hint at what the eventual end of the novel will be.  Postmodernism at is playful best.   

But there were a few things here and there that struck me as a bit adolescent, a little comic bookey, which seemed out of place in so sophisticated a novel.  Thankfully, some of the issues addressed in The Watchmen have lost their sense of urgency.  I think I would have been a much bigger fan of The Watchmen had I read it when it first came out in 1985.  Unfortunately, I left comic books behind a few years prior to that date and did not discover graphic novels until many years later.  (It might be more true to say that I couldn't afford them until much later.  I can remember when a comic book cost a mere 50 cents.)

I will also confess that even after reading the novel I have no desire to see the recent movie. But I did come across this very cool teaser trailer for it. Enjoy.

  

Classics Challenge

Tomorrow morning I'm off to San Jose for the California Association of Student Leaders annual statewide conference along with nine of my students. My students will be attending three days of workshops and motivational speeches and an evening dinner dance at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, which is the real reason they're all going. I will be hanging around the hotel correcting papers and reading books.

Which brings me to the Classics Challenge. I wasn't going to do any challenges this year, but now I'm signed up for two. I have enjoyed the Dewey Decimal Challenge so far because it has led me to some unexpected reading. I figured since I have several classics in my TBR pile, why not join the challenge. You can still join, too.

Here's my reading list:

I'm 2/5's of the way through Les Miserables already but that leaves close to 700 pages still to go so I think it should count.

I've been saving Angnes Grey for a while. I've read all but two of the Bronte sister's novels so I'm trying to space them out. I have one more Charlotte still to go that I'm saving for after I turn 50 in 2014.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling is one that I enjoyed far more than I thought I would when I read it grad school and I've always meant to read it again.

The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz is a leftover from last year's 1% Well Read Challenge. Here's hoping I get to it this year.

I recently read Daisy Miller by Henry James and loved it, so I thought I'd give Washington Square a try. If I like it I'll move on to one of his full length novels.

That leaves Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. I've read very good things about it on several book blogs and since I loved Crime and Punishment I thought I'd give another Russian a try.

I'm taking Les Miserables along with me to San Jose tomorrow. I should be able to get through Part III before we head for home Saturday afternoon. Wish me luck.

Interview with Janet Lee Carey author of Dragon's Keep, The Double Life of Zoe Flynn and Many Others

One of my favorite books from 2008 was Dragon's Keep by Janet Lee Carey. Ms. Carey is currently a full-time author of Young Adult fantasy novels, but along the way she wrote several terrific realistic Young Adult books, The Double Life of Zoe Flynn among them. She is the third author of my favorite reads from 2008 to agree to do an interview for Ready When You Are, C.B.

I know this may make me look a bit shallow, so I'm going to get it out of the way up front. I think Dragon's Keep has a fantastic cover. Were you at all involved in the cover design? What do you think of it?

I wasn’t involved with the cover design, but was wowed by it when I first saw it. I think the provocative cover has helped bring more readers to the book. An author is always pleased with results like that!

After you agreed to this interview I went back and read two of the novels you wrote before Dragon's Keep and was surprised to find them both just about completely free of fantasy. After looking at your website, novels my students would call "realistic" seem even more out of place. How did you end up starting your writing career with "realistic" books? What led you to move from "realistic" stories to fantasy?

I’ll write whatever story grabs me, but I always wrote both types of fiction. The fantasy novels simply took longer to sell, so it was a while before they hit the shelves. I was ecstatic when Atheneum finally accepted one of my fantasies The Beast of Noor. I’m now writing more and more YA fantasy. Once I take the time to create a world, I want to keep going back to it so I just finished the sequel to Dragon’s Keep, the sequel to The Beast of Noor and completed a new YA fantasy, Stealing Death set in another world all together. More about those books later in the interview, but as you can see, I’m kind of on a roll.

One thing I liked so much about Dragon’s Keep is how personal and down-to-earth the story is. Rosalind the narrator/main character gives us the nitty-gritty of her everyday life both before and after she goes to live with the dragons. I think this helped make the novel more believable somehow. There is "magic" in the novel, of course, but most of the book is well rooted in historical reality of the middle ages. The book's world strikes me as basically 13th century England with a real dragon in it. I mean that as a compliment; it could pass muster as historical fiction. Were you ever tempted to write Rosalind’s story as historical fiction instead of fantasy? How did you create the fantasy world of Wilde Island?

You bring up such interesting points here. First, you might be interested to know that Dragon’s Keep was rejected for five years. I just couldn’t sell it. One of the publishing houses rejected it because it was “too historical.” I revised and revised and kept hoping to find the right publisher. My agent, Irene Kraas carted it around for a long time. We were both about to give up on it when I took it to England during my Wenny Has Wings book tour with my UK publisher Faber & Faber. I showed it to my UK editor Julia Wells and she loved it. Within the next month, my agent also brought it to Kathy Dawson who was then at Harcourt, and she wanted it too. So after five years of rejection, we sold the book to two houses! Julia Wells and Kathy Dawson both said they liked the novel’s historical feel. I’d done an enormous amount of research to make the history as accurate as possible. Kathy Dawson had never taken a fantasy book before, so it was a great compliment for her to reach for Dragon’s Keep. Faber & Faber published it under the title Talon.

As to the balance of history and magic, you nailed it. Dragon’s Keep is the nitty-gritty daily life of medieval England with the exception of living, breathing, dragons. I never like adding too much magic. I tip the vial, add a few drops, and stir.

I'll try not to make this question a spoiler, but I was struck by a certain twist in the plot of Dragon's Keep that echoed the story in Beowulf where the hero kills one monster only to be later attacked by it's vengeful mother. Was Beowulf a source of inspiration for Dragon's Keep? What others sources inspire your work?

