Short Story Sunday: "N-Words" by Ted Kosmatka

They came from test tubes.

As the short story "N-words" opens the narrator is in the back of a limousine on the way to her husband's funeral. She is with her young son. The boy doesn't fully understand what is going on, but she believes it's important for him to be there. He'll want to remember that he was there someday. As the limousine enters the cemetery they pass a group of protesters who shout at them. They believe her husband was an abomination, that he should not be buried in consecrated ground, that he was not fully human. The rest of the story is told in flashbacks as the funeral progresses.

Many readers resist science fiction for various reasons, some of them good ones I suppose. But science fiction can ask questions regular fiction cannot, and when it is well written, as it is in "N-words," it can result in an unexpectedly haunting story. "N-words" does just that.

The question here is what is human. Set in the near future, after human cloning has become feasible (I suspect this is the very near future) and various scientists have begun cloning cells from long extinct species. Michael Crighton suggested the possibility of cloning dinosaurs in Jurassic Park but why not clone extinct human ancestors? An amusement park full of gigantic reptiles can provide plenty of thrills, but it's a much safer idea than the possibility of resurrecting homo sapien neandertalensis. Reptiles are reptiles, but are all humans human? Neanderthals may have looked different, but they were every bit as human as you and I. What happens if they return and expect to be treated like everyone else?

"N-words" is not without suspense, not without excitement, but it's working on a much deeper level than thrillers like Jurrasic Park do. It's easy to conclude that the real issue in "N-words" is racism, a problem that still won't go away, but "N-words" forces the question to go much deeper than we usually want to take it. Are we not all human beings? Should we not all be treated as such? What if the difference is more than skin deep?

The narrator has grown up watching the Neanderthal clones from infancy when they were all discovered in a failed Korean biological laboratory. The Neanderthal babies were adopted by people all over the world and eventually ended up in colleges including Stanford where the narrator met her husband and joined him on the picket lines fighting for equality. They eventually married and had a son together, a son with both of their features, a new generation of humans.

"N-words" can be found in the book Seeds of Change and as an audio podcast from Escapepod.org. Escapepod has become one of my favorite podcasts. The podcast of "N-words" can be heard here.

Thanks to everyone who participated in May's Short Story Sundays.

Short Story Sunday Participants

1. Puss Reboots (Shadow-Below) 2. Sam Sattler (The Worm in the Apple) 3. ds (The Ice Man, Murakami) 4. Puss Reboots (The Tribes of Bela) 5. gautami tripathy

6. J.C. (Good Country People) 7. vijesh 8. Gail 9. Katrina (Aristotle's Lantern) 10. ds(Career by Kay Boyle)

11. gautami tripathy (The Ugly Duckling) 12. LizzySiddal (Scottish Short Stories) 13. Ali (Unaccustomed Earth) 14. ds (Nightingale, Tobias Wolff 15. gautami tripathy (Lanndscape with Flatiron by Murakami)

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Dakota Eats Kipling

Good dog, Dakota.

Dakota's Favorites: Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

We're starting a new, semi-monthly feature here at Ready When You Are, C.B. -- selections from the archives. There are well over 250 books reviews in the archives to choose from including many of our all-time favorite books. First up is Criss Cross by Lynn Rae Perkins.

Criss Cross has become one of my favorite Young Adult novels, though it usually gets very mixed reviews from my students. It's been a book club option in my class since it first came out, one of the few book that I bought five copies of in hard-cover. No group of boys has ever picked it, and the groups of girls who do are usually split down the middle love/hate. But this year the group that read it all loved it, rated it very highly, and several of them even read it a second time.

Here's the review we ran here back in May of 2007...

My book club met yesterday to discuss Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins. Everyone enjoyed the book. One member loved it as much as I do. (I was the one who suggested it.) The book captures one magical summer in the lives of several high school age friends. One of those summers when nothing really happens, but everything changes. We all felt that the book took place during our lifetimes, though some of us were in high school in the early 60's and others in the early 80's. It's a very gentle story about how people's lives take certain paths, how these paths cross the lives of other people, and how rarely you actually meet up with another person at just the right time, just the right moment when you can join paths. It's also about finding out who you are and how it's possible to be several different people at the same time, something we all could remember from our teenage years.

The book is written for young adults and won the Newberry medal, but we all feel it's really for an older audience. (The book club is made up of elementary and middle school teachers.) We highly recommend it. You'll probably find yourself in it.

"Unreading" from Booking Through Thursday

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Is there a book that you wish you could “unread”? One that you disliked so thoroughly you wish you could just forget that you ever read it?

"Unread" is a bit severe, but there are two. First, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. I read his non-fiction work, The Right Stuff, and thought it was excellent, so when The Bonfire of the Vanities came out and became the Da Vinci Code of its day I picked up a copy. I soon found everyone in it, including the narrator/author, obnoxious at best, but I read it to the end in the hopes that all of the characters would come to a satisfyingly bad end the way so many of them did in Donna Tartt's The Secret History which is the other book I'd like to unread. Unfortunately, none of the characters in The Bonfire of the Vanities suffered as much as I did reading the book and Mr. Wolfe made lots of money, a little bit of it mine.

And It Breaks My Heart

“No civil rights movement has EVER lost. Never. It is not a matter of if our community will win full equal rights, including marriage. It is only a matter of when. But as in all civil rights movements, we will have to fight like hell for it.”
— Robin Tyler, activist and petitioner in the case to overturn Prop 8 quoted on Mike Tidmus Blog.

Bleedout by Joan Brady

But why did he kill them?

Joan Brady, the only American author to ever win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, wrote one of my all-time favorite novels Theory of War. I had the good fortune to stumble upon Theory of War on the remainder table at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco well over 20 years ago, long before there were such things as book blogs. Ever since then, I've looked for more by her but never found any. I concluded she was a one-book-wonder, because Theory of War truly is a wonder. But last year her name started popping up on the blogs I read. It turns out she has been writing, slowly but steadily, since Theory of War found its way into my hands. She has moved to England, run into some trouble with her local council which took up much of her time, had a difficult bout of ill health which took up more time and started writing mystery thrillers to pay the bills. Her name made it into the book blogs because there was some controversy over whether or not she said mystery novels were easier to write than literary novels. She says she did not.

