Sunday Salon: A Book Club Delimma

My book club is meeting today, and it's my turn to select the book.

I've been thinking about which book to choose for several weeks now, actually, more like several months. The last book I picked was Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimimanda Ngozie Adiche which everyone loved. The one before that was Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris which got very mixed reviews. Go figure.

Lately, the books my book club has read have been a bit pedestrian: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Raven Black, The People of the Book. These are all good books, but they're not going to change anyone's life, not the way a book like Half of a Yellow Sun does. I think everyone is afraid to pick something that will upset anyone too much. I think books should upset us. I think what seperates a great book from all the rest is that it upsets the way we view the world somehow. That doesn't mean it can't also be funny, or fun. I'm not on an endless quest to be made depressed, but I'm not jonesing for something to make me comfortable numb either. I think that's what network television is for.
However, there are six other regular members of the book club who are likely to stone me with bits of quiche at the next meeting if I make them read something that pushes them over the edge.

Hence my problem.

So, I'm putting the question out there for Sunday Saloners and anyone else who happens by this morning. I'm leaving for my book club at 9:15 Pacific Time with five books in my trunk. I'm still undecided about which one to select so any suggestions are welcome be they pro or con. The five "nominees" are:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Basically, I think everyone in the world should read this book. I've gushed on and on about it here several times. I read it for the first time just about a year ago and already want to read it again. But it's non-fiction, kind of a memoir, kind of a book on psychiatry. My book club does not have a very good record with memoir. We got severely burning by that whole Million Little Pieces business and by the Mutant Message Down Under. It was very unfortunate.

Blood Done Sign my Name by Timothy B. Tyson. Non-fiction again, about race in America. 1970. A black man is killed in public in a Southern town. No one is held accountable by the white run justice system until the black community stands up and fights back. There's a new movie based on the book coming out soon. It's won awards. Looks very good. Been on my TBR shelf for some time.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. I remember loving this one when I read it back in grad school and I plan on re-reading it this year for the Book/Movie challenge. I've not seen the movie yet because I want to re-read the book first.

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann. I confess. I got an ARC of this book and have not read it yet. It won the National Book Award and is a best seller, something my book club might read anyway. It takes place during 1974 in New York City during the summer that saw a man walk across a tight rope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. (If you haven't seen Man on a Wire, the documentary about this, go rent it today. It's wonderful.)

Caucasia by Danzy Senna. Currently, the one I'm leaning toward choosing. I loved Symptomatic, her other novel. I was haunted by it for days after reading it. I fact, I still think about it sometimes. This one is about two mixed race sisters--one looks just like their white mother, the other just like their black father. It's one of the books the narrator of The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things was reading. I find it oddly fun to read books recommended by fictional characters in other books.

Any thoughts? Are you in a book club? What will you select when it's next your turn to choose the book?

The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher

When we were in grade school most kids thought Eddie Profit was stupid because he would ask questions no one else would think of.

Opening line to The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher.

I'm taking a chance with The Sledding Hill. 

The story is narrated by Billy, a teenager who dies in the opening pages of the book.  His spirit sticks around to keep an eye on his best friend Eddie who lost his father only a few months before Billy died in a freak accident.  Eddie is not having an easy time of it.  Even before Eddie's father and Billy died, Eddie had difficulties in school and a sometimes troubled relationship with his mother.  Eddie's mother wants him to be baptised into the fundamentalist church she attends.  Once his father dies, Eddie's mother starts bringing Rev. Tarter, who also teaches history at the high school Eddie attends, over for dinner on a regular basis.  After Billy dies, Eddie decides to stop talking, his only defense against a world that has turned on him.  Rev. Tarter respects Eddie's silence in class, but lets him know that he'll have to talk if he wants to be baptized.  He first must tell his story to the assemble congregation. 

Trouble is, Eddie doesn't want to join the reverend's church.  The reverened is actively trying to push religion in the high school where he teaches--trying to get his students to become vocal oppenents to evolution in science class and to force the school librarian to stop using a controversial book with the contemporary literature class she teaches. Eddie's not saying anything about any of this to anyone, except for Billy's father who still works at the high school as a custodian and to the ghost of Billy, whom Eddie is not quite sure he believes in. 

