Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks by Horatio Alger, Jr.

"Wake up there, youngster," said a rough voice.

Horatio Alger is a writer people talk about as though they've read him without ever actually reading him. I am guilty of this. We think we know what an "Horatio Alger story" is, but few of us have first hand experience. So I picked up a copy of Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks at a used book store and gave it a go. One should know what one is talking about whenever possible.

Ragged Dick was exactly what I expected a Horatio Alger story to be, except when it was more than I expected. The story is the first in Alger's Richard Hunter series. We are introduced to Ragged Dick, as he is known, a young boot black, or shoe-shine boy with spunk to spare. Dick is full of life, upbeat in his outlook, cheery to a fault. He faces life on his own, on the streets of mid-eighteenth century New York City with a level of pluck and good-hearted determination that would annoy any modern reader if he weren't so darn likable. The lad is hard to resist, very hard.

As the story opens, Dick is "hired" to show a shopkeeper's young son the city. Frank is in town visiting from school during his vacation and has not had a chance to see the sights. Dick takes him on a tour of New York that ends up changing both boys. Frank sees how desperate the lives of those less fortunate than he is are, while Dick sees a new world of opportunities if he'll only apply himself, save his money, and get an education. At the end of the day, Frank goes back to school and Dick begins to improve his life.

Ragged Dick is an Horatio Alger story, so there's never any doubt about the ending. Dick befriends another boot-black. Henry, aged 12, had an education before his father died so each night he gives Dick lessons in exchange for the support Dick gives young Henry who has not fared very well on the streets of New York. The two work in tandem, save their money, move off of the streets into a shabby apartment, open a bank account, save more money, get better jobs as shop clerks and move into a decent apartment at the end of the novel. Just what one would expect in an Horatio Alger story.

What's unexpected in Ragged Dick, at least for me, is just how unimpressive Dick's ambitions are. This is not a rags to riches story. Instead, it's a rags to respectability story. Dick wants not to be rich, though he'd happy take riches if they came his way. He wants to be a respectable man, like those whose shoes he shines each day. What's also unexpected in Ragged Dick is the grand tour of New York City the opening chapters offer. We see New York City from the underbelly of the Bowery district to the hotels of uptown high society, along with trolley cars, afternoon tea, cheap theatricals and high class shops. Dick's insider status makes him a wonderful tour guide, a diminutive raconteur.

Ragged Dick is Horatio Alger's only best selling novel. He went on to write many more, including several more volumes in Richard Hunter's story, but he never became more than an author of tales for boys. That said, he did become a household word, and that should count for something.

Ragged Dick counts towards the Classics Challenge. I believe that completes it for me. It's also book three in the Random Reading Challenge. According to the biography on Wikipedia.org, I could also count this one for The Challenge that Dare Not Speak Its Name, but I've already finished it.

Full disclosure: the photo of a young Horatio Alger comes from Wikipedia.org.

Short Story Sunday: St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we'd made to be civilized and lady-like, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls' starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was windowless and odorless. We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.

Opening paragraph from "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell.

Karen Russell writes of roadside America, all those little, run-down attractions that used to dot the highways with desperate billboards trying to catch each tourist's fancy-- Just 100 miles away, 50 miles to....., 10 more miles to......., you've just missed...... A dilapidated alligator farm, a collection of giant seashells, big enough to hide in, a retirement home made up of old houseboats, a skating rink with live orangutans, a summer camp for children with sleep disorders, an orphanage for werewolves's daughters. Even people who don't take the time to stop and see what's there spend a few minutes wondering what kind of people would. Just who runs places like that? What would it be like to grow up there?

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves starts of strong with Ava Wrestles the Alligator and Haunting Olivia, two stories I've reviewed previously. (I put them both on the list of 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die.) Both deal with two siblings--girls in one, boys in the other--on their own for the summer, parents away dealing with problems of loss. The children try to make sense of their worlds and their family's neglect of them in whatever way they can. Their imaginations play such a strong role in their lives that the both stories begin to border on fantasy, the reader begins to wonder what is real in each.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the stories decline in quality. I enjoyed "Z.Z.'z Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers" and "Out to Sea," but the novelty of each story's unusual setting and unusual premise began to wear off well before the last story in the collection. The early stories used their fantastic premises and fanciful plot elements to say something about the human condition. But by the end of the collection what had been insightful seems merely clever. What insight into ourselves can we gain from a story about girls raised by wolves who are trained to function in the human world? We learn that afterwards they are no longer wolves, they cannot ever return to their wolf families. You can't go home again. I expected more of a payoff than that. But the stories in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves that do payoff, payoff well. The fanciful plot elements draw the reader into the childhood worlds Karen Russell explores, worlds that can be as imaginary as they are real. Child's play can take very serious turns in it's attempt to make sense of the adult world.

Karen Russell, at age 24, has received high praise for her collection. She's been featured on National Public Radio, named one of the Best Young American novelists by Granta without actually having published a novel, and has something of a following already. I hope this doesn't end up hurting her writing in the long run. While I'm not recommending anyone buy St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves I am looking forward to more from Karen Russell. What's good in her collection is very good. Unfortunately, success can lead a writer to focus on what succeeded, instead of on what was good.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, like the city where the novel is set, is a great, shambling mess of a novel, a true baggy-pants monster of a book. As the novel opens, the unnamed hero finds himself on the road to the deserted city of Bellona. He has lost most of his memory; he does not know where he comes from nor why he is going to Bellona. Bellona itself is equally mysterious. The city has been deserted by almost all of its inhabitants. The few people who remain roam the empty streets living like parasites on what remains. Some have banded together to try to build a new community in the city's main park. Others formed gangs that extort whomever they can. A small handful hang on to civilization by walling themselves up in a large mansion or shutting themselves up in apartments, refusing to accept the changes Bellona has been through.

Bellona has suffered a singularity. It's not clear why the city has become cut off from the rest of America; no television, no radio, no telephones. Strange things happen. A building catches fire and burns for days without being consumed. Two full moons appear on the rare day when the constant smoke clears. Landmarks appear to shift. A single bus route is still running, its driver going where and when he will.

The unnamed hero, who becomes known as Kidd, never helps the reader solve the riddle of Bellona. He knows little of his past but it seems he was once in a psychiatric hospital. He suffers blackouts that jar the novel's narration several times leaving more holes in the story rather than filling any. The third person narration is so closely tied to Kidd, that it becomes as unreliable as he is.

