Fearless by Tim Lott

The Girl could hear sobbing from the front room.

Opening line of Fearless by Tim Lott.

In the not too distant future, in a totalitarian society, a girl called Fearless plans to escape the prison where she has grown up. She remembers, before she came to the City Community Faith School for re-education, that she had a mother and a grandfather who cared for her. She carries the mementos they gave her. Some of the other girls remember, too. If Fearless can make contact with their parents, they say, their parents will rescue them. If Fearless can find them, tell them the truth about the "school" they've been sent to, that they don't have enough food,that they don't have enough clothing to keep warm in winter, that they've had their names taken from them, then their parents will close the City Community Faith School and take them back home.

Tim Lott's novel Fearless travels deep inside Robert Cormier territory. While reading it, I couldn't help but think of Cormier's novels I Am the Cheese and The Bumblebee Flies Anyway and The Rag and Bone Shop all of which deal with children under the thumb of various totalitarian authorities. Fearless is not quite in the same league. I think it's afraid to be.

The main character, Fearless, refuses to submit to the constant, daily pressure to conform to all the rules of the City Community Faith School where she has spent the last several years of her young life. Conformity has its rewards. Girls who behave are ranked higher, given more privileges, placed in authority over other girls. But Fearless does not want to become an "A" girl. She does not want to be viewed as suitable for release; she wants to bring about an end to the prison itself. Sounds like The Chocolate War to me.

Fearless believes the only way the prison can continue to exist is that the adults on the outside do not know the truth about it. So she convinces the "A" girl in charge of the garbage, Stench, to let her escape by hiding in the trash cans that will be taken to the local dump. Fearless's attempts to escape and what happens afterwards make up for the bulk of Tim Lott's thriller.

Robert Cormier took a lot of heat during his lifetime for the bleak world view of his novels. Mr. Cormier did not think much of the world and his novels acted as warnings to their readers. Beware. This is what it's really like out there. This is what people will do to you if you give them a chance. Mr. Cormier wanted his readers to be angry at the way his books ended. He wanted them to be outraged, so outraged that they'd do something to make sure what happened in his books did not happen in the real world.

Mr. Lott almost goes the distance in Fearless, but he pulls his punches in the end. Fearless becomes a fable as a result when it could have been something more. I don't think it would have been something as good as The Chocolate War, but it could have been as good as I Am The Cheese or The Rag and Bone Shop. Instead, Fearless tries to offer its readers hope. But the hope he offers feels tacked on to a story that really doesn't have any. The book becomes the kind of comforting story that more sophisticated readers, even young ones, probably won't buy.

Short Story Sunday: "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was expecting P.G. Wodehouse. A story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Sounds like a comic tale of wealthy New Yorkers, probably full of witty repartee like one finds in a Jeeves and Wooster story. Instead of P.G. Wodehouse, I found H. Rider Haggard.


"A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is narrated by Fitzgerald's standard middle class young man, John T. Unger, who has found himself among the very rich. The narrator agrees to visit a school mates family ranch during a long semester break. His friend, Percy Washington, has bragged that his father owns a diamond as big as the Ritz hotel. John would like to see it.


John and Percy travel to the rugged Canadian border, somewhere in Montana, to the Washington family estate. John soon learns the family history. The original Washingtons arrived in Montana from the south, slaves in tow, discovered a diamond mine that held wealth beyond imagination. Should anyone discover the diamond mine, which turned out to be a single diamond as big as a mountain, the value of precious stones and money itself would immediately decline to near worthlessness. So the Washington family set about making sure that no one ever found their estate. They used their wealth to keep their land out of the land surveys, out of all contact with either Canada or the United States and turned their ranch into a sort of lost civilization, much like the forgotten kingdoms in the jungles of Africa that one finds in novels like She by H. Rider Haggard.


Fitzgerald's story follows the typical plot arc of lost kingdom novels. We learn how the place was kept secret over the generations. We get a tour of the place so it's wealth and opulence can be described and its social customs explained. The narrator falls in love with a local girl, Percy's sister. Finally, the ranch/kingdom falls and the narrator escapes, girl in tow. None of this should be considered a spoiler, you knew it would all happen didn't you--it always does. What's fun about stories like this one are the details, the explanations the author gives as to how it all works and how it all came about.


But this is not the sort of story I expected F. Scott Fitzgerald to write. Nor did the Saturday Evening Post, which typically paid him 1,500 dollars for a long story. "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was rejected as too long at 20,000 words. Fitzgerald cut it down to 15,000, but it was still rejected. It's not a very nice story--the Washington family keeps the source of their immense wealth a secret through intimidation and murder which may not have been suitable for the Saturday Evening Post. Fitzgerald eventually published it in The Smart Set and later in Tales of the Jazz Age.


If you'd like to read "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald the full text is here.




I listened to a podcast of "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" from The Classic Tales series of free podcasts. You can subscribe through iTunes or visit The Classic Tales Podcast website here.


Full disclosure: The picture of The Smart Set magazine comes from the University of South Carolina. They have a good article about the story there as well. I found the picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald at The Luxist.

Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge - Suggestions

Sandy at You've GOTTA Read This thought it might be helpful if I posted a list of suggestions for my first challenge, the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge. Many people like to post lists of specific books they'll be reading for their challenges though I prefer a more make things up as I go along kind of process.