Theory of War is a complicated novel, both in subject matter and style. The story of a white boy sold into slavery in the American west at the end of the 19th century, it uses multiple narrators to describe how familial violence can affect several generations of one family. Ms. Brady demonstrated mastery of the writer's craft in Theory of War and did not put her tools away when she turned to writing mystery/thrillers. Bleedout is a very literary thriller.

Bleedout has two narratives. The first is narrated by Hugh Freyl, successful lawyer, blind man, murder victim. Like the narrator in a film noir movie he tells the reader how he came to be killed, we suspect by the young man David Marion whom he once fought to have released from prison. The second narrative is the third person account of how David investigates the murder he is accused of in order to find the real killer. The book goes back and forth between the two building tension as each narrative moves towards its own climax.

Hugh tells us how he and his assistant Stephanie fought for years to find the truth behind David's crime and the punishment he received. David, the product of many bad foster homes, ended up in prison convicted of beating his foster father and brother to death in the garage where they all worked. But was the then sixteen-year-old David forced to confess by abusive police officers. Why did he do what he did? Why did he never try to appeal his sentence? We know at the outset that Hugh and Stephanie were able to win David's release from prison, but we don't know if this was a fatal mistake, one that led to Hugh's own murder.

David is the dispassionate hero of his own narrative. Once his alibi for Hugh's murder is established, Hugh's mother hires him to find the real killers. She does not think he is some sort of undiscovered great talent as a detective, but she believes he has it in him to kill her son's murderers once he's found them. That's all she really wants. She does not know that David's alibi is phoney, either. David soon finds that all was not what it seemed to be at Hugh's law firm. Readers of noirish detective thrillers expect the plot to become more and more complicated before the end is reached and it certainly does here. The corruption going on at Hugh's firm reaches into the police department, the governor's mansion, the Supreme Court, and to one presidential candidate.

I'll not give away the ending expect to say that most murder victims are killed by someone they know. The ending really should not have been the surprise it was.

Happily for me, Joan Brady has several other novels, some mysteries one not, that I've yet to get my hands on. Hopefully, now that her health has improved and the difficulties with the local council have been settled, she will write many more.

My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

Two years ago, when I was walking my dog in Fulham Palace Gardens, we overtook an old woman who was wheeling a baby carriage. She was chatting cheerfully to the occupant of it, and it was therefore, perhaps, not unreasonable of me to be surprised to find, when I caught up with her, that this too was a dog.

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley is a love story. It's also a dog story, but it's not like other dog stories, nor is it like other love stories. Mr. Ackerley, who came to own Tulip, an Alsatian Shepard late in life, found in her an emotional bond deeper than anything he ever had with friend, family or lover. She was instantly and completely devoted to him; he soon became devoted to her. Mr. Ackerley's friends have said that the two were inseparable, much to everyone's consternation. Tulip was a difficult dog, but he insisted on taking her everywhere he went. Soon, his friends stopped inviting him round. Then they stopped coming round. But Mr. Ackerley never wavered in his devotion to Tulip, nor did she in her devotion to him.

My Dog Tulip, his memoir of their time together, is about love but it is not romantic. I have never read a less unvarnished account of what it's like to own a dog. No one tells you this, I can assure you no one told me, but once you have a dog you will soon become obsessed with "liquids and solids." In fact, Mr. Ackerley gives his second chapter this exact title. He lives in a London flat, so finding a suitable place for Tulip to do her business without disturbing the sidewalks and doorways of local shops is not exactly easy. Even his offers to scrub down the sidewalk afterwards do not quell the anger of some store owners. Because dogs cannot talk, how well a dog urinates and the condition of its bowel movements are two of the few ways a dog owner can tell how healthy their dog is, but Mr. Ackerley's is the only dog story I've ever read that goes into this topic. He goes into detail and while the details may make the reader squirm they bring laughter in their wake. They are also very true to life; I can assure you.

Most of My Dog Tulip is about Mr. Ackerley's attempts to successfully breed Tulip. He wants her to have a full life which includes the experience of motherhood, in Mr. Ackerley's opinion. (The events in the book cover several years in late 1940's well before the time when having your dog fixed became more the accepted norm.) Again, Mr. Ackerley is unromantically frank in his portrayal of how difficult it was to find a mate for Tulip and what it was like for her to go through heat. He tries many times to find a suitable male Alsatian Shepard for her, but she rejects them all only to end up with a neighborhood mutt. Keeping a litter of pups in a small London flat is not easy, nor is finding them all homes when the time comes, so Mr. Ackerley does not repeat the experience.

What I like most about My Dog Tulip is that throughout the memoir Tulip remains a dog. At no point does Mr. Ackerely anthropomorphize her. She never rescues anyone from a burning building or does something so wonderful that it brings a broken family back together. Her pups are not a troop of Keystone Cop comedians; they are difficult and demanding. Tulip never thinks human thoughts; her affection is never compared to that of a child or a lover. She acts like a dog and Mr. Ackerley deals with her as a dog. He is not a man who would ever put a dog in a baby carriage. Tulip is devoted to Mr. Ackerley as only a dog can be. It's not at all like a human to human bond. It's a human to dog bond. It's different. And it's nice to see it celebrated for the wonderful thing it is in My Dog Tulip.

Short Story Sunday: "The Color of Rain"

Since I make it a practice not to read entire collections of short stories in a single sitting it's difficult for me to form an opinion of an anthology as a whole. I'm just eight stories into Men on Men 2000 so I should probably reserve judgement, but I am struck by how dated the stories' themes are. Maybe not dated, maybe limited.

"The Color of Rain" by Michael Villane is the story of a young New York City hustler, a man who has dedicated his life to sex. We follow his journey through a single night as he visits the various places one can go to find sex, stopping now and then for a flashback, usually one that has to do with the narrator's sexual history. "The Color of Rain" is well written and, to its credit, it does create a sympathetic, believable main character. The reader can see how he became the man he is. But it all seems like a tale from the 1970's, like something we've moved on from. Cruising for the new millennium.