Adult readers, especially Chris Crutcher's readers,  know by now that a show down is coming, that Eddie is going to make a big speech in front of Rev. Tarter's church.  The Sledding Hill builds to its climax slowly but effectively, revealing more about the Rev. Tarter, the town the book is set in, and the students at Eddie's high school as events head to what must be one of the more interesting Sunday's any fundamentalist church has ever spent.  Secrets are revealled; we find out that a minor character who attends Rev. Tarter's church comes out just before Eddie's final confrontation scene. However, Mr. Crutcher wrote The Sledding Hill specifically for middle school age readers, I'm told at the request of Middle School teachers and librarians, so the  controversial subject matter is not on the same level as it is in his other books like Whale Talk or Ironman. 

Still, I'm taking a chance by adding it to my class book club library.  Hope it's worth it.

Friday Picture Reading: Rembrandt

Rembrandt. Philosopher Reading. 1631. Oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden.

This Side of Paradise by Steven L. Layne

I'm not sure if I can point to one single event that led to my father's decision to move us to Paradise.

Opening line to This Side of Paradise by Steven L. Layne

Steven Layne owes Ira Levin a beer. 

Mr. Layne's entertaining Young Adult thriller concerns two boys, brothers, who are moving to the gated community of Paradise.  Their father, who has become more and more distant lately, works for the head of the corporation that owns and runs Paradise as a sort of company town.  It's perfect there.  Clean streets, no crime, excellent schools, beautiful parks, wonderful homes.  Everything safe and secure, nothing anyone ever need worry about could possible intrude.  Paradise.

The narrator is the good son.  His brother is not really a bad kid--he pushes the limits and questions the rules in a good-natured way--but he is always in some trouble with his school or with his father.  Maybe a move to Paradise will do him some good, or so his father thinks.  Things have become so bad between the two boys and their father that it has begun to take a toll on their mother's mental health.  One day just before they move the two boys return home to find she has gone to a sort of convention for a week to rest and recharge.  She'll meet them in Paradise.

But the woman the boys find waiting for them is not their mother.  She may look like their mother, but they know it's not her.

While This Side of Paradise is not exactly an original idea, it is a good book, one that many young readers will enjoy.  The narration is taut, designed to keep the pages turning and to leave the reader desperate to begin the next chapter.  The boys are easy to identify with and to root for.  There is a brief romance that doesn't get in the way of the thriller's plot.  The villians are fun to hate and the good guys are fun to root for.  The book does raise issues of conformity and can be read as social satire, the same way Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives could, but this never interferes with the reader's enjoyment of the book as a straightforward thriller. 

I have a group of 7th grade students currently reading This Side of Paradise for the class book club.  So far, their reviews are good.  Three other groups are signed up for a chance to read it before the school year ends.  I think it's going to be very popular.

Admit One: My Life in Film by Emmett James

If I could tell you just one thing about my life it would be this: My alter ego was once a very famous man.

From the introduction to Admit One by Emmet James

What are the key movies in your life?  Perhaps not your favorite movies, but the movies that stand out as important moments in your personal history, the ones the represent significant periods of time or events or people in your past? 

Actor Emmett James  uses this question to frame each chapter of his memoir Admit One: My Life in Film.  You've probably not heard of Emmett James.  He has had a moderately successful career, judging from his profile on the Internet Movie Data Base--20 acting credits ranging from voice work to regular roles on a short-lived television series to a supporting role in James Cameron's Titanic.  The one with Leonardo and Kate.  His memoir, Admit One, follows hs  life from childhood in England to a struggling, then promising career as an actor in Hollywood.  Each chapter is framed by a particular movie, one that Mr. James found important at that point in his life.

I like the idea.  In fact, we share  a few movies in common: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Star Wars: A New Hope, The Elephant Man, The Amityville Horror, Taxi Driver, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  (A confession--my mother wouldn't allow my little brother and me to see The Amityville Horror though I did get my hands on a copy of the book which I devoured in secret, and in my day there was just Star Wars...none of this New Hope business.)  When Mr. James writes about how thrilling it was to see Sindbad fight an army of skeletons, I could identify.  I remember.  Those stop-motion animation monsters, once state of the art, that inspired Mr. James to pursue an acting career inspired my friends and I to try our own hand at film making.  All we needed was my best friend's father's Super 8 camera, a cable for the shutter, a backyard sandbox and my little brother's plastic dinosaurs.  (Another confession-- half of the dinosaurs were mine.)