I read Beowulf in college. Like all the books I’ve read over the years I’m sure it has become a part of my subconscious “storytelling soup.” I wasn’t aware of its particular influence, but I can see the parallels now that you mention it. I was, however, conscious of twisting the typical fantasy archetypes in Dragon’s Keep. I set out to break the mold, to create an imperfect princess, a dragon who is a powerful animal yet not completely evil, a loving mother who is pushed beyond her moral bounds by her obsession with her daughter’s “flaw.”

Fantasy can allow for a greater scope. It has its trials and tribulations, but the freedom of thought and expression fantasy allows keeps me coming back. I love to read them and to write them. I devour good fantasy books, love J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, Jane Yolen, and particularly admire Ursula K. Le Guin. When I finish reading an Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, I sigh and say, “Oh, to write like that!”

You mention on your website that you grew up in Mill Valley, California in a house with glass door knobs and that you carried one with you while working on The Double Life of Zoe Flynn. Zoe spends so much time reading fantasy stories, like The Wizard of Oz, that she struck me as someone who might grow up to write a book like Dragon's Keep. Can we read Zoe as Janet? How close are you to the heroines of your books?

The characters come out of the story as much as the story comes out of the characters. It is a very, “what came first the chicken or the egg?” sort of thing. All the characters have a little something in common with me. After all I have to be able to get inside of Zoe,Will, Rosalind, Miles, Hanna, Kipp – all of them. Yet they are all unique and tend to surprise me. If I’m lucky (and I have been so far) they come to life on the page.

Yet you asked about Zoe, so here goes. Like Zoe, I was a dreamer as a child, and like her, I loved the woods. As to Zoe’s fondness for fantasy fiction, you picked up on my longing at that point to have my fantasy novels published. Dragon's Keep was still being rejected when my third book, The Double Life of Zoe Flynn, was published. So I put my own love of fantasy into Zoe’s heart.

I'm a big fan of intertextuality and I've been accused of going too far with it, but I noticed that in both Molly's Fire and The Double Life of Zoe Flynn a game of hide and seek features prominently. The game bookends the events in Molly's Fire and serves as a symbol for Molly's search for her father and in The Double Life of Zoe Flynn hide and seek also bookends the novel and serves this time as a symbol of the search for a physical home. The story of St. George and the Dragon plays an interesting role in Molly's Fire, too. Do your books influence each other? Are there certain themes that you are consciously reworking throughout your novels or certain symbols that you find yourself coming back to when you write?

I weave much into each work and, like you, love planting clues and adding many layers within my stories. Hide and seek touches on a deeper theme I tend to revisit; a character trying to recover something that was lost. You see the theme in Molly’s Fire as she’s hoping to find her father. You see it in The Double Life of Zoe Flynn as she tries to recover her lost home. You also see it in the other books. In Wenny Has Wings, Will tries to recover a sense of a ‘whole family’ now that Wenny is gone. In The Beast Of Noor, Hanna has to go after her lost brother who has transformed himself into a beast – the key question there was, “can you rescue someone who does not want to be found?” In Dragon’s Keep, Rosie tries to recover the part of herself she has rejected, to become something much better than a perfect princess -- a whole human being.

The books don’t have to be read at deeper levels to be enjoyed. It’s my job to write exciting adventures that make the readers want to turn the pages. But the character’s central longing to find the missing pieces, also translates into page turning. Hopefully the reader wants that unifying conclusion as much as the character does.

What does the future hold for Janet Lee Carey? Will she reamian a full time writer of fantasy, go back to "realistic" stories, alternate between the two, or go off in a completely new direction?

Not to confuse you, but all three! I’m currently writing fantasy full time. As I said earlier, fantasy novels are my passion right now. I have a new YA fantasy coming out with Egmont USA in fall 2009. The title is Stealing Death. In this story, seventeen-year-old Kipp tries to outrun the Death Catcher and his shadow pack to save the life of the girl he loves. The tale is set in a fictional sub Saharan Africa.

In Bound By Three, the next Wilde Island novel after Dragon's Keep, the Pendragon soothsayer predicts the next Pendragon king will marry a fairy's child. To prevent this a witch hunter scours the countryside jailing and burning any girls who show fey powers. The tale introduces Tess, a half fey girl caught up in the political struggle who must help her friends escape the witch hunter. I’m happy to be working with my editor Kathy Dawson again. Bound By Three is due out with Dial Books in fall 2010.

The sequel to The Beast of Noor has Miles and Hanna on another adventure. This time we see a romance between Hanna and Taunier as the three teens join with the dragons of Noor to bind the broken worlds. The newest Noor novel will be out with Egmont USA in Fall 2010.
As you can see I’m slowly working on what could become three trilogies! That said, if a realistic fiction story grabs me, I’ll write it. I might also walk down other writing roads. As long as I’m writing, I’m on an adventure. I will remain open to where the next tale takes me.

Yours is one of the better author websites I've looked at. Since you've been writing, how has the Internet changed they way you deal with your audience and with writing in general? Do you follow any particular websites we might want to know about?

Thanks. My husband designed the overall site. We’re in the process of updating the main pages and giving it a new facelift. I’ve also asked the very talented Jaime Temairik to add new pages into the fantasy mini site for the Stealing Death launch. It’s a work in progress.

The Internet offers wonderful networking for authors! I’m in touch with readers, fellow writers, booksellers, librarians, book bloggers, book communities – it’s indeed a world wide web! I was also lucky enough to be a founding diva for readergirlz. http://www.readergirlz.com/ This online YA book community was initiated by award winning authors, Justina Chen Headley, Lori Ann Grover, and Dia Calhoun. There are more divas now, but we four were the founders. Readergirlz was a seminal group using myspace, live chats, sensational book bloggers, Facebook, a website, and newsletter to reach and interact with readers. It created a phenomenal connectivity inspiring readers to dialogue with authors and challenging readers to reach out and volunteer. I’m a retired diva now, but I have to tip my hat to the other founders, the new divas, postergirlz, gotogirlz and to the ongoing group as a whole.