There are many more stories still to go in Men on Men 2000 including several from some writers I admire very much. So for now I choose to withhold judgement--I'll decide later if I can recommend the anthology overall or not.

Please feel free to leave a link to your own short story related post here are Short Story Sunday.

Dakota Loves Peaches

Friday Picture Reading #1

Inspired by Sandy Nawrot's regular Wordless Wednesdays I thought I'd make pictures of people reading a semi-regular feature here at Ready When You Are, C.B. Here's the first one.

This photo is by Moriza. You can see more of her pictures here.

BTT. Once Again For The Very First Time

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

What book would you love to be able to read again for the first time?

I think this should go in tandem with "Do you read books more than once?"  Second reads are a very different experience than first reads are.  Since you already know the plot, even if you have forgotten much of it, a second read forces you to read for something else: character, theme, use of language.  A second read can be like revisiting old friends, a high school reunion of the mind.  Sometimes you find out that things weren't really the way you remembered them at all.  I reread Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim this week and found the experience very different from the first time I read the book.  

I loved Kim back when I first read it back in graduate school.  I made no attempt to defend or rationalize away the author's obvious racism, I just loved it as a rollicking boy's adventure novel and I was crazy about the description of India's Trunk Road.  This time I just could not get past Kipling's unapologetic racism to find the boy's adventure, and the Trunk Road section, which I remembered as being 80 pages long, was only part of one chapter.  It was like reading a different book.

I recently had the opposite experience with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights which I first read in high school.  As a teenager, I hated the book, was bored out of my mind with it.  Who writes a romance with a female lead who dies before the book is half over?  I read it again, just a few years later, in college and was blown away by it.  It was the bravest book I ever read, full of raw passion and emotion--it looked at forbidden love full in the face without blinking.  Emily Bronte was my hero.  I read it a third time years a few years ago and found it full of horrible people making one bad decision after another, but I still felt for them all like a parent watching a child go out with someone who is clearly wrong for them.  

There can be a thrill of discovery when reading a book for the first time.  It's all new and your reaction it is also new.  I understand why people want to recapture that experience, but personally, I'd rather move on to another book, or to the second reading and the deeper understanding it can bring.  

One Word: Library Loot

Okay that's two words, but watch the video and you'll understand.

Are we supposed to learn anything from this, or is it just for fun?

Though there are only 17 days of school left, I decided to go ahead and do A Midsummer Night's Dream with my students like I usually do at the end of each year.  I'm late starting but since I don't go in for a lot of activities when we read a book or play together, so we should have no trouble getting to act five by the end of the year.  We'll probably even have time to watch one  of the movie versions.

At the end of  class, yesterday, a student made one of those comments that make it all worthwhile.  We teachers love comments like that.    

My introduction to the play is one of the few "speeches" I give to my students.  I do a fast paced summary of the plot for acts one, two and three.  It's my view that Midsummer Night's Dream is a very silly play and that's basically how I approach it.  I tell the students the play tries to answer the question "Why do people fall in love with the wrong people?" and ask them if they've ever known anyone who had  a crush on someone who didn't have a crush on them.  I explain the Helena - Demetrius- Lysandar - Hermia situation and how both men want Hermia and then fall under a spell and both want Helena and how Helena chases after Demetrius even after he's rejected her, which basically makes them all perfect guests for the Jerry Springer Show.  I explain how Bottom and company are all regular people who are very bad actors rehearsing a play and how funny it is that a guy named Bottom ends up with the head of an ass.  And, of course, how Oberon and Titania, who are kind of married,  have arrived in Athens for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta only to end up with Titania falling in love with a man who has an asshead.  So basically, Shakespeare seems to be saying that people fall in love with the wrong people because they are under an evil spell.   

I go for laughs and yesterday I got lots of them.  I killed, as they say.  I had my students laughing their heads off.  We then  assigned parts for act one, everyone has to read theirs and be ready to perform on Wednesday, and yes, boys can play girls and girls can play boys.  Just use an appropriate voice.  

On her way out after the bell,  one student, who was not exactly thrilled to be reading the play at first, said,  "So are we supposed to learn anything from this, or is it just for fun?"

I told her we'd go with fun.  Shakespeare is fun.  That's what I want them to learn from this.

No Review Today

This is the first Monday in a very long time that I don't have a book review to publish. I spent the weekend with a large stack of term papers and ended up with almost no reading time. (I guess we should count reviewing term papers as reading, but not as fun reading.)

Overall, a very good batch of first drafts. I edit the first drafts very heavily so they end up taking a very long time to get through. But, because the first drafts are so heavily, edited the second drafts are a breeze to evaluate.

Next year I'm starting a campaign against the use of the word "well" as a transition. For example: "Have you ever wondered what it was like to live on a medieval manor? Well, it was hard work." Close to  one out of every three term papers began with a question followed by "Well, I'm going to tell you." or something to that effect. I hate it; it drives me mad. I'm going to have C.J. make a big poster for my classroom that says, "Unless you were sick and are now feeling better, or you are thirsty and looking for water, you may not use the word "well" in this class." Forget about using it as an adverb. I just don't even want to go there. Hemingway was right about adverbs. (I may turn into a curmudgeon in my old age.)

I hope to have an actual book review up tomorrow.

18 more days til summer!

Short Story Sunday: iPods and Podcasts

If you don't read short stories would you listen to one?

Are you facing a twenty minute drive to somewhere? Is there nothing but commercials and pledge breaks on the car radio? How about a good short story instead?

I ask because last month I bought and iPod which led me to the discovery of podcasts versions of short stories. Podcasts, for those new to the iAge, are downloadable versions of radio shows. Many are professionally done, like National Public Radio's Selected Shorts and others are amateur labors-of-love like Libravox recordings. But whatever type of story you're looking for, my money says you can find it in a podcast form.
And they're absolutely free.

For mainstream literature NPR's Selected Shorts offers a wide range of story types and subjects read by authors and professional actors. You can download episodes for free at iTunes.