In any case, I came up with a short list of possible book/movie combinations. Please feel free to list any suggestions you have as a comment or on your own site. I've tried to think of as wide a variety of books/movies as I could.

• Out of Africa
• Babette's Feast
• East of Eden
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• All the King's Men
• My Brilliant Career
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
• The Hours
• Atonement
• The Laughing Policeman
• Let the Right One In
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Road
• The Lord of the Rings
• Twilight
• New Moon
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Persepolis

I'm willing to include television series based on books in this challenge so if you're a fan of Dexter, Trueblood, or BBC adaptations, please feel free to join in.

To sign-up for the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge go here.

Dakota's Favorites: The Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis

Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis is one of my all time favorite books, so this will be another rare five star review. This is my third or fourth time through the novel, I can't remember which. By this time I could probably tell the story almost as well as Ms. Bakis does but I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book again none-the-less.

Lives of the Monster Dogs is the story of a group of elegantly dressed talking dogs that appear in Manhattan after rebelling against their human creators and escaping slavery in a remote northern Canadian wilderness. The dogs take the city by storm, becoming celebrities New Yorkers enjoy even if they do not completely believe the dogs are real. The story of the monster dogs is revealed through their interviews and friendship with a young reporter Cleo Pira, the papers and memoirs of several of the dogs, and through an opera written by one of the dogs.

This layering of the narrative helps bring the story to life by concealing much of the actual detail about the dogs. Because so much about the dogs remains unknown, the reader does not have to worry about how unlikely they are and can instead be swept up in their story. Their story: it is a terrible thing to be a dog and to know it. How can they interact as humans in a human society? What is their place in the world once they rebel against their masters who spent generations creating them?

In past readings I found the book to break down in its final chapters but I did not feel that way this time. The creators of the dogs were able to lengthen their lifespan but could not foresee the sickness that would eventually drive so many of the the dogs into madness. The dogs, once free from their creators, can live as they choose, however they cannot reproduce a new generation of monster dogs since the records of how to do so were destroyed in the rebellion. Their story, and most of their lives, end in a weeks long party held in their New York mansion/castle. Previously, I found this sequence to be directionless meandering but this time I found it quite haunting. I guess I know these dogs so well after so many reads that their demise produces a much greater since of loss.

I'll probably come back to Lives of the Monster Dogs again someday; I'm not listing the book on Paperbackswap.com and I'm storing it on a high shelf that Dakota cannot reach. Until then, I'm giving Lives of the Monster Dogs five out of five stars and my highest recommendation.

This review was first posted in November of 2007. I am pleased to say that Dakota has not been able to get her paws on my copy so far.

The Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge

I've been thinking about hosting a challenge for some time, now. But what sort of challenge?

Earlier this year Sandy Nawrot of You've Gotta Read This and I posted a book/movie review of Jose Saramago's Blindness. It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. Potential reading challenge idea?

The Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge is based on a simple idea--read a book, see a movie based on the book, include both in your review. Whether yours is a book blog or a movie blog, this could be a way to add some spice to your posts, expand your outlook, have some fun. Mostly, have some fun.

You don't have to write full reviews both the movie and the book. You can write a review of one then add a brief paragraph or just a sentence or two about the other at the end.

Here's how to join:

1. Select a challenge level:

• Matinee: one book/movie
• Double Feature: two books/movies
• Saturday Movie Marathon: four books/movies
• Film Festival: eight books/movies
• Festival Jury Member: ten books/movies

2. Copy and paste the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge button to your blog. (Optional. If you don't have a blog, you can still sign-up and play along. You can post reviews here.)

3. Sign up using Mr. Linky below. Please list your challenge level in a comment.

4. Get together a list of books/movies that you plan on reviewing. (Optional. You can just see what comes along during the year if you'd rather.)

I'll post monthly link lists so you can post links to your reviews here and I'll try to feature a few reviews each month.

The challenge will begin on New Year's Day 2010 and will last all year. There will be prizes. I don't know what the prizes will be yet, but expect several. I'm a big fan of giveaways. See here, here and here.

You can double count this challenge with any other challenges you're doing in 2010.

Hope you'll join and play along.....

The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness by John Waller

Somewhere amid the narrow lanes, the congested wharves, the stables, workshops, forges, and fairs of the medieval cith of Strasbourg, Frau Troffea stepped outside and began to dance.

Introduction to The Dancing Plague by John Waller

I found The Dancing Plague hard to believe on two levels.

First, I just find it hard to believe. In July of 1518, after several years of crop failure and hard times, a plague of uncontrolled dancing broke out in the city of Strasbourg. Eventually, over 400 people fell victim to an inexplicable and uncontrollable urge to dance that lasted for days resulting in bruised, bloody and broken feet and several deaths. The townspeople tried everything they could to stop the dancing. At one point they decided the dancers would simply have to continue until they were exhausted. So they herded them into a large hall and provided musicians to speed up the dancing in the hopes of ending the plague sooner. The victims came to believe that they were cursed by St. Vitus, known for healing those he favored and cursing those he did not. To remove the curse the dancers were packed into carts and taken to a hillside cave/shrine where priests performed a sort of exorcism on them. This worked. Many of the dancers were cured. Others gave up dancing after six or seven days. A few died.

I find that hard to believe.