I feature regular posts about my dog Dakota, a Bassett hound who loves to eat books. So I like to end by asking if you've ever had a pet with similar tastes? You mention a cat, Uke, on your website. Has Uke ever developed a taste for literature?

My cat Uke sits in the lap of luxury, which is to say that Uke likes to curl up on my lap while I write. She also pads across the keyboard. In September the day I finished writing Stealing Death (I am not making this up) I’d just written the words The End when Uke stepped onto the keyboard. When she walked off again this is what was on the screen below the words The End – mmmmmmmmmm. I took that to be a good sign, her vote that the book was yummy.
Thank you for the great interview questions! It’s been a pleasure to answer them. Come visit me at http://www.janetleecarey.com/ or pop a question my way at janetleecarey@hotmail.com

My thanks to Ms. Carey for participating in this project. If you've not read her yet, her work comes with my recommendation. Start with Dragon's Keep. It's my favorite and it's terrific! And I'm not giving it away, sorry.

The Double Life of Zoe Flynn by Janet Lee Carey

It wasn't like an earthquake hit on that hot July day in Tillerman, but the world might as well have leaped up like a crazed bull and tried to buck Zoe off its back.

The Double Life of Zoe Flynn by Janet Lee Carey is an example of just how adult the issues in Young Adult literature can be. And I don't mean sex.

The adult world has done some serious damage to Zoe Flynn's life. Her father has lost his job and as a result their family home. Zoe is forced to leave behind the room she loves, her best friend and her dog and travel with her brother, mother and father to another town in another state. Once there her family must live in their van until her parents can find jobs and save enough money to rent a place to live. They manage to get Zoe enrolled in the local school but once there she must live a double life. She wants to make friends, of course, but she cannot tell anyone the truth about her living situation especially since the family van is in a hidden spot off the main roads, not exactly legally parked.

Zoe's parents try to make the experience seem like an adventure, to make it as fun as they possibly can, and they succeed to some degree, especially with Zoe's younger brother. It is like a camping trip at first and the stories Zoe's father tells along with the fantasy novels Zoe can escape into help Zoe deal with her situation. She worries that the best friend she left behind will forget her since she has no phone to call her with and she finds it difficult to make a new best friend when she can never invite anyone over afterschool or even tell anyone the full truth about what happened to her family.

The Double Life of Zoe Flynn is not just the story of Zoe's search for a new home. It's a story that asks us how much we really know about eachother, ask me how much I know about the students in my classroom. As far as her behavior in school goes, Zoe is a wonderful child, someone any teacher would want seven of. Once she leaves school she has to do her homework at the library because there is not enough light in the van. She has to shower and use the facilities at the public pool becuase there are none in the van. She scrounges coins to buy Galaxy Burgers at the local fast food place because she wants to win the grand prize and buy a house. At school she evades questions about her family as much as possible. These are adult responsibilities. These are adult issues.

The author of The Double Life of Zoe Flynn, Janet Lee Carey is also the author of Molly's Fire and of Dragon's Keep one of my favorite reads from 2008. I am pleased to say that she agreed to do an interview for Ready When You Are, C.B. Please stop by tomorrow and have a look.

Short Story Sunday: "The Open Door" by Mrs. Oliphant

It's possible to get a good sense of what a particular culture valued by looking at the art it produced. But if you look only at a culture's "high art" the view you get will be skewed. Imagine some future anthropologist trying to draw conclusions about what early 21st century Americans were like by looking at several best picture Oscar winners: Slumdog Millionaire, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, No Country for Old Men. While these movies were winning awards and critical raves, most American movie goers were flocking to the latest X Men sequel.

The same situation exists for readers of Victorian fiction like me. The classics are what we have easy access to: Dickens, Hardy, the Brontes, Austen, etc., but do they provide an accurate reflection of what interested the general population of 19th century England? One thing the classics don't show us is just how concerned the general population was with Christianity. Many of the popular books of the day, the big best sellers, had very heavy religious overtones. Some of these are available in Oxford Press editions. I can recommend two: Olive (1850) by Diana Craik is the story of a young woman with scoliosis who leads a handsome young man away from temptation back to the life of a believer through the example of her own love and devotion. It's really much better than it sounds. The Sorrows of Satan (1895) by Marie Corelli tells us what happens when Satan himself enters the milieu of late nineteenth century London into the bohemian theatrical world of Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley. This one is also much better than it sounds; Oscar Wilde is actually counted among its fans.


Mrs. Oliphant's short story "The Open Door" fits in nicely with the religious hauntings of The Sorrows of Satan. Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret Oliphant Wilson) was one of the better selling authors of her day, known primarily for novels like Hestor and The Perpetual Curate which are very similar to the works of Anthony Trollope. (For what it's worth, I think her best work is just as good as his but Mr. Trollope remains in print to this day while Mrs. Oliphant, unfairly, does not.)

"The Open Door" is something of a departure for Mrs. Oliphant. The story concerns a man with a young son who has taken gravely ill. The boy had been given the freedom to ride a horse into town where he goes to school, only to fall ill after repeatedly hearing a voice in the woods he had to pass through each day. The voice pathetically calls for its mother and is so moving that the young man cannot help but be overcome with feeling. (This often puts frail Victorian characters in bed for the many weeks it takes to recover.) The boy's father and a trusted servant investigate the wood to find out if the boy is telling the truth or if he has simply lost his mind. (Read no further to avoid spoilers.)