Libravox.org is run by volunteers who read stories or chapters of books, all of them in the public domain, and then offer up their recordings for free. You can subscribe to their podcast at iTunes. I'm currently listening to their new recording of Boccaccio's Decameron.

Many people are standoffish when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, but both genres make for excellent and entertaining short stories. Some of the best can be heard at Starship Sofa. The show, run by Tony Smith, comes out of the U.K. and features several stories in each episode along with book reviews and feature articles. You can also get it for free at iTunes.

iTunes makes it easy to subscribe to many different podcasts and to update your iPod with relative ease. Basically, I plug the iPod into the computer once or twice a week and I'm good to go.

Now if I can just figure out how to include the audio here at Short Story Sunday.

A Special Thank You to Our Subscribers and Followers

Click here to read my review of The White Tiger.

Thanks again to all of you who subscribe to or follow Ready When You Are, C.B.

A Modest Proposal or Maybe Just a Ramble

Does your blog have a down day?

Ready When You Are, C.B. does fairly well Sunday through Thursday, the best days are Monday and Tuesday, but traffic drops dramatically on Friday and Saturday, sometimes by as much as 50%. This pattern has held steady for the past year or so, since I've been following the daily traffic via Google Analytics. I've tried posting reviews of more popular books on Friday and posting contest winners on Saturday, but neither have had much affect the weekend blahs.

I'm guessing a large number of people have better things to do on a Saturday than visit the internet, and good for them. I also suspect that many people avoid getting down to work on Monday, which is usually my best day, by checking out what people posted over the weekend.

Which is a rambling way to get around to my modest proposal. I've managed to do one post a day for some time now, and I've built up an archive of over 200 book reviews. What if I posted a rerun every other Friday? I would include a short update of my opinion, whether or not it's changed. Is that something that would make you more or less likely to keep coming back, or would it make no difference at all? (Personally, I almost never check the reviews listed in people's archives unless they're linked to in a new post so if you'd like to publish a few re-runs yourself I say go for it, especially if it's a book you recommend highly.) I would label my re-runs "From the Archives" or "Dakota's Favorites" or something like that; I've no interest in making anyone think they are fresh reviews.

I don't think this would in any way bring more traffic on Fridays, but it would make keeping this blog a little easier.

What do you think?

And if you're a fan of trivia and American television, can you identify the gentleman pictured above?

BTT: Buy Books Much??

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?

Some people choose abstinence and some people have abstinence forced upon them.  

Years ago, when I lived in the city and there were lots of bookstores new and used all around, I bought like crazy.  In those days I could almost always find something interesting on the remainder table for under five dollars and lots of second hand bookstores still sold books at half off of the cover price even if the cover price was $1.50.   San Francisco had so many bookstores I could go in a different one every day for over a month, so there was always something new or at least new to me.

The years go by, I meet someone who lives outside  of the city, we move in, buy a house together, get married, get married again, and I find myself living happily in a town without a bookstore.  Whenever we travel, where ever we go, I find all the bookstores I can, and yes, I buy more books than I can read.  At home, I visit the local library and I borrow more books than I can read.  I've joined Paperbackswap.com and Librarything.com and I end up with more ARCS and more swapped books than I can read.  

So yes, I'm a glutton.

We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee

Mum and I arrived as the new owners of Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time at around six o'clock on the evening of 20 October 2006, and stepped out of the car to the sound of wolves howling in the misty darkness.

We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Changed Their Lives Forever by Benjamin Mee might be wish fulfillment for some readers--buy a run down property and restore it to become your dream home. If the property is a farm house in Tuscany, people will sigh and become slightly dreamy-eyed when you tell them about it. But what if the property is a private zoo in Devon?

Just a few years ago Benjamin Mee's mother decided to sell her long time home, just a short drive from London in a very desirable neighborhood. The property was worth about 1.2 million pounds. One of Mr. Mee's siblings then found an advertisement for a zoo with a large house on the property, acres of land, and 200 exotic animals including a substantial collection of big cats for sale for at just a bit over 1.2 million pounds. Why not buy the zoo, move Mom and the whole family into the big mansion and run it as a family business?

Mr. Mee was willing to consider it, his mother was interested, his wife was willing to go along, his siblings thought it could be a good idea, his kids thought he was joking but after quite a few rejected offers and long struggle to find a bank willing to loan them the money they needed to fix the zoo up the property was theirs. The story of how they adapted to their new lives among 200 wild animals and how they readied the zoo to open in just about six months makes for entertaining reading. Things do not go smoothly, one of Mr. Mee's brothers turns against the plan and nearly ruins it, a jaguar escapes, and Mr. Mee's wife suffers a terminal cancer. But once

you've become responsible for the lives of 200 wild animals as well as the lively hoods of several dozen employees, you've nothing if not focus in your life.

Mr. Mee writes a Do-It-Yourself column for The Guardian and he is most at home when describing how to fix up some part of the zoo or another. He does give the reader enough of the animals and people involved to make them memorable, but he's most clearly happiest when tools are in use. No one in his family had ever been involved with a zoo before, so their learning curve is very steep, and Mr. Mee does a good job taking his readers along for the ride. We learn all sorts of information about the animals and about zoos from how wolves form their social pecking order based on who gets to eat what part of the goat to how much a barrel of ale in the restaurant costs. It's all actually very interesting. If you like the sort of program when two people fix up an aging deck just imagine reading about two people fixing up a dilapidated jaguar enclosure with a live jaguar inside it.

I never really gave zoos much thought before reading We Bought a Zoo, I've enjoyed most of the ones I've been to, but I'm not a devotee of them by any means. I'm also not that crazy about DIY shows either, though I did watch Trading Spaces mainly to see how horrified people were when they saw what their friends had done to their bedrooms. However, I found We Bought a Zoo to be entertaining, informative and at times touching. If you're looking for a summer read, I think you could do well to consider We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee.

You can find the website for the Dartmoor Zoological Park, the zoo Mr. Mee's family bought here. They are open daily from 10 to 6 during the summer months and from 10 to 4 the rest of the year. If anyone has been there I'd love to hear what you thought of it.