Though the bulk of Dhalgren takes place in a single location, it's essentially a road novel. Kidd moves from one set of characters to another as he moves through the city. He begins at the commune in the park where he meets Lanya, a girl he will form a close bond with as the novel progresses. He spends the night with Tak Lafour, an engineer who moved into the city after its fall and became a sort of wise old man, the guy others go to for advice. Tak knows the fallen city inside out. Kidd gets a job moving furniture for the Richards family who insist on maintaining appearances, pretending that everything is normal as everything around them slowly falls apart. Mr. Richard's leaves for work each morning, though no one knows where he spends his day. Mrs. Richard's runs the family's luxury apartment as she always did, serving empty soup bowls at dinner time in a strange charade of the family dinner.

Kidd has found a notebook, filled with someone's diary about the city. He uses the blank pages and margins to write poetry of his own which is published in a small edition halfway through the novel by the city's main celebrity Roger Calkins who keeps a large, walled mansion filled with celebrity guests from the outside world. One of them, a poet, takes an interest in Kidd and encourages his writing. By the end of the novel, Kidd has fallen in with a street gang, the Scorpions, who wear mirrored disks that create holographic disguises. Kidd forms a family, reuniting with Lanya after the commune in the park breaks up, who becomes his girlfriend. The two are joined by Denny, a teenager who shares their bed.

What to make of all this? Should on even try to make anything?

Science fiction author and fan of the novel, William Gibson, has said that Dhalgren is "a riddle never meant to be solved." But it's human nature to solve riddles, even when there is no solution.

Some possibilities:

In the midst of this massive, post apocalyptic science fiction novel, Kidd is writing poems. Here Dhalgren becomes an extended meditation on the creation of art, how art works, where it comes from, how it suffers when it becomes a commodity, how the artists must finally face the reaction of the public. Not something I expected to find in a science fiction novel.

Though published in 1975, Dhalgren is a product of the 1960's; the influence of the hippie movement on it is clear. It can be read as a critique of the changes American society during that decade. The commune in the park Kidd finds when he first arrives in Bellona is a hippie paradise. Golden Gate Park 1968. The Summer of Love. The commune runs as a collective, everyone helps with the food, the maintainence of their camp and the construction of new shelters. The members move from partnership to partnership, without moral constraints. They are as free as anyone could be. The Richards, whom Kidd works for, don't know what to make of the commune nor of the changes their city has gone through. They insist on going on exactly like they always have. When their eldest son begins to question their way of life, they force him out and pretend he has died. Their daughter sneaks off to join the commune and to sleep with a radical black leader whenever she can. The commune falls apart, just as the hippie movement did. It ends in crime and exploitation without leaving any mark on the landscape, having failed to build any of the permanent structures they had planned.

There is much more in Dhalgren--as many solutions to its riddle as their are readers. I will be keeping my copy. I'm not sure if I'll ever re-read it--at 800 pages I make no promises--but if I do, I'm sure I find a new set of answers to its riddles. Dhalgren is that kind of book.


I'm counting Dhalgren as part of the Classics Challenge. It also counts as book two of twelve in the Random Reading Challenge. I rolled a set of dice, counted off the books on my TBR shelf, and was not exactly happy to end up on such a long book. But, I wouldn't have read Dhalgren had it not been part of that challenge. Dhalgren could count for the Challenge that Dare Not Speak Its Name but I've already finished that one.


Full Disclosure: The photo of Mr. Delany comes from Wikipedia.

Friday Picture Reading #9

From Going Underground's Blog.

Here "Fluffy" - Booking Through Thursday

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the lightest, most “fluff” kind of book you’ve read recently?

Fluff is relative. Anything much easier to read, much lighter than your usual fare, is fluff, but my fluff is not necessarily your fluff.

The most recent "fluff" I read was Fear The Worst by Linwood Barclay. I suspect some of my readers would rank The Art of Racing in the Rain as "fluff," and to be fair it does have a dog narrator. Earlier this summer I read Mean Streets, a collection of four novellas featuring detectives with magical powers. That certainly reeks of "fluff." Otherwise, my reading has been on the serious side lately. I just finished reading Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger which is 150 year old "fluff." Review to follow.

Full disclosure: I found the picture at Those Darn Accordians.

BBAW Nominations and a Video

I'm pleased to say that Dakota and I have received four BBAW nominations: Best Writing, Best Reviews, Best LGBT Niche and Most Eclectic. We'd like to thank everyone who nominated Ready When You Are, C.B. I'm very excited to make the long lists this year for the very first time.

I have a few special events planned for this year that I hope everyone will enjoy. And, it's about time I got around to doing the BBAW meme for first timers, too.

1) What has been one of the highlights of blogging for you?

The people I've met and worked with make keeping a blog like this fun. I've done several guest posts and had several people do posts for me, which have been great, but what I enjoy most is doing interview type projects and dialogue posts. I did a brief one with Matt of A Guy's Moleskin Notebook earlier this year and have a second, much longer one, with Sandy of You've Gotta Read This on tap for BBAW.

While I know that most book blog readers avoid reading author interviews, I love doing them. Of the 9 interviews I've done, 8 of the authors were great to work with, a few of them continue to keep in touch with me whenever they have a new book coming out. I know that I do the interviews more for me than for my readers, but I'm hooked on them at this point. I do pledge that I will always try to make them interesting reading.

2) What blogger has helped you out with your blog by answering questions, linking to you, or inspiring you?

Eva at A Stripped Armchair was very helpful when I first switched my focus to book blogging. She may not even remember this, but she really pushed my first book giveaway, which was not going very well at all until she stepped in. Trish at Trish's Reading Nook has been a regular commenter and has always had good advice in her comments about blogging. I don't know why, but Sam Sattler's blog, Book Chase has sent more viewers my way than any other book blog. This only puzzles me because our reading interests are not all that similar, there is some overlap but it has surprised me just how many people come to Ready When You Are, C.B. via Book Chase each week.

On another topic....the fight for equality continues....


"We don't make one set or rules for some, and another set for others."

If you'd like to donate go here.

Daylight Noir by Catherine Corman

Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City by Catherine Corman is based on a simple premise--photograph the locations mentioned in Raymond Chandler's detective novels set in Los Angelos, California. The 54 photographs in Daylight Noir are each matched with a brief quotation from Chandler passage that mentions the location. The results are much better than I expected.


I've seen books based on similar ideas, a then and now book that chronicled locations in 1920's movies, but none have reached the level of artistry Catherine Corman does in Daylight Noir. Ms. Corman avoids making her photographs a simple record of how each setting looks. Instead, she produces a more artistic photograph, evocative of Chandler's prose, spare, to the point, a bit cynical. Raymond Chandler's stories are set in the land of sunshine, Southern California, but they are never sunny. His interior world is one of grays, matched in Ms. Corman's photographs by the cloudless California sky which is often a solid block of gray in a black and white photograph.