To date, no one has discovered a scientific medical explanation for the dancing plague, which occured several times throughout the Medieval period in Europe. (The dancing plague is not the same as St. Vitus' dance, a disease characterized by spasms of uncontrolled twitching. The dancing plague, as described by those who witnessed it, was characterized by actual dancing.) Mr. Waller proposes that the victims of the 1518 outbreak were subject to a kind of psychic contamination. What began as a response to the extreme conditions of the time, spread from person to person, then from town to town. Frau Troffea, faced with years of a near starvation diet exacerbated by a clergy more concerned with making itself rich through the sale of indulgences than with caring for its flock and by her position as a woman in a society that viewed women as the meer property of their husbands responded to her condition by dancing herself into a trancelike state she could not escape from. Others saw her and found themselves joining in.

I find this hard to believe, too. I want a more scientific explanation, but to date, none has been found, nor does John Waller propose one.

He does present a highly readable account of the 1518 outbreak of the dancing plague along with a fascinating look at the social conditions that he believes led to it. This is Europe just before the Reformation, and Mr. Waller's account of the clergy helps place the desire for reform into perspective. The very organization that should have helped the poor during times of need had become so corrupt by the beginning of the 16th century that their monetary policies served to make the situation worse. The lower classes, already suffering from several years of crop failure and the low level starvation it produced, were faced with a clergy more concerned with lining their own pockets than with the physical and spiritual needs of the poor. Mr. Waller presents The Dancing Plague as an organic response to very troubled times.

There is not much hard evidence to support this theory, but there's very little to contradict it either. While I still find the whole thing hard to believe, I must admit that 1518 was still the age of faith, an age that produced the Children's Crusade and Jean d'Arc, an age that believed in the power of saints, witches, and the stars equally. An age that could produce large numbers of itenerant flagellants, beating themselves until they bled as a means of ending one plague could probably produce a plague of uncontrolled dancing.

Maybe I should keep an open mind. But 400 people dancing in the streets until their feet begin to bleed...... I don't know.


This book counts towards the Random Reading Challenge.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I might as well say, right from the jump: it wasn't my usual kind of job.

Opening sentence to People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Everyone thought I would love People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

The central plot concerns Hanna, the woman in charge of restoring the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a medieval Jewish book of prayer famous for its rare illustrations featuring people which were not commonly included in 15th century Jewish art. The Sarajevo Haggadah survived the centuries in spite of wars, pogroms, and inquisitions. Hanna's job is to repair the book and to investigate it's condition in order to learn as much of its history as can be learned. While taking the book apart in order to fix it, she finds a wine stain, an insect wing, and a piece of animal hair. The stories of how each of these ended up in the book are told in flashbacks that illustrate the history of European Jews as they reveal the history of the book itself. Her investigation leads Hanna to discover the secrets of her own family as well.

People of the Book is an entertaining read. Good historical fiction educates as it entertains which People of the Book does. If you're interested in learning about the history of European Jews, People of the Book is probably a good place to start. Their experience in Spain at the start of Isabella and Ferdinand's reign when all Jews were expelled, Venice under the inquisition a century later, Bosnia during the Nazi invasion of the Second World War are all covered in the flashback sections. Each flashback is a fully developed short story that would satisfy on their own and each builds a collective narrative of the Sarajevo Haggadah. Hanna's own story works both as a detective procedural, the processes she uses to restore and investigate the book are interesting, and as a family drama, she has a difficult relationship with her brain surgeon mother and starts a relationship with a man she meets in Sarajevo while investigating the book.

But things didn't come together for me. I found the ending hard to swallow, and that's all I'll say to avoid spoilers. I liked each flashback individually, but together they added up to an unbelievable story. Each item Hanna found in the book got there during a time of extreme hardship for the Jews, making the book a story of suffering throughout the centuries. Each incident depicted was tragic, terrible, important and should be remembered. But it just became too much for me. Didn't anybody ever read the Haggadah during a time of relative peace and quiet? Didn't anyone ever just happen to knock over a glass of something during a typical Seder meal? Did no one ever swat an insect that landed on the book on an ordinary day? There were some other plot incidents, mainly details around the strand of animal hair, that I found a bit hard to believe. Again, I won't give anything away here.

I read People of the Book for my book club which was split into three equal camps. One third of us think it's a terrific book, one of the best the club has read. One third of us think it's basically an airplane book. One third of us were not able to get a copy from our library because the waiting list is so long or because we mistakenly looked up Book of the People instead of People of the Book. Just another ordinary day at the book club.

Dakota Picks a Winner - Springtime on Mars

We rushed this little video a bit because it's looking like it might start to rain today.




You can find reviews of Springtime on Mars here, here and here.

Short Story Sunday starts back up again next week.

Friday Picture Reading #15

Dutch Girl Reading in a Cafe by TouTouke.

What the Dickens? What the Austen? What the Bronte?

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now?

At the end of the 19th century magazines ran the typical sort of century in review articles we saw ten years ago.  Literary critics of the day listed the authors they thought would still be considered great a 100 years later.  At the top, or very near the top of many lists was George Meredith author of Diana of the Crossways, The Egoist and The Ordeal of Richard Feveral.  Remember reading those in high school?  You probably didn't.  Jane Austen was still considered important at the end of the 19th century, but Dickens was disparaged by serious critics and the Brontes were still largely unacceptable.

So I hesitate to answer this week's Booking Through Thursday, for at least a hundred years.  It takes a long time to see who'll withstand the test of time.

But that's no fun. If you're not going to take a stand one way or another, why bother.