This book counts for both the Non-fiction Challenge and the Dewey Decimal Challenge. It's a 500's book. The 500's is full of animals and sciences.

Deadwood by Pete Dexter

The boy shot Wild Bill's horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself.

Deadwood by Pete Dexter was first published the same year as Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1986. The award could have just as easily gone to Deadwood as both books are very well written and both books turn the western genre on its head in just about the same way.

The American western has not been the clean-cut altruistic battle between good and evil that many people view it as for some time. Even John Wayne's movies moved into gray areas. The Searchers, for example, seems like a simplistic story about how bad Indians are, but if you look closely enough, if you can get past the obvious racism in the movie, you'll find that Wayne's character, the character who hates the Indians the most, is the one character that is no longer welcome in society. It's not the girl raised by Indians but Wayne who cannot return to white "civilization" in the end. Even a character as noble as Shane has to leave town in the end of the movie because there is no place for an ex-gunfighter anymore. Taking the turn towards the amoral man-with-no-name stories of the Clint Eastwood type just wasn't all that big of a leap. Westerns were already on the way there.

What was new with books like Lonesome Dove and Deadwood was the way they took historical figures and events and presented them in a raw, unvarnished, style that bordered on revisionist history. I'm not well-versed enough in the genre to say with certainty, but I imagine both novels were heavily influenced by the new takes on the American West that historians were writing in the 1970's and 80's which presented versions of history that focused on Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, freed slaves and women rather than on the on-going, unquestioned story of Manifest Destiny.

Pete Dexter's Deadwood differs from Lonesome Dove in that all of the characters in it are based on historical people, even the very minor ones. Deadwood could almost pass as the sort of new-journalism Truman Capote was aiming for with In Cold Blood, it's just about a non-fiction novel as far as I can tell. It's also a novel with an ensemble cast, something not typically found in a western. The setting is Deadwood, South Dakota during the early years of the town's existence. Deadwood began as an illegal settlement of miners who violated treaties with Native American tribes in order to prospect for gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota territory. The men who went there at first were all law-breakers just by being there so the overall lawlessness of the place should come as no surprise. The women of Deadwood, at least at first, were largely made up of prostitutes, portrayed in Deadwood as essentially slaves owned body-and-soul by the men who ran the brothels. This is not the Dakota territory of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The characters in Deadwood include Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane Cannary, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and Charley Utter who functions as the linchpin that keeps all of the other characters together. Utter, a truly decent man, has followed Hickock to Deadwood which has just passed its initial glory days as a mining boom town. Hickock is dying, probably from Syphilis, but his presence will haunt the story and the town long after he has been gunned down. The other characters and their stories circle around Utter who is the one character to continue throughout the entire novel in part because he is one of the historical figures to remain in the area until the end of his life and he seems to have known just about everyone at least in passing.

If books like Deadwood and Lonesome Dove can be said to have moved the western genre forward then the HBO television series Deadwood can be seen has having moved westerns back a bit. (The two appear to be unconnected; there is no credit to Mr. Dexter on the official HBO Deadwood website which I find a bit hard to believe.) The novel is focused on the character of Charley Utter who serves as a moral compass for everyone else, albeit perhaps a damaged one, but Mr. Utter plays a much more secondary role in the series. The television series, instead, sets up an on-going rivalry between Sheriff Seth Bullock, who is morally upright, and Al Swearengen who ends up being a brothel owner with a heart of gold. By the final episodes of the television series the audience is rooting for Swearengen even while his actions remain repulsive. This is not possible in the novel. The Seth Bullock of the novel is not entirely likable the way he is in the series, and Al Swearengen is completely despicable. The Chinese immigrants who lived in Deadwood play a serious part in the novel, several of them are featured characters, but they are basically reduced to a single single role throughout most of the series. This seems like a great oversight on the part of the series in my view since the experience of Chinese immigrants in the American West is not one many Americans know well. It strikes me that it could have been a very rich source for possible story lines. According to Wikipedia the owner of the most prosperous brothels in Deadwood were women whom neither the novel nor the television series feature. In both, characters move in and out of the story, just as real people moved in and out of Deadwood, South Dakota. Some are more compelling than others and the resulting novel, like the television series, has a plot like a soap opera--events build to a climax and then keep on going to another climax next week instead of building for a big climactic finish. Things don't really end, except in death, people just move along. Maybe, in the end, that is the story of the American West.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: Part IV. The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis

The Years 1831 an 1832, immediately succeeding the July Revolution, are among the most singular and striking in our history.

In part four of Les Miserables things really start to happen. This is not to say that the previous seven hundred plus pages have been lacking in action, they certainly have not, but in part four events begin to turn in ways that can only end in a revolution that will catch up in its wake all of the characters the reader has come to know. It's no coincidence that this is the first part of the five that cannot be read as a self-contained narrative; it ends on the eve of battle, and every reader wants to know what will happen next, even those of us who already know what happens.

Previous sections of Les Miserables have focused on smaller groups of characters and their stories, but in Part IV everyone who is still alive makes an appearance, everyone's plot line is advanced, as all of Paris begins to either rise up or to take cover in advance. The events of the plot, like the lives of the characters, begin to play out against the background of history. While Jean Val-Jean makes plans to flee France, his "daughter" Cossette finally meets Marius face to face:

He fell back on the bench with her at his side. Neither could speak. The stars were beginning to show. How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

Shortly after this kiss Cossette and Marius finally introduce themselves to each other. I've gone this far without discussing Hugo's writing, but a paragraph like that cannot go by without comment--it is both wonderful and terrible at the same time. I don't know how it reads in French, but in English it's very difficult not to laugh a little even if you can let yourself be carried away by it. I do recall how wonderful a first kiss can be, but birds singing, snow melting, the sun rising over the "quivering summit of the hill."? Gracious! And "And all was said."? This comes on page 810 with over 400 pages still to go! I had a professor in my undergraduate days who said Thomas Hardy was a great writer, but he wasn't a very good writer. I would so love to ask him what he thinks of Victor Hugo. This is the language one expects to find in a low end romance novel, not a great classic. But there it is. Is the reader going to laugh? To cry? I admit, I laughed a little.