Chandler's prose fits nicely with Ms. Corman's photographs. The second photo seen here is Florian's, a night club/bar featured in Farewell, My Lovely. The passage for it is:

I told him what had happened at Florian's and why. He stared at me solemnly and shook his bald head.

"A nice quiet place Sam run too," he said. "Ain't nobody been knifed there in a month."

I expected to find Daylight Noir the sort of impulse buy one gets for an acquaintance who likes detective novels like me. What I found is a collection of excellent photographs that can stand on their own artistic merit. That they all add up to a vision of Chandler's Los Angelos, gray and seedy in the land of eternal sunshine, is an added and unexpected bonus. In California, the sky is either perfectly clear or solidly overcast, rarely anything in between. In Mr. Chandler's novels, nothing is perfectly clear but the sky.

Ms. Corman has an excellent website that features all of the photographs in Daylight Noir here. It's well worth checking out. Daylight Noir debuts in October.


Full disclosure: I received and advanced reader's copy of Daylight Noir. The pictures featured here are the cover photo, Florian's and Bullocks Wilshire.

Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett

The stories we are told as children do, undoubtedly, mark us for life.

Opening to Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett.

Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett is the rare book that can break your heart while scaring you to death.

Neil Bartlett's retelling of Beauty and the Beast takes place in 1960's London during the waning days of the fur trade. At one time there was a real Skin Lane, an area of London where all of the nations furriers operated, making a wide range of fur coats and other garments. Already the story is a little creepy.

The main character, Mr. F., has worked for the same fur manufacturer for 33 years. He has worked his way up from sweeping the floors to head cutter a supervisory position that will be as high as he can go since he is not part of the family that owns the business. Mr. F. has lived his life alone, sleeping in a single bed that he has never once shared with anyone male or female. He lives a simple, quiet, private life that satisfies him fully, until on night he begins to have a disturbing recurring dream.

He dreams that he finds a beautiful young man, bound and gagged, hanging upside down in his bathroom shower. Each night he dreams that he goes closer and closer to the body hanging in the shower, studying it, examining its skin the way he would examine a fur he has to cut into the pieces of a new coat. He wakes in a sweat, afraid to fall asleep again, afraid of what his dream means.

At work, he is given the job of supervising his boss's young nephew who is learning the trade from the ground up in order to take over the business. The nephew is so handsome at 16-years-old that he is soon known as Beauty by the women who work in the sewing room where he starts his education in the fur trade. In his dreams, Mr. F. gets closer and closer to the body in his shower, close enough to see that it is dead, but not close enough to see who it is. Once Beauty is assigned to work under Mr. F., they begin to form a close relationship, close enough for Beauty to go to Mr. F. for help when he gets into trouble with one of the girls. As Mr. F. becomes physically and emotionally attracted to Beauty, he sees that the body hanging in his shower he dreams of nightly is that of the young man.

Neil Bartlett is a consummate story teller. The introductory sections that detail Mr. F.'s daily routine, the slow build up of tension as Mr. F. gets closer to young Beauty are not "exciting" as they might be a more conventional thriller. But as the details of Mr. F.'s dream and the inner workings of the fur trade emerge over the course of the novel, a tension builds that is much more authentic and disturbing than what is found in conventional thrillers. The effect is like watching a car wreck that gets worse before your eyes. You probably think you know what is going to happen in the end. But you don't. Neil Bartlett sets things up to lead the reader to suspect an outcome, but what finally does happen is both unexpected and heartbreaking.


This books counts as my final book in The Challenge that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Short Story Sunday: "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.


Few people do revenge as well as Edgar Allan Poe. In his short story "The Cask of Amontillado" revenge, like certain types of good wine, is best served cold.

"The Cask of Amontillado" is a familiar title-- one of those stories most people know about, but few people have read. The subject matter is not safe for public school textbooks; the story is not very nice.


The narrator does not like Fortunato. We get the sense that he has long held a grudge against him, that the un-named insult he speaks of in the opening line is just an excuse. He's been waiting a long time for a reason to do away with Fortunato. During carnival he takes advantage of Fortunato's drunken state and leads him down into a deep crypt with the promise of an excellent cask of amontillado wine. Fortunato is a connoisseur. He trusts the narrator completely, and willingly follows to his doom, a pathetic figure in his jester costume. The narrator plans to chain Fortunato to a wall while he is drunk and then seal him in behind a brick wall, leaving him buried alive where no one will ever find him.


Somewhere, someone must have written a paper on the use of bells in Edgar Allan Poe. Here, they are the last sound Fortunato makes. Chained, alone, in the darkness, finally becoming sober just as the narrator places the last brick in the wall that will seal his death chamber, Fortunato drops his head, defeated, and the bells on his jester's hat jingle.


It's enough to give you nightmares, which is the whole point with an Edgar Allan Story. It's too bad it's not in textbooks. I know more than a few students who'd enjoy it. Who dreams of revenge more than high school students do?


If you'd like to participate in this month's round of Short Story Sundays, please use Mr. Linky to post a link to your review. I'm still looking for 696 short stories to add to the list of 1001 Short Stories to Read Before You Die. If you have a suggestion, please leave it in a comment below.

Dakota Picks a Winner: The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

I stupidly left my camera at school so there will be no video this time. (The videos are really fun to do, you can see a good one here.) But, I promised a winner today, so Dakota made her random selection and the winner of The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is.....

Sharon54220

Sharon, if you'll send me your mailing information, I'll pass it along to the publisher and they'll get a book in the mail to you.

Dakota's Favorites: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Dakota and I both loved this book. I read it back in the summer of 2007 and have been in love with Murakami ever since. I loved reading it, and Dakota loved eating it. Judging by what was left of it afterwards, we both found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle delicious. Here's my review from August of 2007.

I'm going to be haunted by this book for some time and I don't know why. I'm not really sure what this book is about. I may not even know what really happens in the story but I keep thinking about it.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami tells the story of Toru Okada who is looking for his wife's missing cat. But this is just a McGuffin, to borrow Hitchcock's term, to throw the reader off track from the real story. Or maybe it's the key to everything that happens afterwards.

Okada lives a rather secluded life in a Tokyo suburb with his wife who is the breadwinner. Okada spends his days trying to figure out how to spend his days. His search for himself is interrupted by three events, the missing cat, the disappearance of his wife, and a phone call from a strange woman.

The novel becomes a sort of detective story as Okada looks for the cat, tries to get his wife to return and to figure out who the woman that keeps calling him is. Soon several women enter Okada's life and the story takes a turn towards David Lynch territory. The first woman, Malta Kano and her sister Creta Kano are both sort of psychics who give Okada clues to both his past and his future. They are strangely involved with both his wife and his brother-in-law, and may have the ability to find the missing cat. The mother-son team whom Okada calls Nutmeg and Cinnamon find Okada has psychic abilities himself and use these to further their own goals. The neighbor girl May Kinsahara traps Okada in a well on a friendly whim and sets in motion a series of events that end with the possibility that Okada has murdered his brother-in-law, a powerful up-and-coming politician. All of these events seem to be connected to what happened to Okada's friend Mr. Honda in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and after.