While it's still too early in her career to say for sure, based on the strength of Half a Yellow Sun, Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie looks very promising.  Half of a Yellow Sun has the sheer scope of a Charles Dickens novel.  Salmon Rushdie has often been compared to Dickens; when Rushdie's good, the comparison holds.  I think Midnight's Children is one of the best books of the 20th century. 

 I think Iris Murdoch measures up against Jane Austen, though she's morally an anti-Austen.  Both write about the difficulties of finding love.  Maybe Carol Shields is a better suggestion here.  Both are concerned with love though Murdoch is more of a literary stylist like Austen was than Shields.  I count Shields and Murdoch as part of my era, though I'm not sure they're a part of our era.  It's still too soon since their deaths to know if they'll survive the test of time.  I hope they do.  If you've not read either rush out right now and get copies of The Sea, The Sea and The Stone Diaries.

The question does not specify which Bronte.  This is probably an honest mistake on the part of the questioner, but it's a pretty good way to look at the Brontes' books.  It's entirely possible that we wouldn't still be reading any of them if they all hadn't written.  Part of the fun is comparing Emily to Charlotte to Anne.  I cannot think of any set of sibling authors who can hold a candle to them.  And, as far as I'm concerned, Wuthering Heights still stands alone on a hill, nothing else like it out there.

The Drinker by Hans Fallada

Of course I have not always been a drunkard.

Opening to The Drinker by Hans Fallada

2009 is the year of Hans Fallada as far as I'm concerned. I've not started my "best of" lists, but there is a very good chance that Hans Fallada will be my favorite author  based on Every Man Dies Alone which I read this summer and on The Drinker which was published in English this year. Hans Fallada, a German author who survived World War II by only a few years, wrote The Drinker while imprisoned in a German insane asylum following a drunken altercation with his wife that ended in gunfire. (No one was injured.)  While in the asylum, Fallada agreed to write an anti-semitic novel based on a court case about corrupt Jewish financiers in the 1920's. However, instead of writing the novel Joseph Goebbels expected, Fallada used the pencils and paper he was given to secretly write The Drinker, an autobiographical account of a respectable man whose life is ruined by alcoholism.

The Drinker is of interest on two levels. The novel stands on its own as a work of fiction. Its narrator, a successful, happily married business man, tells the story of his descent through drink to lower and lower rungs of society to his end in a psychiatric asylum from which he will never escape. As he sees it, he is the victim of a society that stacks the deck against him and of a wife who is out to get all his wealth and then abandon him. Every step of the way, the reader is aware that the narrator is unreliable, that what he tells us, how he sees events, is determined by his alcoholism. The narrator does not realize that he provides his readers with a case study in the effects of uncontrolled addiction to drink.

The Drinker is never a glamorous story. Hans Fallada is a realist, one who could stand toe-to-toe against Zola any day of the week. The narrator frequents neighborhood bars until he is banned from them. Then he frequents dive bars in worse parts of town. Eventually he is reduced to begging for drinks, until his wife agrees to take him back. He swears he will stop drinking, he will get the business back on its feet, he will be a good husband again. The moment things don't go his way, success doesn't come easily, he returns to the bars, steals his wife's money, falls in with a more criminal element and ends up in prison.

The Drinker is not just an excellent novel, it is a historical document. The account of alcoholism Hans Fallada presents is a record of what that experience was like in 1930's Germany. There was no 12-step program in place, no enlightened approach to treatment for alcoholics. The only option the narrator's wife has is to press charges against her husband as soon as she can, have him imprisoned, and determine whether or not to divorce him. He can't get help because there is none to be given. The asylum where he is eventually imprisoned for life, is not a place of treatment, nor one of refuge, but a dog-eat-dog world where each man struggles daily just to get enough food to keep himself alive another day. I'd like to think that asylums in Germany were much worse, but I imagine they were probably on par with the rest of the world in the 1930's.

Alcoholism is certainly still a serious problem, but things have improved over time. There has been progress. The disease itself is still as serious as it ever was, and those who suffer from it still find themselves losing everything like the narrator of The Drinker does. Fortunately, now when someone finally hits bottom, there are people and programs who can help with recovery.

Hans Fallada died in 1947. Hans Fallada's The Drinker is translated into English by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd.

The Drinker counts for the Random Reading Challenge.

Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling

Mouldering bone crumbled beneath their boots as Lord Mardus and Vargul Ashnazai lowered themselves down into the tiny chamber beneath the earthen mound.

Opening prologue to Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling

Shortly after his father's death, young Alec finds himself imprisoned by the local lord, accused of a crime he did not commit. He expects to be executed soon when a strange man named Seregil is made his cellmate. Alec does not know it, but Seregil is an expert thief and a well trained spy. When Seregil makes his escape from their dungeon cell, he takes Alec along and offers to make him his apprentice. Alec takes him up on the offer, though he knows little about Seregil.

What follows is a swashbuckling adventure in the true old-fashioned sense of the term. While trying to get back to the capitol city where his wizard employer awaits Seregil's report, Alec and Seregil face several adversaries whom they must either defeat in battle or outsmart through thievery. Seregil is a master of disguise and able to do some magic, since he belongs to an elvish sort of race. There is plenty of fun in the first half of the novel as the two face various attempts on their lives.

There's quite a bit of fun in the second half, too, but the story does become a bit overwhelmed by the political scheming going on in the capitol city. So much that the book begins to suffer from too much talking. There's a great deal of exposition to get out of the way before things can get back to the fun the first half of the book was having.