They find a ruined house, destroyed by fire and do in fact hear a voice calling for its mother just as the boy described. They cannot find a living explanation for the voice so they seek help from the local clergy man who tells them the story of the house. It once belong to a woman who had a very prodigal son. Her son strayed away from home and from God and died a sinner. The clergyman recognizes the voice as the prodical son and realizes that the only possible way to help the spirit find peace is to pray for its soul. They do, this works, the spirit leaves the wood and the boy is cured.


I cannot defend "The Open Door" as great art, nor even near-great art, but it does provide evidence of just how important an issue faith was to 19th century readers. It's still an important issue, here in America anyway, though it rarely makes its way into more literary fiction.


If you'd like to participate in Short Story Sunday please feel free to leave a link below. I'm trying to set Mr. Linky up so that it will collect links for each month as an on-going project. So if you're a regular participant you may see your name here more than once.

Dakota Picks a Winner: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

The winner of Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson is __Maggie. I'll get the book in the mail to you ASAP.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight

The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car.  "You be good," she said.  "You hear me?  You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you.  You hear?"

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight is the story of four children on their own. The oldest, Dicey Tillerman who is still young enough to pass as a boy when she needs to, leads her three siblings on a cross country journey in search of a home.  They must face this journey alone after their unstable mother abandons them in a car outside of a large shopping mall while on the way to the home of their great aunt.  She never returns.  

It's clear that Dicey has been covering for their mother for some time.  She immediately takes charge of the situation, keeping the younger children in line, dividing tasks between herself and her brother James who's just a year or so younger than she is.  Dicey hopes that their mother will return as soon as this latest spell is over, but she also fears that the police will find them and separate them.  She wants her mother back, but even more than that she wants to keep her family together.  So when it begins to get dark and her mother still has not returned, she decides to abandon the car and walk to their great aunt's house, though it's a trip that will take several weeks and they have just over ten dollars between them.

What follows is a terrific survival story.  Ms. Voight knows what she is talking about here.  The details of how the children survive, earn money, get food, find shelter and eventually find their great aunt's home are completely realistic.  (If you had to run away from home with only a few dollars to you name in 1981 when the book was written this book could have been your field guide.)   There are no flights of fancy here, no unexplained or surprise rescuers, no helpful coincidences that appear out of no where to save the day.  Dicey is simply too determined to fail.  Her siblings recognize this and stick to her side through thick and thin.  She does not disappoint them.

Homecoming is more or less officially a young adult novel, but it should be seen as a young adult novel in the same sense that To Kill a Mockingbird is a young adult novel.  Put a more sophisticated cover on it, take off the references to the Newberry Medal and you have a novel about children written for all audiences.  Ms. Voight never talks down to her audience, never makes things easy for them, but she does write a compelling tale.  All of the characters, even the minor ones, are as richly drawn as any you'll find in an "adult" novel.  Motivations are complicated here.  People try to do the right thing by each other only to find both the giver and the receiver of charity are too complicated to make even the most generous act go smoothly.  It's not that no good deed goes unpunished, but no good deed is easy to swallow.

One thing that sets Homecoming above other novels like this is that once the children find a home, their great aunt's house, they also find that it is not really what they were looking for.   Most writers would end their stories at the doorstep of their destination with a happy and satisfying reunion.  Ms. Voight could have done so and still had an excellent novel.  Instead, Dicey, her sister and her brothers find they have such a difficult time fitting in that they must consider taking to the road again, this time to look for the grandmother they never knew, one whom their mother rarely had a kind word for.    

Homecoming is the first of a series of six books about the Tillerman family.  I don't know how I managed to teach middle school English for almost 20 years and never read it, but I'm certainly glad one of my student book clubs finally gave it a chance.  The girls who read it are glad they did, too.  They plan on reading the next book later this month.  I'm looking forward to it.  Homecoming by Cynthia Voight comes with our highest recommendation.

I "Heart" Your Blog

I'll be very busy today preparing for Open House which is tonight. Because I teach one of the Gifted and Talented Core classes (English and History) I usually get a very large turnout, 60 to 100 parents, sometimes more than that. Most of them with lots of questions. Parents of gifted and talented children usually have lots of questions.

So, I'm setting this post to publish via remote, I guess you'd call it.

This past week I got an award from ds who has become one of my regular commenters and contributors to Short Story Sunday. I you have not been to her blog, third-storey window, please check it out.

Thank you, ds. I do enjoy awards. Winners of the "I Heart Your Blog" award are asked to post the picture on their site and to pass the award along to seven more blogs. I thought I'd try to give some love and publicity to some newish blogs, to me anyway. I hereby pass the I "Heart Your Blog award on to the following....

First up is A Journey to Find the Great Gay Reads by Simon Savidge. This is a slightly specialized version of Mr. Savidge's main blog Savidge Reads. He has an up-coming interview with Tom Rob Smith author of Child 44 which I am jealous of, even if I wasn't crazy about the book.

For a change of pace try Stuff as Dreams Are Made On. Chris, who lives in New Orleans, blogs mostly about science fiction and fantasy books. He's a good source for interesting books I've never heard of, one of my favorite genres. And he has a very cool banner at the top of his blog.

Aaron at That's the Book lives in Stratford, Ontario and is an excellent source for what's going on in Canadian Books. I've added several books to my TBR list that I've found on That's the Book.

Ameteur Reader at Wuthering Expectations continues to find obscure books that interest and intrigue me. AR is reading through the classics and finding lots of new material as a result.

AndiLit.com blogs about her experiences teaching at a community college in Maryland and about the books she reads. She also keeps an on-going account of her progress as a writer. It all makes for a very interesting blog.

Here's one I just found called Reading Through the Night. It's run by reader and teacher, Christina.

I'm leaving blog number seven open, a place holder for all the other blogs I read and enjoy. If you'd like to give someone an award please fell free.