Confused? I certainly was at many points while reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicle but I felt compelled to continue reading. Haruki Marakami is certainly a wonderful story teller. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle he keeps several story threads going throughout the novel, giving the reader just enough to keep you interested, without telling you what is really going on, which actually makes you more interested. Along with the story telling, there are many scenes and images that haunt the reader: a man who goes into a well to find a good spot to think and ends up trapped there for days, a massacre in a zoo in occupied China, an internet conversation between a man and what he believes is his lost wife.

I admit that I am still trying to figure it all out, puzzle it all together. I will be for several days at least. For that reason, I am giving The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami five out of five stars.

BTT: The Best Thing You've Read Recently and First Day Jitters

I'm writing this at three in the morning, Pacific Time. Today is the first day of school; I've actually slept much longer than I used to. Although this will be my 20th year as a teacher, I have the jitters.

I only had two 'teacher dreams' this year. In the first one, a former student of mine crawled into a small cabinet and took a nap. We only found him there because he had begun to jiggle his foot the way a puppy does as though running . This was typical behavior for this particular student, so, we decided to let him sleep. Last night, I dreamt a class united in opposition to me--it was not pretty. No dreams tonight, but I am up and wide awake at three in the morning.

So.....Booking Through Thursday.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
(Tell me you didn’t see this one coming?)

Cassandra, by Christa Wolf reviewed here is the best book I've read recently. You've probably never heard of this author, I suspect she's obscure even in her home country, Germany, and she's not widely available in translation. But her re-telling of The Illiad through the eyes of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who foretold the fate of Troy only to find no one would believe her, has remained on my mind for several weeks. In my opinion, that's about as good a recommendation as I can give--haunting.

Today I am haunted, by literature and by dreams of past students.

Maybe I should get some sleep.

Blog of the Week at Book Blips

I'm pleased to announce that Ready When You Are, C.B. has been selected "Blog of the Week" over at Book Blips. You can read all about it here. Many thanks to Robyn at Book Blips who selected Dakota and me. We may have had an advantage--Robyn and her husband once owned a Basset hound named.

Hounds of a feather flock together.

Don't forget you can still enter to win a copy of The Art of Racing in the Rain along with a Go Enzo refrigerator magnet. To enter just leave a comment after the review.

An Interview with Garth Stein Author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

Yesterday's featured review was The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. Mr. Stein is the author of several books, plays and screen plays. He currently lives with his family in Seattle, Washington. I'm pleased to say that he agreed to an interview with Ready When You Are, C.B.

- The Are of Racing in the Rain is dedicated to your childhood dog, Muggs. I know you have told the story of the Muggs dedication and your father's reaction to it before, but could I ask you to tell it one more time here. It's a wonderful story.

My family's childhood dog was an Airedale named Muggs. She was a sweet, lovable, proud dog. And she got old. When I was a teenager, one day my father came home from work early. He was wearing his suit and it seemed odd to see him in the day at home in a suit. He put Muggs in the car and took her away. He came back without her. (She was quite old, her hips had given way, she was incontinent....)

When he came back, he took all of her things out of the place we kept them in her cabinet. Her bowls, her food, her leashes, her collar. He put them in a garbage bag, tied it up, and placed it outside by the garbage cans. That was it. He never said a word about it, and no one in our house spoke of it.

When I finished my book I wanted to dedicate it to someone, but I didn't know who. So I dedicated it to Muggs, knowing that I was really dedicating it to my father by doing that.

The book was ready, I got my first copy from Harper Collins, and I proudly showed my parents, forgetting for a moment that I had dedicated it to Muggs. My father opened the book, saw the dedication page...and started crying.

So he knew. Parents know stuff like that. He knew I meant it was for him.

- Your first two novels were well received, How Evan Broke his Head and Other Secrets was an award winning Book Sense pick, but The Art of Racing in the Rain looks like a huge success. How has it affected your life? Will success spoil Garth Stein?

There's nothing like having a loving wife and three loving children to keep a guy grounded! Everything is business-as-usual in the Stein house. Except now, when I complain about no one paying attention to me, they all laugh....

- I'll admit I hesitated before reading The Art of Racing in the Rain out of fear that the dog would die. I've taught middle school for twenty years now and have used Old Yeller as a class book a couple of times. It's a marvelous book, the kids love most of it, but the dog dies at the end which my students hate. I pointed out to them that the author told us the dog would die in the opening paragraph so we should be ready for it, but they still hate the ending, and many of them walk away hating the book because of it. It's not a spoiler to say this since we know Enzo is in his last days within the first few pages of your novel, but I was not sure I wanted to read The Art of Racing in the Rain knowing the dog would die. I'm a sap, I admit it. The ending certainly hasn't hurt the book's success as far as I can tell, but did you ever feel pressure to change the book so Enzo could live?

Why do we read? Why do we see movies? Why do we go to the theater? Because we're looking for a catharsis. We want to experience a range of emotions through the eyes and actions of another. Some people may be sensitive to certain issues or emotions, and that's okay, I totally understand that they may not want to read my book right now. But I could never have changed the ending. This book is about a dog who wants to be reincarnated as a person. In order to achieve that goal, he must lose his present incarnation. If he hadn't died, it wouldn't have been true to the story.

- I'll admit that I also doubted the dog as narrator device, but by the end of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Enzo won me over. He is one of the most memorable narrators I've encountered. But being a dog there are important moments in the life of his family that he cannot recount because he was not there to experience them. Enzo communicates in gestures so you have to come up with what Enzo wants to communicate and then with a gesture that a dog can conceivably make to do the communicating. Sounds like tough work to me. How did having a dog narrator challenge you as writer? My spouse suspects that it was freeing to have Enzo tell the story, but I think it would be much more difficult. Can you settle our bet?

Dude, your wife wins. I mean, first of all, I was writing from the point of view of a specific character, not from the point of view of All Dogs. So my "tough work" was in getting Enzo's character right: he's a nearly human soul trapped in a dog's body; I tried not to be self-conscious about the whole dog thing. Secondly, by having a character who is able to observe all things closely but not able to interact fully, I was liberated from some traditional narrative traps. Nobody suspects a dog of being overly judgmental, so they say things in front of Enzo they wouldn't say in front of someone else, and they act inappropriately in front of Enzo. In a sense, Enzo became a giant barking fly on the wall!