While suburban California where I grew up is a long way from the working class England of Mr. James's childhood, I found the first half of Admit One nostalgic reading.  We're bound together by a common love of the same childhood movies.  (I wonder if Avatar will inspire the same sort of amateur film making.  I hope it does.)  The second half of Admit One follows Mr. James's journey to Hollywood and his attempt to become a professional actor.  Success does not come easily.  There are roles he'd rather not talk about, both small and large, a few respectable acting gigs here and there, then a big break, a part in a full scale Hollywood production.  The kind they don't make anymore.  Titanic. 

A good idea can hinder a memoir as well as help it.  At first the the events in each chapter stick close to the movie that frames them.  Mr. James's childhood need not match the reader's childhood if the two share the love of the same movie.  We were all watching Star Wars at that age, or whatever our era's Star Wars was.  This makes it easy to identify with young Emmett  even if the theatres we attended were radically different.  It seems odd that the closer Mr. James gets to a career in movies the farther away the chapters in Admit One get from the films that frame them.  A few offer little more than ironic commentary on the events they describe, and the narration becomes snarkier, more worldly-wise.  By then end of the book I began to miss the little boy who loved movies so much.

But it just may be too hard to love movies like a child does once you're in the world that makes them.  The Hollywood Mr. James ends up in does not live up to his expectations.  One day an agent calls--get to the set right now; you're needed for a scene. Full of hope, the young actor arrives on set to be sent to the make-up trailer.  He is stripped, shaved, dressed in a bikini with large balloons stuffed in the top.  The scene, a boxing rink.  The part, a woman boxer.  The reason an actor was hired instead of an actress, the visual joke of punching a woman's oversized chest.  This is not the worst thing that happens to the aspiring actor.  Mr. James makes a living but it's not the one he dreamed of when he was a little boy amazed by the sight of Sindbad fighting an army of skeletons.

Maybe one day....

Full Disclosure: I received a free autographed copy  of Admit One from the publisher. 

The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin

During her last year my mother grew obsessive about the emblems of empire: the Union Jack, the Tower of London, the Queen, and Mrs. Thatcher.

Opening to The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin

Instead of a typical review I respond to the blurbs on the back cover:

"A fine novel, remarkable for the purity of its ambitions."---The Washington Post Book World.

The Story of the Night is a fine novel.  Very well written, reading it feels like spending a long weekend hearing all the details about a new acquaintance's history.  The more I read it, the more I enjoyed it.  But I have no idea what "the purity of its ambitions" even means so I can't say how remarkable they are.  I don't think there's very much that is remarkable about The Story of the Night.  The narrator, Richard, goes from rags to riches, from loveless to loved, only to face losing it all.  There's not much remarkable in that story. 

"This is one of the most absorbing new novels I've read in quite some time."---The Irish Times.

I agree.  The narrator, Richard, is an Argentinian of English descent.  When the novel opens he is still living in his mother's apartment.  She is disappointed with how her life has turned out, having left England to marry an Argentinian who died leaving her to raise a son in a strange land.  This gives Richard an odd outsider status in his homeland which he never really overcomes.  But he is able to use that to his advantage after meeting an American couple who take a liking to him and set him up as a public relations/escort person for wealthy oil industry executives keen on buying up Argentina's newly privatized oil industry.  The business and the politics of the novel are soon subsumed by the romance Richard begins with Pablo, the son of a former political boss now trying to get himself democratically elected to office in Argentina's first elections after the Falkland's war.  The Story of the Night becomes almost an escapist read with so many wealthy people living the high life in Buenos Aires.

A smart literary novel that is also a satisfying page-turner."  ---Out.

Smart and literary yes.  The Story of the Night precedes Mr. Toibin's Booker nominated The Master by almost ten years, but even in this early work it's clear that he was an author worth watching.  But page-turner no.  I've read many a page-turner and The Story of the Night is not one of them.  Reading it one might become so absorbed that time flies by a bit, but it's not a book you'll stay up late reading on a school night if there's a big test the next day. 

"Toibin's simple but eloquent telling of this personal story is sometimes explicit, often moving, and always vivid in its portrayal of Argentina and its people." ---Library Journal (starred review).

True. 

"Beginning the book is like sneaking into a diary; ending it is like losing a fascinating friend." ---Harper's Bazaar.

Again true.  This is an excellent way to describe some of my favorite books.  I love books that read like a person's life, that don't focus so much on plot, but allow the reader to spend time with a character or set of characters getting to know all about them.  Reading The Story of the Night has the added bonus of getting to know Argentina.