I'll be back with a new book review tomorrow.

A New Oz

Book trailers keep popping up on the web these days. Many of them are fairly amateurish affairs featuring little more than voice over narration of book covers, but this one for Graham Rawle's new Wizard of Oz is an exception.



Certainly piqued my interest. You can find more at Mr. Rawles website.

So, seen any good book trailers lately?

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson--Book Giveaway

Early November. It's nine o'clock.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and translated by Anne Born prompted a split decision from my book club--four members loved it, three did not. This is not typical for us. It's rare that we all love or all hate the same book, but the vote is usually closer to five-two than it is to four-three.

Out Stealing Horses is a complicated story. It opens with the narrator as an "old man," recently widowed, who has left his urban life for a cabin in rural Finland. His new life, that of a loner in the woods, gives him time to look back on his life which brings on a succession of flashbacks to various points in his youth as he tries to come to grips with the father who abandoned him to live with another woman and her young son.

I admit that I was not in the "loved it" camp, so instead of writing a more traditional review I'm just going to focus on three scenes in the novel that I can honestly say I loved since there is much to admire in Out Stealing Horses. I don't think any of these will be spoilers--I'm leaving quite a bit out--but if you're planning on reading the novel soon and like to be completely surprised, you may want to skip to the giveaway at the end of this post.

The first scene comes early in the novel and is the most harrowing part of the narrative. The narrator, Trond goes "out stealing horses" with his friend Jon who lives on the neighboring farm. The two young friends spend the afternoon basically borrowing horses from other farmers, riding them for a while and then returning them to their corrals. Afterwards the boys each go home so the narrator finds out what happened only later. Jon was supposed to watch his two younger brothers, 10-year-old twins Lars and Od, but he left the house unattended and went for a swim in the nearby creek. A shot is heard and Jon's father races into the house from the fields. Jon cannot move. He waits in the tall grass outside the house. He knows he forgot to empty the cartridge from his rifle which he hung in the hallway and which his little brothers are prone to play with, pretending to be him. The father has to leave almost immediately to pick up his wife at the train station; she is returning from a visit to a relative. He cannot bring himself to tell her what has happened, so she enters the house unaware that one of her sons has been killed.

The second scene takes place shortly afterwards. Trond's father, who is often away from home for long periods of time, has decided to help Jon's father cut down a stand of timber. The two men begin cutting and stacking young trees next to the river. Without realizing it they begin to compete with each other to see who can build the highest stack of timber. Their wives and children are all there, the sons helping their fathers while the wives watch the scene. It's here that it became clear to me, while the two men silent stack wood unable to look each other in the eye, that there was something going on between Trond's father and Jon's mother, that their silent antipathy was not just a product of one man's grief for a lost son. Much more is at stake here. It's a wonderfully written scene, full of understated tension.

The final scene takes place several years later. Trond's father has left his family for good, but before going he sold one final stand of timber and left the proceeds in a bank across the border in Sweden. Trond and his mother travel to the city to get the money only to find that it's just 150 kroner and that they cannot take currency back into Finland. So his mother decides to take him to a tailor and buy him a new suit, his first one, which uses up most of the money. The two of them spend a single day, happily touring the city, looking very smart in their new clothes.

Out Stealing Horses goes back and forth in time, not without causing some confusion, and it tends to ask more questions than it answers. These are both double-edged swords for a novel, some people like this sort of thing, some do not. But there are many passages in Mr. Petterson's novel where the writing reaches lyrical heights that are seldom seen. I was very impressed by the writing more than a few times, especially considering that I read the novel in translation. There are many rewards to be found in Out Stealing Horses, one of which is a book club discussion that stayed on the book for close to an hour--that's very good for my book club.

Book Giveaway


If you'd like to read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, I have an almost new copy that I'll be giving away this week. Just leave a comment below by midnight Friday. If you leave a link to this giveaway on your own blog I'll enter your name five times. Dakota will be selecting the winner at random on Saturday.

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but with the multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is divided into two parts. The first deals with the author's experiences in German concentration camps during World War II. As he says in his opening paragraph Dr. Frankl is not interested in writing about the great horrors but about the every day life he experienced and in how these experiences led him to develop logotherapy, a school of psychoanalysis based on the idea that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning. To be honest, I am skeptical of this idea as I am of psychoanalysis in general, but when an author can back up his theories with experiences from Auschwitz it is difficult to remain a non-believer.

Man's Search For Meaning does not go to extremes depicting life in the camps; it does not have to. As Mr. Frankl says we all know the horrors and those who are going to believe they took place already do. His focus in on the day to day issues such as how did a prisoner get enough food to survive, specifically how did he convince the man who ladled out the soup to go to the bottom of the pot and give him some of the peas that could be found there instead of just skimming broth off of the surface. When one's life is reduced to this, how can it possibly have any meaning? Dr. Frankl provides this answer:

We who walked in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They many have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way...

...Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those marytrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom--which cannot be taken away--that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

This is certainly not an easy path to follow. Of late the word "purpose" has been cheapened, at least here in America. Dr. Frankl survived the worst experience the 20th century could summon, and he found people there who still maintained a life the meant something and had purpose. He also found their antithesis, men whose lives had lost meaning, men who had seized on all that is dark, who wanted nothing but survival. The thing that is a little hard to accept is that he found both groups of men among the prisoners and among the guards. Only recently have writers begun to widely discuss the role of the Capos in the concentration camps. I suspect many people don't realize how important they were. The guards ran the camps, but the Capos ran the barracks, did the real day to day grunt work of keeping all the prisoners in line and working on rations and sleep well below what is needed to stay alive for long. The Capos were prisoners themselves, chosen by the guards because they were bullies enough to be willing to beat their fellow prisoners into submission when the guards weren't around to do it themselves. Dr. Frankl says the Capos enjoyed a level of power and prestige in the camps that none of them would have experienced outside them.