- (It's husband, actually. I should start being more specific than "spouse.") Write what you know is perhaps the most common advice given to aspiring authors. Clearly, you know racing as we can see in The Art of Racing in the Rain. How Evan Broke his Head and Other Secrets is about a rock musician....have you been in a band? Both books are about men who end up single fathers raising one child, while you are married with three sons. I read somewhere that John Irving was writing what he feared most when he wrote about the death of a child in The World According to Garp. Does that apply to your work?

Yes, of course. But that can be stretched. You need to have a deep knowledge of something to write about it with authenticity. But that shouldn't hold you back as a writer. Go out and learn about it if you don't know it. People are happy to help. And, worse comes to worst, make it up!

As for the band question, no, I'm not a musician. But my wife used to play the drums for rock bands when we lived in the East Village in NYC. I was a really good roadie!

- I teach 7th grade English. My students are tested by the State of California on their writing ability each year and short story is one of the possible genres they may be tested on. (I never know until the morning of the test.) Since you have taught writing fiction to children and adults, do you have any advice for writing teachers?

I would recommend working theater into your curriculum. Nothing teaches the importance of conflict, intention and dramatic truth better than theater.

- I see on your website that you'll be racing in the Mazda Grand Prix this year, congratulations. If I could offer you a racing career in exchange for your writing career, would you be at all tempted?

Um, no. It's much safer behind a desk. Besides, I love racing, but I think I'm a better writer than I am a racer.

- You've written novels, produced a play, filmed several documentary movies. How do you determine if an idea will become a book versus a play or a movie? Is there a project you'd love to do that you haven't had the chance to yet?

I don't get to determine that. The project gets to determine its own form, I think. I'm not much into film these days. I'm working on a novel now. I'd like to write another play, as theater is a ton of fun.

- What's next for Garth Stein? Is there anything in the works we should keep an eye out for? Maybe a movie? Who would play the voice of Enzo?

I don't know who's going to play Enzo, but Patrick Dempsey is going to play Denny. (That's right! Universal bought it to make into a movie!)

- I suspect that the good people at Terra Communications Book Marketing may have selected Ready When You Are, C.B. because I frequently feature posts about my dog, a Basset named Dakota, who regularly eats my books. I like to end each author interview by asking if you've ever had a pet who ate your books. Is your dog Comet guilty?

Phew! I thought you were going to ask if I've ever had a pet I've eaten. (Well, once. A rabbit....with a delicious white wine sauce....Kidding!)

Nope. Comet much prefers watching TV to eating books!

Thank you for taking the time to participate in this interview. You can find out more about Garth Stein and The Art of Racing in the Rain at http://www.garthstein.com/. If you'd like to win a free copy of The Art of Racing in the Rain along with a "Go, Enzo" refrigerator magnet, enter here. Dakota will select the winning entry Saturday morning.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.

Opening, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein.

Garth Stein takes his chances with treacle overdose in The Art of Racing in the Rain. The novel's hero, Denny, faces his wife's struggle with terminal illness only to face his in-laws in a protracted battle for the custody of his young daughter. As if this plot wasn't risky enough, Mr. Stein chooses Enzo, the family dog, as the narrator for his novel. If this doesn't raise enough red flags to decorate a used car lot, consider that Enzo's age, which puts him in his final years, has made him start dreaming of reincarnation as a human. This could all go horribly wrong.

But it works. In large part because Enzo, the dog narrator, is sure to win over even the most skeptical, urban sophisticate like yours truly. Enzo begins his story at the end--he is old, his body is starting to break down, but he is looking forward to his next incarnation as a human since he has successfully overseen the happy ending the novel will eventually reach. Enzo, like many pets, has spent much of his life home alone with the television on, Public Television. He once saw a program about Buddhism in Mongolia that explained the high position dogs hold, so high that the next step up is reincarnation as a human. Enzo is devoted to his owner, Denny, as only a dog can be. He hopes this devotion will lead him to life as a human being.

A dog narrator has it pluses and it minuses. On the plus side, people assume they can talk freely in front of a dog. Those given to thinking out loud make confessions to dogs, revealing secrets they wouldn't dream of telling anyone else. (If they're like me, they pause their confessions to give the dog a chance to jump in with her view.) Thus, Enzo is a first person narrator who is almost able to function as a third person omniscient one. He knows more than anyone else possibly could. As an intelligent, thinking being, he is able to editorialize about what the humans in the story are up to. However, because he is also a character in the book, his narration never comes across as the voice of the author preaching to the audience; it's just what one character thinks about another. On the minus side, he is a dog. A dog cannot offer testimony in a court of law, nor can he do much to change the course of events in the human world though he does do what he can, often to great effect. There are a few points in the novel where I would have preferred to be where the action was, instead of home with the dog watching television.

The Art of Racing in the Rain could have gone terrible wrong, it could have ended up a simple tear-jerker, just another re-telling of Kramer vs. Kramer, this time with a father who wants to be race car driver. It's really Enzo, the dog-narrator, who saves the book from this fate. In spite of his religious beliefs and his ability to understand very high levels of language, he remains a dog devoted to pleasing his master. His love for his owners has no limit so once we start rooting for Enzo we can't help but root for Denny. Fifty or sixty pages into the book, urban sophistication began to give way. Thirty pages more, Enzo had won me over completely. I'm embarrassed to admit how much I liked him.

Good dog.

The publishers have donated a copy of The Art of Racing in the Rain to give away along with one "Go Enzo" refrigerator magnet. If you're interested, please leave a comment. Be sure to include a way for me to get in touch with you by email. Dakota will be selecting the winner Saturday morning. And please stop by tomorrow for an interview with Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Full disclosure: I did receive a free copy of The Art of Racing in the Rain from the publisher.

Heard Any Good Books Lately?

Last month I subscribed to Audible.com which allows you to download one audio book per month for under $15.00. I listened to my first one, the free one, while working on art projects down in my studio. I liked it.

Last week, when I received my monthly credit, I headed to Audible.com, wish list in hand, to look for another audio book. It turns out that my reading tastes are a bit off the beaten track for Audible, only four of my 40 plus wish list titles were there. Next I looked over the subscriber reviews of the four books--all of them were bad. By bad, I mean 3 stars or fewer out of five. While subscriber or customer reviews are not the only thing I look at when I buy something, I do look for at least four out of five stars. This rarely fails me when ordering videos from Netflix.

After browsing Audible.com, I found three stars to be the norm. The ratings on Amazon.com, for the titles I compared, are at least a full star higher. What gives? Are listeners tougher critics than readers?

And what do I do with my credit? Can you recommend a good audio book?

Full disclosure: photograph from Jody Fransch's website.