Front cover blurb: "An impressive, beautifully modulated, unexpectedly affecting book." ---Jeffrey Eugeides, author of The Virgin Suicides.

"Impressive" and "unexpectedly affecting" yes.  But watch those adverbs!  Just as with his later book The Master, I found myself much more moved by the story than I expected to be.  Colm Toibin has this way of sneaking up on the reader emotionally.  He never even taps the reader on the shoulder, it's not that dramatic, but by the end I feel that someone has been standing behind me all along.  But "beautifully modulated" what does that mean?  Maybe Mr. Eugeides was playing Apples to Apples with his children while he was writing his review.  It sounds very good, "beautifully modulated" but surely it's a phrase best used to describe a piece of music or the segmentation of an attractive invertebrate.

In the end, I have to go with Harper's Bazarre's blurb.  I think it's the best description of my own reaction to the book, and the best of the blurbs quoted on the book's cover.

Sunday Salon: I Give Up and I Give Away.

This month I gave up on two books I was halfway through.  I don't do that very often.  I'm more than happy to stop reading something after a few pages or a chapter; I won't read something that doesn't grab my attention right away, but if I've gone several hundred pages into a book I usually finish it.  These two were library books which may have made it possible to give up on them with just a few hundred pages to go.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin sounds too bizarre to be true.  Henry Ford decides he needs his own rubber plantation so he builds an American city in the middle of the Amazon River Basin, complete with American style company housing, a water tower, a hospital, school, manicured lawns and athletic fields.  A utopia of his own.  Today only the water tower remains.

Henry Ford probably did more to shape 20th century America than anyone; he was a genius but he was also a very strange man.  A few years ago I read Henry Ford and the Jews about his anti-semitism and how he used his fortune to publish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-semitic literature.  The man did a lot of very strange stuff, like making his immigrant workers take American classes that feature a graduation parade with everyone wearing their native costume as they walked into a giant melting pot to emerged dressed in classic, conservative, American summer suits. 

But, after 200 pages of Fordlandia, I still wasn't involved in the story.  It just never took off for me.  I felt like the plane was still stuck on the tarmac.  So it's going back  to the library today.

I was so excited to get my hands on A.S. Byatt's new novel, The Children's Book.  I spent less than a week on the Holds list at the local library.  I'd heard almost nothing but good things about the book.  People say she's back in top form, that this one is as good as Possession which I loved.  The Children's Book is marvelous.  Byatt creates a rich word of interesting, complicated characters, several dozen of them, all fully drawn and believable.  Her prose is beautiful, her attention to detail fascinating.  Reading the opening party scene transported me to the Edwardian era the story is set in.  It's the literary equivalent of the wedding scene that opens Francis Coppola's The Godfather. 
But 200 pages into the novel and I honestly didn't care if any of the characters lived or died.  I felt like the story hadn't started yet.  What's the point of creating such a rich group of characters if you're not going to engage them in a plot.  Things happen in The Children's Book, but there is no narrative thread, no compelling interest pulling the reader through to the end.  After 200 pages, I gave up and moved on. 

Halfway through Shakespeare's MacBeth the title character says "I am so far steeped in blood that to turn back would be the same as to wade o'er."  I turned back.  All in all, MacBeth should have done the same.


I was out in Point Reyes Station in West Marin much of the day yesterday and didn't get a chance to post the winner of The Book of Lost Things giveaway.  Dakota helped me choose a winner this morning--the video is below.



If you are the winner, please send your mailing information to 204mountain at comcast dot net. I can get the book in the mail to you tomorrow.  To read my review of The Book of Lost Things go here.

Dakota's Favorites: Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan

January of 2008 was a very good month for me.  I read three of the book that ended up on my top ten favorite reads of the year during the month of January.  Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan was one.  I hold it as one of the best young adult novels about coming out that there is.  I was fortunate enough to have the chance to interview Mr. Ryan shortly after this review first ran. The interview is here.  P.E. Ryan is also the author of the terrific novel Send Me under his full name Patrick Ryan.

Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan made me laugh out loud four times. This makes it a very funny book. It's also touching and insightful, a wonderful read.

The story concerns two high school boys, once best of friends, now each on his own facing a different set of very serious problems and wishing he had a best friend to talk to. Charlie Perrin is still dealing with the aftermath of his mother's death from cancer one year ago. His father rarely leaves the house, spending his days drinking and staring at the television. Charlie escapes via a pot smoking habit that has cost him his girlfriend and his car. Sam Findley faces a family that has broken up. His mother has a new boyfriend; his father does too. Sam can deal with his father and would be able to deal with his mother as well except her new boyfriend is clearly homophobic. This cuts Sam twice, once for his father and once for himself, because he can no longer deny that he is also gay.