But not all is kisses and sunrises in Part IV. Marius's circle of friends are all deeply involved in politics and are meeting in a favorite tavern to plan what to do when the fighting starts. One of the more verbose among them, Grantaire, has this opposing world view to offer:

"I've just swallowed a bad oyster! My hypochondria's starting again. Bad oysters and ugly waitresses, how I had the human race! I came by way of the Rue Richelieu, past the big public library. The places is like a pile of oyster-shells. All those books, all that paper and ink, all those scribbled words. Somebody had to write them. Who was the idiot who said that man was a biped without a quill? And then I ran into a girl I know, a girl as lovely as a spring morning, worthy to be called April, and the little wretch was in a transport of delight because some poxed-up old banker has taken a fancy to her. The smell of money attracts women like the scent of lilac; they're like all the other cats, they don't care whether they're killing mice or birds. Two months ago that wench was living virtuously in an attic, sewing metal eye-holes into corsets, sleeping on a truckle-bed and living happily with a flower-pot for company. Now she's a banker's doxy. It seems it happened last night, and when I met her this morning she was jubilant. And what's so disgusting in that she's just as pretty as ever. Not a sign of high finance on her face. Roses are better or worse than women in this respect, that you can see when the grubs have been at them. There's no morality in this world."

It's one thing when a character gives voice to this kind of language--Grantaire is a man in love with his own speech, a man who'll say what he will and win a certain kind of admiration for his gift-of-gab--but it's another thing when the narrator joins in. While Grantaire and his cronies meet, complain and plan their next political action the streets of Paris begin to come alive.

And while a battle that was still political was preparing in that place that had witnessed so many revolutionary acts; while the young people, the secret societies, and the schools, inspired by principle, and the middle-class inspired by self-interest, were advancing upon each other to clash and grapple; while each side hastened and sought the moment of crisis and decision--remote from all this and from the battlefield itself, in the deepest recesses of that ancient Paris of the poor and destitute which lay hidden beneath the brilliance of the rich and fortunate Paris, there was to be heard the sombre growling of the masses: a fearful and awe-inspiring voice in which were mingled the snarl of animals and the words of God, a terror to the faint-hearted and a warning to the wise, coming at once from the depths, like the roaring of a lion, and from the heights like the voice of thunder.

Okay, I'll go with great writer. That's all one sentence. I'm impressed and basically ready to join the battle. It's towards the end of Part IV that the reader begins to get Victor Hugo at his best. He is unafraid of sentimentality (it's really just one of many tools at his disposal) nor he is bothered by the possibility that he may be openly manipulating his readers emotions--that's his job in the end. The result is the kind of rising tension other writers dream of achieving, a 1200 page novel that ends up being a page-turner.

There was a pause, as though both sides were waiting. Suddenly a voice called out of the darkness, the more awesome because no speaker was to be seen, so that it sounded like the voice of darkness itself:

'Who's there?'

At the same time they heard the clicking of muskets being cocked.

Enjolras responded in lofty and resonant tones:

'The French Revolution!'

'Fire!' ordered the voice, and in an instant glare of the light shone upon the front of the houses as though a furnace-door had been swiftly opened and closed.

"Whose there? The French Revolution!" how does Hugo get away with that. Lines like that should get belly-laughs, but I was practically pumping my fist in the air as I read it. And if everything loses something in translation, well, just imagine... It would be worth learning how to read French.

I've fallen a little behind in my reading schedule, but I do intend to finish Les Miserables before the end of May. After spending so much time with one book, it will probably be a bittersweet end. But I expect the novel itself will have a bittersweet ending. With a story as big as Les Miserables, how could the author pick just a happy ending or just a sad one. I expect to find a full does of each.

Click to read reviews of Part I, Part II and Part III of Les Miserables.

Short Story Sunday: "The Golden Honeymoon" by Ring Lardner

Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop.

Charley and Lucy have been married for 50 years. To celebrate their anniversary, their son-in-law sends them to St. Petersburg, Florida for the winter. Charley narrates the story, with lots of details about the train rides both to Florida and back to New Jersey. The couple enjoys their stay until Lucy meets and befriends Mrs. Hartsell, wife of Frank Hartsell. 50 years prior, Lucy had been engaged to marry Frank Hartsell but threw him over in favor of Charley.

The two couples become attached, to Charley's chagrin. They tour the sights, attend lectures, go to the park, play cards and checkers and all the while Charley compares what the Hartsells have with what he and Lucy have. Frank is balder than Charley and his beard is whiter, they pay 10 cents a meal more for lunch at their cafeteria, his wife is a terrible card player and Frank "may be good for tiddle-de-winks, but not checkers!" Things finally come to a head during a protracted game of horseshoes that actually ends up drawing blood. (Only a little blood since this is a comedy.)

Ring Lardner does ask several very serious questions in "The Golden Honeymoon." What has kept Charley and Lucy together for 50 years? When they are faced with what might have happened had they made a different choice 50 years ago, had Lucy married Frank instead of Charley, they can't help but look at themselves in ways they wouldn't have thought of previously. Would Lucy's life have been much different if she'd married Frank instead? Oddly, the answer is no. Frank is a decent man, a successful doctor, she enjoys his company as much as she does Charley's, and both men have ended up taking their wives to the exact same vacation spot to winter away their golden years. Marry Frank, marry Charley, the results are basically the same one way or the other. Each man is just about equally good and has just about an equal number and degree of faults. They do end up telling each other that they made the right choice and that they could not have lived with anyone else. But look at the reasons why they each think Frank and Mrs. Hartsell would have been wrong for them:

"Good gracious!" I said. "Imagine being married to a woman that plays five hundred like she does and drops her teeth on the roque court!"

"Well," said Mother, "it wouldn't be no worse than being married to a man that expectorates towards ladies and is such a fool in a checker game."

In the end what matters is that she plays cards well and can keep her false teeth in her mouth and he doesn't chew tobacco and plays a mean game of checkers.