Short Story Sunday: "Hands" by Sherwood Anderson

"Hands" is Sherwood Anderson's best known story. It leads off his collection Winesburg, Ohio which is a portrait of small town America at the turn of the 20th century. Winesburg, Ohio has been popping up here and there in reviews of Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning book Olive Kitteridge. Both are collections of short stories that share a common character. In Ms. Strout's book the title character appears in every story, in Mr. Anderson's the title character is the town itself, where all of the stories are set.

"Hands" is the story of Wing Bittlebaum who has hidden out in Winesburg for twenty years, living alone in the house he inherited from his aunt. He is known throughout the town for his hands, which are always in motion. When he talks they fly about in fists, pounding on any surface he can find; when he picks strawberries they gather more than anyone in town. It was not always so.

Wing Bittlebaum used to be a school teacher, a very good school teacher. He had an easy way with his students, whom he loved and who loved him. But no one in Winesburg knows this about him. His one close friend in Winesburg is George Willard, a young man just leaving school for either work or college, he does not know yet. George visits Wing who counsels him on various topics, sometimes giving George the inspirational speeches that he must have once given to his students.

Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands. Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard's shoulders. Something new and bold came into the voice that talked. "You must try to forget all you have learned," said the old man. "You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices."

Pausing in his speech, Wing Bittlebaum looked long and earnestly at George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.

Wing Bittlebaum has never done anything inappropriate with anyone, but he has come to believe what people said about him twenty years ago when he lost his teaching job and was driven out of town. He does not trust his hands. He does not trust himself. "Hands" is often read as a story of a closeted gay man, but I am not so sure. If Wing Bittlebaum were a married man the fact that he put his arm around a student would have bothered no one, not in the 1900's. He has no sexual desire at all, so his is not the story of a pedophile either. His story is about homophobia, not about homosexuality. He is so afraid of what people will think about him, that he has grown to fear his own hands will make an ordinary gesture of affection, one that a married man would not think twice about it.

If you'd like to participate in Short Story Sunday please feel free to use Mr. Linky below. I'm still looking to add stories to the list of 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die as well. Click here to see the current list of stories and to suggest your own favorites. "Hands" is already on the list.

Cassandra by Christa Wolf

It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; now they no longer have heads. This fortress--once impregnable, now a pile of stones--was the last thing she saw.

Opening to Cassandra by Christa Wolf

Cassandra has always struck me as the most tragic figure in the story of the Trojan War. Gifted with prophecy, she could see the future, she knew what would happen, but no one would believe her. It's one thing to be doomed; it's another to know you are doomed.

German author Christa Wolf retells the story of the Trojan War from Cassandra's point of view in her novel Cassandra translated from the German by Jan Van Heurck. By telling the story from this way, Ms. Wolf increases our understanding of the Trojan War. There are no heroics in Cassandra. When Cassandra witnesses a battle, she sees it from the point of view of a helpless victim not as a combatant. Because she is King Priam's daughter, she has an insider's view of court politics. What she witnesses is a war fought not for honor, but for economic reasons--control of the Bosporus Straits trade. She sees a shift in Trojan politics and culture from a more peaceful, matriarchal society to a society controlled by men, one that shuts out women from all positions of power.

But Christa Wolf's most intriguing take on the Trojan War is her take on it's cause, the kidnapping of Helen. In Homer's version of the story, Helen of Troy, a beautiful young Greek girl who became the face who launched a thousand ships, was promised to Paris, a Trojan prince, by the goddess Aprhodite. She watched the war from the walls of Troy, despised by the Trojans as the cause of their suffering and despised by the Greeks for her betrayal of her father. In Cassandra, Helen is absent from the story altogether. She is taken from her father by Paris, but she is then taken from him by the King of Egypt when Paris stops there on his way to Troy. In order to save face, Paris and the men of the Trojan court, keep the second kidnapping of Helen a secret. When Paris docks his ships in Troy, he sends ashore a veiled woman. The men claim that Helen is too ill to receive visitors, so no one but Paris can see her. Weeks, and then months go by. Eventually, no one asks about Helen anymore. She is forgotten. The Greeks arrive to do battle with Troy and win Helen back; war between the two begins based entirely on deception. It's clear that everyone knows about the lie by then, but no one stops the war once it has begun.

Sound familiar?

The Trojan War continues to be the source of great literature. Margaret Atwood's recent novel The Penelopiad, which tells the story from the point of view of Odysseus' wife who famously fought off an army of suitors while waiting from him to return from the Trojan War, is a recent example. Cassandra, by Christa Wolf, proves that knowing the whole story before hand need not ruin it. At just under 150 pages, it's possible to read the entire novel in two or three sittings which is good because novel itself is a page turner. You think you know the story of the Trojan War, but Cassandra's insider view and the reinterpretation of the war's underlying causes make for eye-opening reading. Knowing how the story ends, does not lessen the experience of reading Cassandra at all. She is the witness to the events who can tell us what really happened. It's a fascinating and compelling read.

As was the case with Hans Fallada, author of Every Man Dies Alone, Christa Wolf's biography is as interesting as her work. Born in what is now Poland in the late 1920's, her family was expelled from their home after World War II and settled in what became East Germany. She became a literary scholar and critic, served briefly as an informant for the Stasis only to be criticised by them for her "reticence" and placed under surveillance for over 30 years. In spite of this she remained faithful to the ideals of Karl Marx and opposed German reunification. Cassandra is considered by many to be her most important work.

Friday Picture Reading #8

I found this one on Harriet Devine's Blog last month.

Woman Reading by Alexander Dieneka, 1934

Fear The Worst by Lindwood Barclay - Escapist Reading?

The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs.

Opening sentence, Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay

People read novels for different reasons. One reason is escape. Thrillers have been helping their readers escape since the early days of the novel. Matthew "The Monk" Lewis, Wilke Collins, Charles Dickens, all knew how to keep their readers coming back for more by giving them thrills--keep them in suspense and they'll keep turning pages. While a thriller can become a work of literature, most people who read thrillers read them not for art but for thrills.

Reviewing a book like Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay brings up the question I faced with Columbine-- how to review it. Fear the Worst is an entertaining thriller that hits close enough to home to draw the reader in and keep the pages turning. Its goal is to tell a good story that keeps its readers entertained. To judge it by the same set of criteria used to judge a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or To the Lighthouse seems questionable. One is an apple, the other an orange.

Most good thrillers can be summed up in a line or two. In Fear the Worst the narrator's teenage daughter does not come home for dinner one night. Weeks later he becomes a suspect in her disappearance and begins to discover how much trouble she was in. If you are a reader of thrillers, that's probably all you need to know to decide if Fear the Worst is for you.