Some of the guards were better than others. Dr. Frankl describes one who used his own money to purchase medicine for the prisoners in his camp and another who was hidden by three former prisoners when liberation came until the prisoners could convince the American soldiers that he should not be harmed.

Dr. Frankl writes: From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two--the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race" --and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

The second part of Man's Serach for Meaning is "Logotherapy in a Nutshell" a brief overview of Dr. Frankl's theory. (The term comes from the Greek "logos" or meaning.) It suffers from being a brief overview of what took 20 volumes in German to fully explain, as Dr. Frankl admits. I'm not qualified to comment on logotherapy's effectiveness, I'm still skeptical of it frankly, but I did find much to admire in this section along with a great deal of food for thought. Man's Search for Meaning is a book that stays with the reader long after it is finished. It just may be one that stays with me for life.

This book was part of the Dewey Decimal Challenge. If you're taking the challenge and need something in the 100's I highly recommend it. If you're not taking the challenge you should consider it. So far it's been the source of some enjoyable and enlightening reading.

Short Story Sunday: Two from Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories often leaves me perplexed. The collection includes a wide range of classic authors from many languages and cultures. To date I've read Franz Kafka, Rainer Marie Rilke, Nikolai Gogol, Bertolt Brecht, Katherine Anne Porter, E.M. Forster, The Book of Jonah, Saint-Simon and for today Isaac Babel and Chuan T'zu.

I don't really know what to make of them. "Awakening" by Isaac Babel tells of a boy who is forced to become a violin prodigy by his father and how he tries to rebel against this. "Five Anecdotes" by Chuan T'zu is a meditation on the fear of death. I liked them both but reading them was a bit like reading the Bible. It's not at all clear what the message is, even after reading them a couple of times, and I suspect a group of readers would end up with as many interpretations as the group had members. (It's no coincidence that the Book of Jonah is one of the short stories in the collection.) My favorite in the collection so far is Nicolai Gogo's "The Nose" which is about a man whose nose decides to leave him one day. Ask a room full of grad students what that means and see what happens.

So am I recommending this anthology? I think I am. I've enjoyed the stories so far and I appreiciate a good tale that leaves me wondering what it was all about. There are no easy answers in Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories but there is lots of food for thought.

If you've read a short story recently and would like to post a link to your review here at Short Story Sunday, please use Mr. Linky below.

Video of the Week: Dakota Eats all the Dog Food

This has nothing to do with books at all--It just made me laugh. We left what we thought was an empty bag of dog food in the kitchen. Dakota managed to find a few bits of kibble in it.



Did you hear her growl at me at the 31 second mark? She was having a good time and hadn't finished all the food in the bag yet.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

It was a dark and storm night.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle was one of my favorite books of all time, back when I was 13. It was one of those books that opened up a new world of reading for me. I read all of the sequels that existed, at the time just two, and everything I could find by Ms. L'Engle at my local and school library. Everything. To this day I recall the chapter about the man with red eyes just about every time I enter a new subdivision with its rows of nearly identical houses. I expect every front door to open and one boy and one girl to simultaneously come out of each with a ball and a jump rope and for them all to begin jumping and bouncing in perfect unison, just like they do A Wrinkle in Time.

For several years I've had a set of five copies in my classroom, an option for my students' book clubs to select. This month, at long last, one group finally chose it, so I decided to re-read it along with them. Recently, Sam over at Book Chase wondered if he should re-read a book he loved back in college. Turns out he is right to hesitate before going back to revisit a book he loved 20 plus years ago. This is not to say that A Wrinkle in Time is a bad book, not by any means, it's just not what I remembered.

The story concerns three children, Meg, Charles and Calvin. Meg Wallace,the central character in the book, is the daughter of genius parents. Her father is a renowned government scientist who has been missing for several years. The government will not tell the Wallace family everything, but they do know that he was lost while working on tesseract, a method of bending three dimensional space around a fourth dimension in order to travel extremely long distances between planets. Charles is Meg's youngest brother, also a genius and Calvin is the new boy next door, too smart to fit in with his large family of very normal siblings. Meg wishes she could fit in, be closer to normal like her twin brothers who show no sign of possessing extraordinary ability or powers the way Charles does.

Enter the three witches: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who. These three elderly ladies have moved into a run down house long believed to be haunted. Charles befriends and introduces them to Meg and Calvin. They help the children begin a journey to rescue the lost Mr. Wallace by teaching them how to tesseract. Eventually they learn the true identity of the three witches and Meg learns a lesson about the power of love and that what she saw as her own faults are really her strengths.

But for me, A Wrinkle in Time has always been about the man with red eyes. His planet is a perfect looking American suburb, where all of the children look and act the same, to the point that when every little girl jumps rope, every rope hits the ground at the same time. Any child who deviates from this norm is subjected to retraining that lasts until that child is broken and remolded into one who will cooperate and get along with everyone else by being like everyone else. It has been suggested that Ms. L'Engle was critiquing Soviet style communism here, but it seemed like suburban California to me when I was 13 and lived in an all white town where every fourth house had the same floor plan, and still felt that way when I re-read the book this week. Meg, who sees herself as someone who cannot get along with the culture on her own world, is horrified by what she sees on his planet and by what happens to the one boy who does not fit in with the others.

It turns out that I had forgotten everything that happened after the man with the red eyes. That was the end of the book as far as I was concerned, but it actually goes on for several more chapters. Chapters that I did not like this time around, unfortunately. The actual ending struck me as so simplistic that it was very hard to believe, and it turned out to be kind of preachy. But, I suspect, in spite of this, that the next time I find myself in a new subdivision, I'll still have a moment when I wait for all of the doors to open at once and for identical children to come out of each house and begin their play, in unison like they all did 30 years ago when I first read A Wrinkle in Time.