And, it turns out, Seregil is gay. It's difficult to say for certain, he is a bit in love with Alec and he has been in love with one of the other male characters in the novel, but he is a sort of elf and has loved women as well as men in his youth. But he is at least bi-sexual, and none of the other characters seem to be bothered by it at all. Alec is a little uncomfortable about it at first--he is from the countryside where such things are frowned on--but he moves quickly to acceptance. Though Alec is unaware that Seregil has feelings for him up to the end of the book, I expect the author will return to this issue in the next part.

Luck in the Shadows is the first book in a series about Seregil and Alec. I've got the second one in my TBR stack. I'm looking forward to it.



The books counts towards the Random Reading Challenge.

Short Story Sunday: Giveaway! Springtime on Mars by Susan Woodring

I'm taking a break from reviewing short stories today to offer a special giveaway. I finished the last three stories in Susan Woodring's collection Springtime on Mars, reviewed here, here and here, so I'm going to give away my copy. Lately there has been some anti-giveaway chatter on a couple of book blogs that I read regularly. Frankly, I don't care. I love giveaways. Dakota loves choosing the winner. (See here.) What's not to like about free stuff?

If you'd like a chance to win Springtime on Mars just leave a comment below. You have until Saturday night to enter. Dakota will choose the winner Sunday morning. I'll ship anywhere in the world. I plan on getting back to short story reviews after Thanksgiving break starts.

Dakota's Favorites: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton changed the children's book world forever. Her story of a gang of boys in Oklahoma set the standard for a new kind of realistic, hard-edged fiction that had not been seen in books for adolescents before. It's also a truly fine work.

First written when the author was only 15, and published when she was a college Freshman, The Outsiders taps into the mindset of its young audience and shows them a truth only they completely understand. It's the perfect book for 13-16 year olds, the book they didn't know they needed. To read it as an adult is to be taken back to a time when they world was a new and terrifying place.

The Outsiders is the story of Ponyboy Curtis, his brothers and his friends, and how they try to get through their lives as poor social outcasts, rivals to the Socs who are the rich kids, the ones with all the breaks. Ponyboy's story becomes dramatic in the opening pages when he is jumped by a car full of Socs. The same car-full sets the main story in motion later that night when they again attack Ponyboy and his friend Johnny who kills one of them in self-defence. The story of Ponyboy and Johnny's flight from the police and their return as heroes make up the bulk of the novel.

S.E. Hinton understands her characters and her audience but panders to neither. She presents a grim picture of America but she provides enough hope for Ponyboy's future to leave her readers with a bittersweet ending. Over 30 years since its first publication, The Outsiders does not feel dated. Once we're inside the world of early 1960's Oklahoma, we could be anywhere in America on the wrong side of town. The greasers may have different names now-a-days, they may not listen to Elvis anymore, but their families are just as messed up, they still have problems the school system cannot fix, and they still get the same reaction when "nice people" meet them in movie theatres.

This is probably my 10th time through The Oustiders. One of my students asked if I read the book every time and if I ever get tired of it. The honest answer is that I do read it every time and that I'm not tired of it yet. I'm excited by how much my students are moved by it. Almost every student I've ever had loves the book, is surprised by the book, is moved by the book on some level. It's the perfect book for 7th graders. Students who would never read a realistic novel find that realistic novels have something to say to them about their lives when they read The Outsiders.

I really can't praise The Outsiders enough. I'm giving it five out of five stars.

This review was first posted in November of 2007. I'll be starting The Oustiders again with a new batch of seventh graders in about a week. I'm looking forward to it.

BTT: Life is Too Short for Bad Books

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation.

That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.

Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?

If I'm not enjoying a book, I do not read it.  To be honest, I don't understand why people read books they don't like.  Unless you're in school and have to read a book for a test, or if you've taken an ARC with the understanding that you'll read and review a book, why would you keep reading?

I have walked out of movies that I was not enjoying.  I've left theatrical productions at intermission many times.  I've even left the ball park after the seventh inning.  If the first half of something is bad, it's very unlikely that the second half will be worth sticking around for.  

I'd rather just leave and go have dinner.

Full disclosure:  The photo comes from Cheetah Velour, which is a fun blog more people should check out.  

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Ruler of the Free Republic of Aburiria, but the most frequent on people's lips were five.

Opening to Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

I loved this book, but I've no idea where to begin or what to say about it.

Fall back on plot summary, you say. Well........

The Wizard of the Crow is about the probably crazed ruler of a fictional African nation, his underlings, their attempt to build a tower that will reach up to heaven called "Marching to Heaven," and the ruler's subsequent illness which causes him to well up like a big balloon. The ruler's efforts to get funding from the World Bank for "Marching to Heaven" are thwarted by the Wizard of the Crow, a powerful sorcerer who seems determined to undermine the government by convincing every citizen in the nation to leaven their homes and queue up outside government buildings bringing the country to a standstill. In "reality," the Wizard of the Crow is two people, a man and a woman, both down on their luck, both opposed to the government, who declared themselves a wizard to prevent the police from entering their home and arresting them.

You can see my problem.

Clearly Wizard of the Crow is satire, but the subject of its satire is not a subject I'm familiar enough with to get all of the jokes or to determine if the book is good satire. For example....