As a thriller, as an entertainment, Fear the Worst works. Before the daughter disappears, we come to know her and her father well and to like them and to be concerned about what happens to them. Just as the father, who narrates the book, can't believe his daughter is involved in anything criminal neither can we. As the book continues, there are plenty of twists to keep us turning the pages while the father gets closer and closer to the truth about his daughter's disappearance.

While good thriller does have well developed characters, it doesn't spend much time on characterization. Mr. Barclay makes his characters distinctive individuals the way a good artist can convey a unique portrait with minimal use of paint. His characterization adds to the book while it never gets in the way of the plot. By the time the father/narrator has to take dramatic and violent action he has been through so much that his actions are no longer out of character as they would have been when the novel opened.

There are a few problems with Fear the Worst. In order for a non-police officer to solve a crime, we have to believe the actual police force is not capable or not willing. Or the person solving the crime must be so involved in it that he or she cannot go to the police for help. I think Mr. Barclay underestimates his police officer characters. If the level of ineptitude they display in Fear the Worst is accurate, then one has to ask how any crime ever gets solved. To say a book had you racing to find out what happens is to also say it had you skimming over parts of it so you could find out sooner. Fear the Worst did have me doing that. There were times when I felt the suspense generated was unearned, merely manipulation rather than actual tension. The father/narrator, who does not own a gun, is so good in the books climatic gun battle that he really should consider a career change and become a police officer himself. Finally, the plot tends to play fast and loose with the lives of the supporting characters while keeping the major players safe and sound. Some readers may prefer this, of course, those looking for escape, for example.

If you read for escape, and if thrills are the escape you seek, Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay should do the trick.

But what do you read for?

Full disclosure as promised. My copy of Fear the Worst is an Advanced Review Copy provided by the publisher through Librarything.com.

Stephen King Changed My Life

Reading a book can be a life-changing experience. Of the books I've read this year, the one that has had the greatest effect on my life is Stephen King's memoir, On Writing. Mr. King devotes the second half of his memoir to a discussion of the craft of writing. While I can't say he breaks any new ground, he does lay out a useful guide to how to write well.

What struck most and has stayed with me is the understanding of how much consideration Mr. King puts into his writing, not just at the overall story level but at the sentence level. He is concerned about a well crafted sentence just as one expects more "literary" authors to be. Though this really shouldn't come as a shock, the man is a professional writer after all, seeing Mr. King's process laid out systematically, his concern for his craft describe in thoughtful detail, drove home the fact that I'd done so little of this kind of thinking about my own writing here on this blog and elsewhere.

So I looked it over. I did not like what I saw.

Adverbs all over the place. Passive voice. Needless words. The word "anyway" kept popping up in my writing, filling in space, serving no purpose. "In the end" and "after all" found there way into the last paragraph of far too many posts. And compound sentences--I was their master and their slave. Compound sentence following compound sentence. It was like I'd stopped learning how to write after watching Conjunction Junction on Saturday morning cartoons. Independent clause, coordinating conjunction, independent clause. "And," "but," and "or," they got me pretty far.

While many writers tend to look at their writing as a parent looks at a child, Mr. King suggests a good writer must be willing to kill his children, to edit without mercy. If something is not working and it can't be fixed, it must be removed. Now, I have a new focus--the rewrite. I follow Mr. King's rule: second draft equals first draft minus ten percent. I'm cutting as many adverbs as I can, I've banned the words "anyway," "in the end," and "after all," I favor the active voice, and I make every attempt possible to stay away from compound sentences. I know, I just used one. Recognizing you have a problem is the first step.

Have you examined your own writing lately?




Stephen King picture from Thecinimasource.com.
Conjunction Junction image from Simonsez.wordpress.com.

Tale of Genji Read-a-Long Ch. 21-24: Genji enters middle age

First a poem:

"The warbler still sings as sweetly as ever then in those bygone days,

but the blossoms he once loved do not look at all the same."

Reading The Tale of Genji can be a meditative experience--Lady Murasaki had a captive audience, hers is arguably the first novel every so what else were they going to read, so she could take her time. If you're looking for faced paced reading, you won't find it here. (I say this about a section that features an escape from pirates.) But little things, like the poem above, that keep popping up make reading the book worthwhile.

"the blossoms he once loved do not look at all the same."

Been there.

Chapters 21-24 find Genji in his thirties, a middle-aged man, a father with nearly grown children, sons and daughters, who are finding their first love. His son, a scholarly boy who scored at the top on his exams, is in love with a girl above his station. Pursuing her could bring disgrace to both children's families. His daughter is as beautiful as one would expect the daughter of Genji to be. She, and her father, must now face the enevitable suitors for both her hand in marriage and her company in general.

It's nice to see that he is in this situation and that he is handling it very well.

Photo: Gosechi-no-mai dancer from the Saeko Ichinohe Dance Company. This is an 8th century Japanese dance that is performed in The Tale of Genji. It is one of the few dances women were allowed to perform. It's difficult to imagine much movement going on inside all that fabric. If you know of a video, please send me link. I'd love to see it.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

He told them he loved them.

First line, Columbine by Dave Cullen

I need a new set of criteria to review Columbine by Dave Cullen. It's something much more than true-crime; a true-crime book about Columbine would be in very bad taste. It's not a non-fiction novel like In Cold Blood, though Mr. Cullen uses novelistic devices throughout. Though gripping, it's purpose is not to entertain. What is the purpose of a book like Columbine? Why study this piece of American history? What can we learn from it?

In Columbine Mr. Cullen presents as complete and accurate a picture of what happened before, during and after the massacre at Columbine High School on April 19, 1999 as we are likely to get for a very long time. (Some evidence is still sealed; some witnesses still have not granted interviews.) Whatever there is to learn from this tragedy, if anything, can be learned from reading Columbine.

Mr. Cullen structures Columbine in three main alternating parts. The events of April 19, 1999 are described in detail in the opening and closing sections of the book. I was struck by how much the media got wrong in its quest for instant and constant coverage on the day of the shootings. Mr. Cullen demonstrates just how unreliable eye-witness testimony can be, so much so that I will forever doubt it even when it is my own. Yet the media relied on eye-witness testimony from tramautized high school students who were sometimes simply repeating misinformation they had heard on television and radio moments earlier. As a result several myths became widely believed: the shooters were bullied outsiders without friends, the shooters were part of a trench coat mafia, the shooters were gay, the shooters were fans of Goth music, the shooters targeted minority students, the shooters targeted jocks, the shooters targeted Christians. None of these were true.