"The Golden Honeymoon" is more than an amusing short story, though if you read it just for the sake of its humor you won't be disappointed. It's also an historical document, a record of life in the 1920's when the typical American vacation was to travel to a warmer part of the country and spend time playing games, going to performances, and relaxing with friends you made while on vacation. It's become much harder to keep American vacationers entertained in the 21st century. It's nice to think that at one time everyone just headed off to Florida and spent their days playing horseshoes in the sun.

You can find "The Golden Honeymoon" in anthologies and textbooks like Short Fiction A Critical Collection edited by James Frakes and Isadore Traschen and in Lardner's anthology How to Write a Short Story. If you'd like to participate in this months round of Short Story Sundays please use Mr. Linky below to leave a link to your short story review. I'm also still looking for a Short Story Button if anyone's interested. I can make it worth your while.

Back Up Your Book Blog

This past week or so I've heard several nightmare scenarios about lost blogs. So I thought it would be a good idea to find out how to back mine up. It turns out many bloggers out there have no idea how to back up their blogs, hence this post.

Here's how to back up your blog if you use Blogger.com like I do.

First plug in your portable hard drive if you have one. If you don't you can use a desktop file, but you can get a good portable hard drive for under 70.00 dollars these days. I got one that will hold everything on my computer and my iPod several times over.

Go to your blog and select "customize".

Choose the "settings" tab.

You'll see three choices at the top in the "blog tools" section: Import blog; Export blog and Delete blog.

Select "Export blog"

Next choose "Download blog"

You'll have an option to select where to download to. I was able to export it all to my portable hard drive in under a minute. It was just as easy to import it all back up in a new Blogger.com blog. As far as I could see, all 700+ post, their comments, pictures and videos were all present in the new blog. The only problem was that not all of the widgets I had in the sidebars made it. I think this is a minor issue compared to losing an entire blog.

Please remember that I'm not an I.T. person-- I just teach middle school-- but if you follow my steps and check out the article on Blogger.com, you should have no trouble exporting your blog.

Please let me know if I have anything incorrect here and if you know how to back up blogs on other systems.

Historic Carson City, Nevada

A couple of weeks ago, C.J. and I took a short trip to Lake Tahoe where we stayed in my brother's condo. (My brother is currently in Bosnia, so we have free use of the Tahoe condo.) We made one day trip to Carson City, the state capitol of Nevada to see the sites. Turns out to be a worthwhile trip.

Carson City has a historical section with many older, historic buildings. They have a walking tour of the historic section that runs two or so miles and takes about an hour, depending on your pace. You can pick up a map with notes on each building or just follow the line on the sidewalk through the neighborhood.

The tour starts at the State History Museum which is on the main road through Carson City and is an excellent little museum. It's got lots of interesting artifacts from the American West and features a simulated western town and a gold mine you can explore. It's well worth the admission fee and the parking is free.

That's C.J. standing in front of one of the historic houses on the tour.

We tried to do a second day trip in to Reno but it started to snow. People from the Bay Area generally don't know how to drive in rain let alone snow, so we raced back to the condo. Reno will have to wait for next time.

When you finish the walking tour the Nugget casino, across the street from the parking lot, has a terrific old-school buffet dinner. It's straight out of middle America circa 1973. They had five different kinds of potatoes, including potato pancakes, Salisbury steak, stuffed green peppers and stuffed cabbage along with sauerkraut and pickled red-cabbage. It was like having dinner with my German relatives in Festus, Missouri. The salad bar even features jello in assorted colors. C.J. and I had a great time.

Comic Book or Graphic Novel?

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Last Saturday (May 2nd) is Free Comic Book Day! In celebration of comics and graphic novels, some suggestions:

• - Do you read graphic novels/comics? Why do/don’t you enjoy them?
  
• - How would you describe the difference between “graphic novel” and “comic”? Is there a difference at all?
  
• - Say you have a friend who’s never encountered graphic novels. Recommend some titles you consider landmark/”canonical”.
  

I currently have a student who openly mocks me when she sees a graphic novel on my desk.  "Oh, that's not a comic book, it's a 'graphic novel'" she says delighting in the chance to use air quotes.  

I do read graphic novels, but not enough to really have an educated opinion about them.  I can recommend American Born Chinese highly, and The Watchmen fairly well.  If you like graphic novels you really owe it to yourself to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret which is not quite a graphic novel, but almost one.   If you only read one graphic novel before you die, it should be Maus I and Maus II.  Those have yet to be surpassed as far as I'm concerned.  If you read two then you should probably read the complete Persepolis.

I think the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel is the difference between a soap opera and a mini-series.  Comic books do not tell a complete, self-contained story.  Instead they continue issues after issue like a soap opera continues episode after episode.  A graphic novel has a complete plot arc in mind when it begins even if it takes multiple volumes to complete, just like a mini-series on television does.  Graphic novels also cost much more to produce and purchase than traditional comic books just as more money is spent on the production values of a mini-series than is on a soap opera.  

Please tune in next time......

Giggles in the Middle by Jane Bell Kiester - A Wednesday Wonder

I've spent the last 18 years looking for ways to make learning grammar fun, to little avail.  I've got fun activities for reading, writing, even spelling, but fun grammar has always  eluded me.  

Until now.  I hope.

Last month a colleague of mine loaned me her copy of Giggles in the Middle by Jane Bell Kiester.   Giggles in the Middle is a grammar book for students grades six to eight, but don't click away yet.  It's actually pretty fun.  

The methodology is nothing new; students start each day finding and correcting errors in a short passage.  What is new, and kind of fun, is that the passages are all part of the same humorous story about a group of friends in middle school.   The plot is right out of an easy read/high interest book; there are struggles with adults, mix-ups between the friends, and a few magical spells that go awry.  It's not great literature, but it's much more fun than the usual sentences students have to correct.  Another new thing, new for me anyway, is that the sentences in Giggles in the Middle feature a rich and varied vocabulary.  I've had to look up several words myself, already.  The vocabulary is reinforced by naming each character after their primary characteristic and by repeating the vocabulary words throughout the book.  Take this sample for example.  This is the uncorrected passage that starts of the grade seven section of the book.

isabelle ingenuous always animated twirled in nervousness and a excess of energy.  pauline puerile whined in a babyish manner about the tardiness of olivia otiose about having to return to horribly hard middle school for another year and about the homework the teachers loved to pile on her

The teacher's guide lists the vocabulary words, which are also in bold face; the grammar topics covered in the passage, in this case paragraphing, use of simple sentences, commas in participial phrases and lists, use of strong verbs, capitalization,  a vs. an and use of alliteration.  I would probably use Giggles in the Middle just for the vocabulary if for no other reason, at least with my GATE class.  None of us had ever heard the word otiose before, and it's the perfect word for so many students.  