One of the government ministers develops a condition that leaves him able to speak only a single word, "If." Both he and his wife become gravely concerned that he'll face ruin if his condition is discovered so they seek help from the Wizard of the Crow. Through a complicated examination that largely involves looking at the minister's reflection in mirrors, the Wizard of the Crow determines that the he suffers from whiteache. Since he has risen has high as a black African can rise, the only way for him to achieve a greater position is to become a white man. His case of whiteache is so severe that he is unable to say anything but "If," short for "If only I was a white man." The Wizard of the Crow is able to cure him by convincing him that if he became a white man the chances are that he would be a poor, undereducated white man with little money or position since this is what most white Europeans actually are. The minister is cured. Later in the novel this same minister visits America where his whiteache returns once he realizes that if he were a white American man he could become anything. The minister proceeds to have his arms and legs replaced with the limbs of a white man. Once he reveals this to the people back home, they are forced to acknowledge he is a very powerful wizard himself, capable of changing into a white man.

Whether or not Wizard of the Crow is for you depends on your reaction to this sort of scene. If you can play along with the satire and the humor, I think you'll enjoy Wizard of the Crow. If this sort of thing irritates you, avoid the book. I found it to be great fun, an African Voltaire. The satire is cutting, the story is fascinating. Wizard of the Crow won't leave you with a factual education but it will help you understand Africa and the longstanding problems with so many African national governments. It's all too easy to link the fictional leader with figures like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

I don't know quite what to make of the sorcery in Wizard of the Crow. Early in the novel it struck me that Ngugi was having fun with belief in sorcery. I've no idea how widespread these beliefs are among African people so it's difficult for me to say just how insulting Ngugi's portrayal of them could potentially be. All of the characters in the book believe that sorcery is real, even the two who start out faking it to escape the police come to believe that they really are the Wizard of the Crow. Neither the narrator, nor the narrative itself, do anything to suggest that sorcery is anything but real as far as I can tell. Someone with more knowledge of African sorcery would probably get much more out of Wizard of the Crow than I did. That said, I still loved the book.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, who writes in his native language, Gikuyu and then translates his own work into English, has lived in exile from his homeland, Kenya for several decades. It's easy to see how this experience colors his view of African politics, and easy to see why governments like the one he describes in Wizard of the Crow would force him to leave. One thing a dictator cannot stand is criticism.

Wizard of the Crow counts towards the Random Reading Challenge.

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides

One morning in mid-August 1846, in the cool hours before dawn, the New Mexican villagers of Las Vegas slumbered anxiously. The Americanos were coming.

Opening to Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides.

It is possible to study history by studying the lives of certain key people in history. One of the key people in American history, at least in the history of the American West, is Kit Carson. An illiterate early pioneer, Carson was a mountain man trapper who joined the Army of the West on its 1846 invasion of Santa Fe and what became New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada. He remained in the west his entire adult life, participating the the Bear Flag revolt that led to California statehood and in the decades long battle between the Navajo nation and the United States. Along the way, he fought in the western most battles of the Civil War and became an American legend, in spite of his mixed feelings about the publicity he received.

In his book Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides covers as much of Carson's life as it's possible to cover. Carson dictated an autobiography but left behind little record of his own life to contradict the novelizations of it that eastern publishers were cranking out to sell to a public anxious for stories of the wild west. Sides is able to go into detail about Carson's life by going into detail about the lives of those who knew him and those who participated in the same struggles he did. This makes Blood and Thunder a comprehensive account of America's expansion into the southwest.

This focus on people who knew Carson is not without its downside. While the people Mr. Sides discusses are interesting, few people in the American West of the 19th century could help but be interesting, they are not Kit Carson. When the book strays from its main subject, which it does often for entire chapters at a time, it becomes less interesting, at times even a big of a slog. The other problem with a book focusing on Kit Carson is that he is not an entirely sympathetic character. It's difficult to come up with truly heroic people when looking at the history of the American West. Carson was certainly a man who deserved much admiration, but he also deserved much scorn. The Bear Flag Revolt, which led to California's independence from Mexico began with a double murder. What was done to the Navajo nations, as well as to many of the other tribes dealt with in Blood and Thunder, leaves little to admire in those who fought them.

This leads to my main problem with Blood and Thunder. While I do not think Mr. Sides is in any way attempting to whitewash Kit Carson, not to write an uncritical heroic account of America's westward expansion, I kept thinking how differently this story would be portrayed had it been written by a Native American scholar, or by a Mexican one. Mr. Sides does discuss things like Carson's scotched earth policy against the Navajos which led to the deaths by starvation of 1000's of non-combatant men, women and children. He even mentions, briefly, the fact that after end of the Civil War, many whites in New Mexico, including Carson, kept Native Americans as slaves in their own households. Mr. Sides book does a fair job of balancing the heroic history so many readers want with the reality of what went on on the ground, but only a fair job.

This book completes the Dewey Decimal Challenge. It's a 900 book. Whew, I didn't think I'd finish that one.

Short Story Sunday: 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die Updated

When I last posted an update list there were 304 titles on it. Since then there have been some more suggestions.