Mr. Cullen alternates his account of April 19 with an analysis of how the two shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, came to be mass murderers. By learning how this happened future tragedies can be prevented, some argue. It is clear from Columbine that Harris was the leader of the two. Mr. Cullen traces explores the work of Dr. Dwayne Fuselier who spent years studying Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold through their journals, homemade video tapes, court and medical records and the testimony of those who knew them. That Eric Harris was a psychopath comes as no surprise, but just what that entails is not widely known. Psychopaths are not typically violent. They have no emotional guilt or empathy for others, their goal is to manipulate those around them, but this only rarely results in violence. There is no effective treatment for psychopaths. In fact, treatment may be a way for psychopaths to become better at concealing the fact that they are psychopaths because it helps them learn how to fake being normal. While Eric Harris's mental illness led him to kill, Dylan Klebold's made him suicidal. No one knew the full extent of their conditions until afterwards. Both boys were in treatment programs as a result of an earlier arrest; both appeared to be doing well.

The third alternating part of Columbine is the aftermath--what happened during the criminal investigation, how the survivors and their families tried to recover and how the nation reacted. The people involved were all average people, put in the media spotlight through tragedy and without preparation. Mr. Cullen gives them their fair due. He does not make anyone a hero, nor does he demonize anyone. He presents a well researched, well written version of events.

In the end we come back to the question of what can be learned from this piece of history? Some say that it is not just dangerous to forget the past, it is rude. The job of history is to remember as well as to teach. I did not find any lessons in Columbine. Anti-bullying programs would not have prevented it; Harris and Klebold were not bullied. Eliminating social isolation would not have helped; neither boy was isolated socially. There is some comfort to be found in blaming the boys' parents, but they both came from solid two parent families with actively involved mothers and fathers who saw that they needed help and got it for them. The police knew of things they did not act on, the boys did use the gun show loop-hole in the Brady bill to buy weapons, there were a few violent essays that raised concern with their English teachers, but there was no one person or one group who knew all the pieces of the puzzle, no one in a position to see the whole picture. Could some one person have done more? The answer to that questions is always yes. With so little to learn, history can only remember.

This book counts as my fifth and final book for the Non-Fiction Five Challenge. I'm also counting it as reading outside my comfort zone.

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Short Story Sunday: "Just Before The War With The Eskimos" by J.D. Salinger. Plus a Bonus Lawsuit.

To say that nothing happens in a J.D. Salinger story is to exaggerate. In "Just Before The War With The Eskimos" a girl named Ginnie insists that her tennis partner, Selena, pay her share of the cab fare. Ginnie waits in the foyer while Selena gets money from her mother. As she waits Ginnie meets Selena's brother who is visiting from college. He complains to her about his roommate and insists she take half of his sandwich. She puts it in her pocket when he is not looking.

That's about it really. There is no surprise revelation in the end, no drastic action that makes the reader re-think what has gone on before. Not much to recommend the story as far as I can see. The best part of it is the title, which is very good, but the way it plays out in the story is not all that interesting.

A friend of mine once insisted that if you haven't read Salinger age twenty you should never read him. Probably good advice. Advice John David California may have wished he followed. Mr. California, not his real name, an American author who lives in Sweden has written a sequel to Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye. In it, a 76 year old Holden Caufiled wonders the streets of New York after escaping from a retirement home. Mr. Salinger is suing to stop publication claiming copyright infringement. There's a good article about it in The Wall Street Journal blog here.

I won't be pushing anyone to include "Just Before The War With The Eskimos" on the list of 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die. You can skip this one. Read "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" or "For Esme, With Love and Squalor" instead. I love those two, though I must admit, I first read them before I was twenty.

But whatever you read please feel free to join Short Story Sunday by leaving a link below. And if you have a story you'd like to suggest for the list of 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die please leave a comment.

Unfinished Reading - A Bad Review?

You won't find many bad reviews on this blog. I self-select the books I read and don't read books I don't like, so the reviews here tend to be good.

This week I stumbled across the Blog With Integrity pledge which asks people to promise they will disclose where the products they review came from in order to prevent manufacturers from getting undeserved good, free publicity. The Blog With Integrity pledge asks bloggers to be honest, stand by their words, even if they have to eat them and to respect intellectual property rights by giving credit where credit is due.

Several book blogs have debates going about whether to disclose advanced review copies when we review them. If the book was free to you, or if you're publishing an author interview or guest post, does that skew your review? Do you have an obligation to say so? Most book bloggers who have said so, have said no. I'm not sure I agree. A free book, an author interview, a virtual book tour, all have an affect on me. Skewed my reviews, maybe a little.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I should give credit where it is due--I have not done that enough with the images I use on this site. In the future, I'll make an effort to state when a book is an ARC copy. I love getting ARC's; I just can't help myself. I'm pickier about them now than I was a year ago and I've grown leary of virtual book tours. If you see an author interview here, it's because I wanted to interview the author regardless of how I got the book.

Which brings me, at last, to the subject I wanted to write about today--unfinished books. There are only four books I've put down for good this year, two of them ARCs. These confessions are as close to bad reviews as you'll find here:

Rocket Man by William Elliott Hazelgrove. (An ARC from LibraryThing.com.) Honestly, this is a good book, it just didn't work for me. If you are a disillusioned straight man trying to adjust to life in the suburbs you swore you'd never live in or are interested in such men, you'll probably love Rocket Man. I'm not and I didn't.

Beat by Amy Boaz. (An ARC from LibraryThing.com.) A woman leaves her suburban life and, with her daughter in tow, heads off for Paris. I often dream of leaving my suburban life and heading off for Paris, so I thought this would be the book for me. It wasn't. I do think someone in my book club will love it, though. Maybe I can get them to write a guest review.,

When You Don't See Me by Timothy James Beck. (Bought with an Amazon.com gift card.) It sounded good. A nineteen-year-ld leaves the Midwestern family who disapproves of him because he's gay for life in New York City. The characters all struck me as shallow which is probably very true to life but that doesn't mean I have to read about it.

If This World Was Mine by E. Lynn Harris. (From the Solano Public Library, Vallejo main branch.) I'd never read Mr. Harris, who recently passed away, so I thought I'd give him a try. If This World Was Mine is about a group of 30-something college friends, all very successful, living a very good life in the Chicago area, who reunite after a decade apart to form a journal writing group. They meet regularly to share their journals. I just didn't buy it. Does anyone know six adult people, men and women, gay and straight, who would meet as a group to share their journals, even in the days before there were blogs?

So....have you any "unfinished" books? Admit it. Time to come clean. And, if you think you'd like to read Rocket Man or When You Don't See Me let me know. I have two perfectly good copies that are looking for a home in exchange for a guest review whether you like them or not.

Photo: Kraemer Building Under Construction, Anaheim. Anaheim Public Library.

Friday Picture Reading #7

Postures of Use, Enjoyment, From Jan Chipchase's blog, Future Perfect.