BTT: Don't Wait for the Movie

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

What book do you think should be made into a movie? And do you have any suggestions for the producers?
Or, What book do you think should NEVER be made into a movie?

I think Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie would make a terrific movie.  My book club read it last month and we all agree.  There is a very rich cast of characters, two romances, a wartime struggle, an exotic setting-- everything a big epic picture needs.  It's Gone With the Wind set in West Africa.  I doubt that it will happen but it could be terrific.

Dragon's Keep by Janet Lee Carey would be lots of fun, too.  Now that computer graphics have reached such advanced stages the scenes between the heroine and the family of dragons could be convincingly portrayed.

One book that I think should never be a movie is going to be one very soon, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  What the heck are they thinking?  Half of the book is a boy and a tiger alone in a boat.  And how can you make the ending work if the audience has actually seen what happened?  

But I suspect more and more of the best books will be bypassing the movies altogether in favor of television.  Television makes it possible to tell a story over a much longer period of time which is perfect for books.  Adaptations of classic novels come to mind immediately but even a modern mystery like Darkly Dreaming Dexter can become a very good television series.  I know most people like the new Narnia movies, but I prefer the old adaptation that was done for BBC television, because even as hokey and slowly paced as it was it let you spend time with the characters.  Movies can't really do that.

The Book Inscriptions Project

I like it when I find a book someone has written in.  Already many readers are horrified by this post, but it's true.

For me inscriptions, underlining, highlighting, notations are all things that make a book an object with a history instead of a collection of words on a page.  I know I'm probably going the way of the dinosaur what 

with Kindle and other electronic readers gaining popularity.  Soon books may end up being just a collection of words on a screen instead of independent objects with a history.

C.J. tells me there is a well known medieval manuscript with a notation written in the margin by one of the scribes who wrote it which reads "It is very late, I am  cold and my back hurts." That may be the most interesting thing in the manuscript.  It gives the book a life it certainly wouldn't have otherwise.  Inscriptions and notations give a books historical  a personal, specific past.  They connect the current reader with past readers and sometimes even with the writer.  

Which is why I was so happy to find  The Book Inscription Project earlier this week.   Since 2002 Shaun who runs the project has been collecting inscribed books.  He has posted many of them to his website and now takes submissions from readers.  Here are a few samples.

This book is The Dawn of No To-morrow by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  The inscription reads:

Christmas 1914

Confession of Faith

I do not believe in a vengefull vicious God.  My God is not the author of any suffering or pain or hatred or envy or fear neither in this life nor any other existence, and he will not Punish us for anything that he has Created in us, and he is the Creator of all.  He is mine and I am yours.

Loving Daddy.

Found in a used bookshop in Pasadena, California.  How could anyone who got a book with an inscription like that complain?  Are you listening Paperbackswap.com

Canaries by G.T. Dodwell has one of my favorite inscriptions, taped to the back.  I think you can see what I mean about an inscription giving a book a history from this note.

Jackson likes:

bread--white or brown

lettuce

cabbage

apple (peeled)

cucumber (peeled)

celery

carrot

hard boiled egg yolk.

Jackson is dead and I am very sad.  Next birthday I would like two canaries like Jackson.

I'm not sure if the young person who owned this book took good care of his canary or not.   I'm guessing from the handwriting that the child's father or mother wrote the careful list of what to feed Jackson detailing exactly what kind of bread and making sure apples and cucumbers were peeled.  The child did care enough to write Jackson's epitaph.  The book was found on Stradbroke Island in Australia.  I hope Jackson got his canaries.

Lisa Adams and John Heath: An Interview with the Authors of Why We Read What We Read.

Yesterday, I reviewed Why We Read What We Read by Lisa Adams and John Heath which I read as part of the Dewey Decimal challenge. I enjoyed the book quite a bit and consider it to be a very lucky find on my part. The authors graciously agreed to do an interview for Ready When You Are, C.B. and turned out to be as much fun "in person" as they are in print. Here's the interview:

I usually don't ask this but what was the inspiration for Why We Read What We Read? Were you regular readers of best sellers before you started this project? Did you discover any authors you intend to keep reading?

We’re pretty big book nerds. While hunting for a book we could write together, we realized we were both fascinated by the bestseller lists (which we knew little about) and would enjoy writing snarky reviews of popular titles. Voila! While we haven’t followed the lists as intensely as we did while researching our book, we definitely keep an eye on them. We discovered several authors whose work we plan to keep reading, such as David McCullough, Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Schlosser, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus III, and Audrey Niffenegger.

I tried to find out if the two of you are married via Google. (They say everything can be googled these days.) I found only one source that answered this question; it said yes. I hope it was correct because I'm going to plunge in and ask this question. What can you tell us about working as a married team? How do you divide the job? Do you think your experience would make you good guests on the Dr. Phil show?

We have been hitched in spirit for some time, though we are actually getting legally married in three weeks! While we have written books alone and co-written books with others, this was actually our first book together. It was a wonderful experience (and we’re not just saying that to avoid getting the silent treatment). One of the most enjoyable parts about it was that we could write with the other in mind, adding in phrases and jokes that we knew the other would love. We motivated each other to keep writing; we cheered each other up when we felt overwhelmed. It all worked because we were committed to the same vision of our book and could both write in the same style. That’s not to say we didn’t have any frustrations, but overall the experience was extremely positive, and we definitely plan to do it again.

In general, Lisa read and wrote about the fiction books, and John read and wrote about the nonfiction books—though in some cases we swapped or both read the same book. After writing a portion of the book, each of us would have the other read and edit that section. Then we worked on weaving the various sections together to make cohesive chapters.