Suggested by Teresa:

Conrad, Joseph: "The Secret Sharer"
Crane, Stephen: "The Open Boat"
Hurst, James: "The Scarlet Ibis"
Joyce, James: "Eveline"
London, Jack: "To Build a Fire"
O'Conner, Flannery, "Good Country People"
Tolkein, JRR: "Leaf by Niggle"

Suggested by Tracy:

Bingham, Sallie: "Benjamin"
Bloom, Amy: "Love Is Not a Pie"
Cable, George Washington: "Belles Demoiselles Plantation"
Child, Lydia Marie: "The Quadroons"
Chopin, Kate: "Desiree's Baby"
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: "The Speckled Band"
Ellison, Ralph: "Battle Royal"
Faulkner, William: "That Evening Sun"
Hemingway, Ernest: "Big Two-Hearted River, Part I"
Hemingway, Ernest: "Big Two-Hearted River, Part II"
Hemingway, Ernest: "Indian Camp"
Hemingway, Ernest: "Soldier's Home"
Lahiri, Jhumpa: "Sexy"
O'Conner, Flannery: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
Poe, Edgar Allan: "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Stevenson, Robert Louis: "The Bottle Imp"

Suggestions from Book PSmith:

The First Seven Years by Bernard Malamud
Brother Gaily by the Grimm brothers
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers
I Pine for Thee by Elizabeth Enright

Instead of re-posting the entire list again, I've added these titles to it. You can see the current full list here. This brings the current total to 333.

If you have a story you'd like to add to the list, to help reach the goal of 1001 short stories, please let me know in a comment. If you've read a short story this week that you'd like to share please feel free to leave a link. I'll post an updated list of short stories towards the end of 2009.

Next up....New Jersey

We lost in Maine. A slight majority of voters in the state of Maine decided that my marriage is not equal to theirs and should not be recognized as such.

The state of New Jersey looks like it may take up the issue in the lame-duck session of their state legislature. Their current governor has said that he will sign a bill granting equality to all citizens of New Jersey. The governor elect will not.

Garden State Equality is already running ads.




The fight goes on. There is only one way this fight will end.

Ever wonder what it would be like if your marraige was put to a vote by the people of your state? I would vote yes. You should be able to marry the person you love.

Friday Picture Reading #14

Old Man Reading by fuksija.

Who You Gonna Believe? BTT: Biography vs. Autobiography

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

Which do you prefer? Biographies written about someone? Or Autobiographies written by the actual person (and/or ghost-writer)?

Just by chance, I saw Oprah Winfrey introduce James Frey to her reading audience. His book, A Million Little Pieces, was her book club selection; her introduction of it was difficult to resist. They author's mother was in the audience. It was very exciting. I bought a copy and brought it to my own book club and convinced them that we should give it a go.

I didn't like the book, I found the writing style annoying past my point of toleration, and I found it a little hard to believe. A Million Little Pieces claimed to be the true story of the author's drug addition and recovery. In it, among other things, he claims to have undergone dental surgery without the use of anesthetic. Pain killers are forbidden to those in recovery from drug addiction. We all should have known. At least those of us who saw Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.

Sometime later, again just by chance, I saw Oprah Winfrey confront James Frey about the lies he told in A Million Little Pieces. The author's mother was not in the audience.

Most of my favorite autobiographies have turned out to be lies. West With the Night by Beryl Markham is a bang-up account of the author's life as a bush pilot in Northern Africa during the 30's and 40's. Even Earnest Hemingway was a fan, praising the author's writing as among the best of their generation. I still think it's a marvelous book even after it was revealed that her husband wrote every word.

Lillian Helmen's collection of autobiographal essays Pentimento featured the essay that became the basis for the Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave movie Julia. In it Helman claimed she had a friend who died working with the underground against the Nazis. The bulk of the essay is about the time Helman smuggled a suitcase full of money into Germany for her friend Julia. It turns out Helman never let the truth stand in the way of a good autobiographical essay. It's still a darn good essay and a darn good movie. Vanessa Redgrave certainly deserved the Academy Award she refused to accept.

While I don't trust autobiographies to give me anything close to historical truth, I do enjoy them if they are well written. I tend to read autobiographies of authors rather than other celebrities, politicians or historical figures. If you look at an autobiography as a sort of novel, you can find a kind of truth in them, but it's a novelistic truth, not an historical one.

For historical truth, I turn to biography. I don't read many of these, maybe one or two a year, but I trust them more. Historians have reputations as historians or as biographers that they want to maintain, so they're less likely to make things up. They have no reason, or at least much less reason, to make their subjects look good. A biographer does not even have to like the subject to write a good biography. One should still be skeptical, still insist on documentation and footnotes, but I just trust biography much more than I do autobiography.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

This is the first time I've tried to write a review of a poetry collection. Where do I begin? There is no plot to summarize. There are no characters but the poet's voice.



Howl is a poem most Americans have heard of but few have read. (Okay, this is probably true for most American poems.) It's easy to see why it upset so many people, why the City of San Francisco would try to seize all copies of it as obscene back in 1956 when it was first published in a small local edition.

Howl takes its form from Walt Whitman's long lists of Americans, the poems like I Hear American Singing which listed person after person forming a great catalogue of the people, largely men, one would find in America. Many people have no patience for those poems, the ones that define Whitmanesque, but I love them. Whitman understood just how big America was, that it encompassed everything. His poems celebrate the America that includes all there is to find on earth. It's sheer size a wonder.


While Whitman celebrates all of America, he doesn't go lower down the social ladder than the working class. Ginsberg's Howl goes all the way down, to the bottom. The America he hears, is not singing, but screaming. It's an America full of junkies, impoverished students, starving artists, petty criminals, communists, homosexuals, outcasts all. And Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a stay in a psychiatric institution.