All of the exercises are on the CD which is included with the book, so it's very easy to set them up in whatever worksheet form you like, or to put them in Powerpoint.  Ms. Kiester also includes a writing assignment every two or three pages if you're looking for topics and suggestions to go along with the story of Horribly Hard Middle School.  

At this point it may be that I love Giggles in the Middle more than my students do.  They are in seventh grade, and grammar is still grammar, and we did start it very late in the year, but I'm definitely going to give the book a full test run next fall.  It's the first time in 18 years that I can say I have a grammar program that I'm looking forward to using.  

Wednesday Wonders are books that can be hard to categorize.  They are not the sort of book that one reads cover to cover.  If you have a book that you think would make a good Wednesday Wonder, or if you're interested in writing a guest post, please let me know.

otiose: adj, 1. lazy; indolent.  2. Of no use. 3. Ineffective; futile.  For pronunciation go here.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Sir,

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is not an easy book. It's not difficult to read, the pages go by at a pretty quick pace, but the experience left me feeling uneasy. That's what this kind of dark satire is supposed to do.

Belram Halwi, The White Tiger, tells the story of his rise to power in a series of letters to the premier of China, Wen Jaibao, who is visiting India to see its economic success first hand. Belram is Horatio Alger's darker brother; the story of his rise from lowly laborer, that of a coffee pourer in a cafe, to private driver for a weathly businessman, to the owner of a prosperous taxicab company, could have been an example for all young people to follow. Work hard. Obey your elders. Be loyal to your bosses. You will be rewarded with success. Belram worked hard. He obeyed his elders. He was loyal to his bosses. Then he murdered one of them, stole his money, set himself up in business and became rich. Not a lesson Horatio Alger would have approved.

Mr. Adiga is clearly not out to praise India's success story. It is clear to Belram, and soon evident to the reader, that Indian society is designed to keep him down, to make sure the servant class stays in its place. Religion, family, democracy, all come under Mr. Adiga's critical and satirical gaze. No stone is left un-thrown, and there a plenty of stones to throw. While there are laughs to be found in The White Tiger, this is not Jhumpa Lahiri's India. There's nothing in The White Tiger that the tourist board will brag about: no beautiful scenery, no delicious food, no colorfully dressed people, no high-tech wonders to behold.

So is The White Tiger meant to be a cautionary tale? The African American poet Langston Hughes (who referred to himself as white America's "darker brother" in his poem I, Too, Sing America) wrote about issues of class and race in many of his poems including A Dream Differed which could have been the epigraph for The White Tiger:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Belram's dream explodes in Aravid Adiga's take no prisoners satire. What's next for India? Mr. Adiga provides no simple answers but he does make a strong case against the current system, and, like all great satirists, he does leave the reader feeling ill-at-ease.

A Blogging Disaster at the Reading Room

Something went horrible wrong at Gautami Tripathy's Reading Room. Her entire blog has disappeared. She has a replacement blog posted and can be found there until Blogger recovers Reading Room.

Look for Gautami at Everything Distils Into Reading.

In the meantime, be sure to back up your own blog regularly, just in case.

Short Story Sunday: "Gusev" by Anton Checkhov

First a contest, kind of---

I think what's missing from Short Story Sunday is a cool button. John has a very nice one over at Short Story Monday on The Book Mine Set, and I can't help but suspect he's getting more participants because of it. I do not know how to make buttons and don't know when I'll have the time to learn how so I'd like to make a special offer. If you know how to make buttons and can make one for me here at Short Story Sunday I'll offer you, in exchange, any of the short story anthologies I currently own, or if you'd rather, one handmade blank book, full size, half size or mini. So what do you say? I suppose buttons should be emailed to me at 204mountain at comcast dot com.

On to this week's short story.....

"It is already dark, it will soon be night."

It's difficult to go wrong with Chekhov. He may be better known as a playwright, though he is well respected as an author of short stories. I imagine that any reputable list of great short story authors one can find would have to include him in the top 20%. It's easy to see why in his story "Gusev."

"Gusev" is a story for lovers of character. Not much happens, but then not much needs to happen. Gusev, the main character, is in hospital ward of a ship slowly steaming its way back home to Russia. He shares the ward with several other soldiers and sailors, mainly Pavel Ivanych. The two are a study in contrasts. The educated Pavel hates the military and the government it represents. He sees the forces of the world as aligned against the common man who cannot win against the upper classes who control industry, the government and the church and who have forced him to serve as a common soldier. Gusev, on the other hand, is a simple man who believes in God and country. He remains steadfastly faithful to both throughout the story and believes that he will soon be reunited with his family and that he'll soon begin a happy, if unexceptional, life of work and family.

By the end of the story, Chekhov has called both character's positions into question. Pavel believes he understands the systemic problems that have placed him in a military sick ward suffering from tuberculosis. He rails against the world and against his comrades who do not understand what is going on. He's right, but this won't help him. If you're powerless to save your own life, is it better to know what is really going on? This is the exact situation Gusev is in. He doesn't understand Pavels talk, has no patience with it though he does not show this. But in the end, he still suffers the same fate Pavel does. Who was better off?

If you'd like to participate in Short Story Sunday by reading a short story and writing a short review of it please feel free to use Mr. Linky below.

Dakota Picks A Winner: Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Today is cold and rainy here in Northern California and I'm not feeling very well. But that didn't stop Dakota and me from picking a winner for our Let the Right One in Giveaway. Special thanks to Teresa who linked to the giveaway on her blog. Remember, followers are entered into every giveaway. Here's the video.



I said the banned word twice. I'm sick. That's my defense.