As for Dr. Phil—the answer is yes, we would make great guests on any talk show! (wink wink)

In your chapter on relationship advice books you sum them up as all having the same basic characteristics: "a preference for celebrity authorities; simple analysis of problems; quick and relatively easy, comfortable fixes; and an appeal to our deepest preconceptions and fears" which I think also applies to the diet and exercise books and possibly to the books on religion and spirituality. I recently attended an inservice, I teach middle school in the North Bay, and found what the two presenters were saying fit this description almost to a "t". This did not exactly inspire hope for improving education any time soon, but it did give me a critical framework to work from when evaluating their presentation. What do you hope readers take away from your analysis of self-help and relationship books? Were you concerned that your readers might end up thinking they should simply "trust no one"?

Ultimately we hoped that people would understand the ways that many self-help, inspiration, relationship, and diet books keep readers in the same vicious cycle, providing temporary comfort without actually solving problems. While self-help books can truly be helpful and inspiring, reading alone is far from enough: it takes significant action on the reader’s part to make genuine, long-term change.

Yours is the best, most enlightening, evaluation of Oprah's Book Club that I have read to date. I was surprised to hear you say that there really isn't an "Oprah Book" since it's a term that is used so often and everyone seems to have agreed on what it means. With that in mind, do you have a favorite Oprah book? I imagine there are people out there who mainly read the books she recommends. What do think of the experience her regular readers are having?

We were surprised by the overall high quality that we found on Oprah’s list. Before reading any of the books, we had understood them to be maudlin and poorly written—most people we knew (snobs, it’s true) referred derisively to “Oprah books.” And while we did find some of her selections to be the weepy tomes we originally expected, we were generally pretty impressed. Oprah’s choices tend to be the best on the bestseller lists—so her regular readers could do much worse. Our personal favorites are House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

In chapter 5, "Soul Train: Religion and Spirituality" you hit two nails on the head as far as I am concerned. One, that the readers of religious writing must trust that the writer is correct since there is no way to prove anything he or she says. This is true even when the writer is interpreting scriptures. And two, that trusting the word of someone who interprets the Bible without the ability to read it in it's original language is like trusting a Shakespeare scholar who cannot read English. In light of that what do you think of the growing political power of people like Rick Warren who recently used his interpretation of the Bible to help pass California's Proposition 8 which discriminates against lesbian and gay people? (In fairness I should tell you that my marriage is one of those that will be ended if Ken Starr has his way in court.) Have you come across any books on religion or spirituality that sincerely deepened your understanding of either?

While we are not religious people, we are fairly interested in and educated about religion—so it is fair to say that we were pretty appalled by much of the bestselling religious writing we reviewed. Fans of Rick Warren we are not, and the fact that he and other bestselling authors of his ilk have any political power is both alarming and mind-boggling.

However, we did truly enjoy exploring the spiritual/religious genre. This was the area of the bestseller lists with which we were least familiar; and in reading these books, we discovered a whole fascinating world of arguments and sniping that we never knew existed. Delving into the ongoing battle between the fundamentalist Christian and New Age viewpoints opened our eyes and taught us a lot about American readers.

I want to ask at least one question about the Left Behind series, of which you both read all 5000 plus pages, but I don't think I can without being overly snarky. Have you seen any of the movie versions? Which do you think are better, the books or the movies?

We considered watching the first movie, but honestly—we like to keep our memories of Kirk Cameron safely in the Growing Pains years where they belong! It would be hard to imagine the movie being worse than the book…but somehow we think it probably is.

Much has been written lately about the decline of the printed book review and the rise of the web review. Have you been following the book blog scene? Do you think it will eventually have an effect on the best seller lists?

Perhaps the greatest irony in the two of us writing Why We Read What We Read is that we rarely read book reviews! We’re kind of anal people who prefer to let a book unfold on its own rather than read too much about it prematurely. That said, we’re certain that online book reviews will continue to grow in readership. The truly talented reviewers will find an audience, whether their work is digital or printed. Personally, we think it’s a good thing that the field is expanding. We have experienced how a printed review can make or break a book—from both sides—and it’s a little alarming how much power a few people can have.

Lisa, I did spent some time reviewing your website, http://www.lisaadamswriting.com/ and came away from it admiring you as a sort of writer/gun-for-hire. You write press releases, brochures, fiction, non-fiction, web site content, technical manuals, just about everything one can name; offer a full range of editing and proofreading services; and even offer on-line courses in writing and grammar. It seems like a heck-of-a-way to make a living. Is this typical for writers these days? How did you become a writer? How do you like it? Have you any advice for people looking to make money writing?

Business writing is definitely a way for any talented writer to make a good living these days. In college I majored in English with a writing emphasis and, after graduating, got a job as a marketing writer with a media production agency. From there, I launched my own consulting business. As you can tell, I enjoy variety!

I don’t think there’s any one “typical” path for writers. Sadly, very few make a living writing books alone, but it’s certainly possible to support oneself by writing for companies, advertising agencies, and PR firms. Excellent writers are always in demand!

Because I regularly feature posts about my dog, a Basset named Dakota who likes to eat my books, I like to end each interview by asking if you have any pets and if they have ever gone after your books? If so, do they prefer best sellers?

Yes, we love our pets! We have a two-year-old black lab/border collie mix named Lu (short for Emmylou) and a chubby black cat named Vetta (short for Svetlana). Lu is pretty good as far as dogs go, but she did—in a rare burst of ferocity—destroy our copy of A Brief History of Time. If you’re interested in the heinous details, Lisa actually wrote an article about the event.

I'd like to thank Lisa Adams and John Adams for participating in this little project. And I like to wish them the best of luck and congratulations on their upcoming wedding.