There is much to admire and to enjoy in Howl and Other Poems. While the poems do not feel dated to me, they do fell like I'm a little too old for them. These are poems for a younger person. Their rage, their disillusion, is largely that of youth. But there is this one little poem towards the end that spoke to me, spoke to me in a way that only poetry can. Here are a few stanzas from it.

Song

The weight of the world

is love.

Under the burden

of solitude,

uner the burden

of dissatisfation

the weight,

the weight we carry

is love.

.....

The warm bodies

shine together

in the darkness,

the hand moves

to the center

of the flesh,

the skin trembels

in happiness

and the sould comes

joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,

that's what

I wanted,

I always wanted,

I always wanted,

to return to

to the body

where I was born.

This is my first review in the Random Reading Challenge.

Full disclosure: The photograph of Allen Ginsberg comes from Ed's First Blog.

Incantation by Alice Hoffman

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.

Opening paragraph to Incantation by Alice Hoffman

What do you do when the whole world turns against you?

Estrella de Madrigal has a good life. The beautiful daughter of a successful businessman, she is well on her way to a good marriage when trouble comes to her home town of Encaleflora, Spain. The year is 1500, a new age has dawned. But when an ancient hatred rears it's head, Estrella finds her family is the target. The Spanish Inquisition has come to Encaleflora, looking for Jews posing as Christians. Estrella does not know it, but her family is secretly Jewish.

Incantation by Alice Hoffman is a problematic novel. The opening sections are entertaining, if not compelling, but they contain some things that are hard to swallow. All Jews were expelled from Spain or forced to convert in 1492, the money confiscated from them was used to finance Columbus's first voyage to America, so how can there be an openly Jewish community like the one Hoffman describes in 1500? Estrella's family has made their Jewish faith a secret, but their small town contains both a Jewish and a Muslim ghetto. Then there is also the issue of Estrella's pet pig. The neighbors all raise pigs for food, but Estrella's family lets her keep one in the house as a pet. No one in her family will eat pork; they claim they prefer vegetable sausages instead. I've been around pigs. While they are an underestimated animal in general, I find it hard to accept that a girl in medieval Spain would keep one as a pet and let it sleep with her in an upstairs bedroom. And how is it that none of Estrella's Christian friends ever offered her a sausage?

Halfway through the novel, things change. Once Estrella finds out that her family is Jewish, once the inquisition arrests her grandfather, the novel becomes a page turner. Any concerns I had about historical accuracy vanished, and I became engrossed in the plot. While there were no happy endings for Jewish families during the inquisition, and Ms. Hoffman's novel remains true to the historical period, Incantation still manages to provide a hopeful ending for Estrella.

So I'm left with mixed feelings about Incantation. I did get a small set of books for my students to use in their book clubs at our school's recent book fair. I expect their reviews will be mixed as well.

Vote No on 1

One last clip from the No on One campaign.




The election is tomorrow. The citizens of Maine will have the opportunity to determine just what kind of state they live in. It's a rare opportunity. I hope things go better in Maine than they did here in California last year.

Short Story Sunday: The Moth Podcast

Do these really count as short stories?

One of my favorite "short story" podcasts is The Moth. The Moth features a wide range of people telling true stories, in front of a live audience and without notes. Some of the guests are ordinary folks, some of them are professional authors. I've heard Lt. Dan Choi tell about his experiences coming out as a gay man in the U.S. Army, author Richard Price's story about one night riding with the New York Police Department, and Jessie Klein's account of her sister's Jewish wedding at Disney World. Turns out Mickey and Minnie do know how to dance the Hora.

Stories from The Moth typically have at least a few laughs in them, but they are not always comical. Richard Price's account of a routine police encounter reveals much about American society. The officers see a black man riding a bicycle with a young white boy on the handlebars. They stop him and soon suspect something is wrong only to find the man is dating the boy's mother and the boy has been through this experience of "police harassment" so many times he's begun to be traumatized by it. Price is an expert story teller, able to keep the audience on the side of the police officers so that we are forced to look at our own prejudices rather than simply comdemn the police for theirs.

Jessie Klein's story is not safe for work but it's very funny. Still single, she is to be a bridesmaid for her younger sister who is getting married at Disney World the day after Ms. Klein's birthday. She is doing this in spite of her parents hatred for Walt Disney, who is known for his anti-semitism. Her sister has paid extra to have the characters attend the reception. Ms. Klein, while in a state of jet-lagged drunkenness determines that she will seduce one of the characters. Her encounter with Dale, one half of the chipmonk characters Chip n Dale, does not go as planned.

Lt. Dan Choi is not someone I expected to be a good story-teller, but he is. His story covers much more ground than the typical Moth story does. Most Moth stories cover a single incident, but Lt. Choi's covers a wide section of his own life, his career in the army as a West Point Graduate and an Arabic Language Specialist. In West Point he was taught to tell the truth above all, even before he was taught how to salute. As an Arabic Language Specialist he was forced to lie about the person he fell in love with. Then he was discharged.

So are these short stories? They do come in at under 15 minutes of listening time, perfect for a shorter commute or a break from your usual radio listening. I'll argue that they are drafts of short stories. It is clear that many, if not all, of the story-tellers on The Moth have rehearsed their tales, but the results often have an impromptu quality to them. So they're not final drafts. But they could be. They could be set down on paper and made official short stories. I expect that if The Moth becomes a big success, they probably will.

You can subscribe to The Moth for free through iTunes or at their website.