This sounds like quite a soap opera and it really is, but the boys have lighter relationships with other friends and each has a strong sense of humor. Their dialogue is both believable and very funny. The chapter describing Sam's first date with Justin had me smiling all the way through. Each of the main characters is believable and likable, I found myself actively rooting for them both. When they finally do meet up and hash things out, they scene is both very funny and very moving. In the end, things are resolved enough to know that each boy will be fine, and left open enough to make me want a sequel. I usually never really want a sequel with a book like Saints of Augustine, but this time I'd really like to know what happens next and I think P.R. Ryan is a capable enough writer not to disappoint. The author writes for adults under the name Patrick Ryan; I've added his novels to my wish list.

I'm giving Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan five out of five stars. Of the young adult novels I've read so far on this latest jag, it is by far my favorite.

Benediction by Jim Arnold

I felt it on my ass before I heard it--the drone and rumble of the Muni 35 as it made its way up Twentieth Street.

Opening to Benediction by Jim Arnold

I have this feeling that Benediction by Jim Arnold may end up on my favorite reads of 2010 list. 

Benediction is about Ben Schmidt, a forty-something gay man, living in San Francisco.  Ben is successful at work, promoting his first independent movie on the side, seeing his handsome younger upstairs neighbor, over  decade sober when his doctor tells him that he has a fatal form of prostrate cancer rare in men his age.  Because the fatal form of prostrate cancer typically strikes older men who are not expected to live long enough to die from it, it tends to go untreated, or treated only slightly.  But Ben is so young he has to face surgery, followed by incontinence, impotence and infertility all of which send him racing into the nearest bar.  Once Jake, the handsome younger upstairs neighbor, finds out he's drinking again, Ben is on his own. 

This could all be very heavy stuff, but Mr. Arnold never lets his main character sink into self-pity for too long.  Even when he's drunk Ben has too much going on to spend page after page wallowing in regret.  He has too much to do. His movie is doing well on the film festival circuit, office politics at work drag him into a knock-down fight to keep his job, he has to hide his drinking and he insists on maintaining an active sex life even after surgery forces him to start taking Viagra and to wear adult diapers.  So much is going on in his life, so much of it is going wrong, that he finds it difficult to make time to deal with his cancer. 

It's no wonder he starts seeing ghosts. 

Mr. Arnold understands that a novel like Benediction lives or dies on how much sympathy the reader has for the narrator.  The book takes the reader to some fairly dark places and then makes a few jokes about the trip.  If we don't like the narrator, we're not going to see the trip through to its end.  I liked Ben Schmidt.  His life is messy.  The way he treats his cancer is messy.  His illness doesn't lead to an epiphany; it just makes everything worse.  But Ben's sense of humor, which was there all along, sees the reader through to the end of the book.

Benediction deals frankly with some uncomfortable stuff.  So uncomfortable that I'll admit I was a little nervous about it.  Can a gay man maintain an active sex life after prostrate surgery?  That question alone probably sends many readers heading for the hills.  For the longest time it appeared that falling off the wagon was not going to have a negative impact on Ben's life.  He was so wrapped up in dealing with his cancer, promoting his movie, negotiating office politics, cruising--lots of cruising, that I began to wonder where Mr. Arnold was going with his narrator's alcoholism.  Ben does eventually end up literally in the gutter due to his drinking, but it's not a drastic, dramatic dive to the bottom the moment he takes a sip of liquor.  It takes a while. For a long time, Ben is able to maintain.  I imagine that's a common experience. 

In the end, Benediction is anything but a common novel.  It's probably not one you'll find at your local chain bookstore, unless your local chain bookstore is in the right neighborhood,  but it's one that is well worth looking out for.  Benediction grew on me.  Ben Schmidt grew on me.  His story would make a terrific movie.


Full Disclosure: I received my copy of Benediction from the author.  I'm not giving it away.  I plan on reading it again some day.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly - Review and Giveaway

Once upon a time--for that is how all stories should begin--there was a boy who lost his mother.

Opening to The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly was a recipient of the 2007 Alex Award given to adult books that appeal to young adult readers ages 12-18, but I'm not so sure.

The story concerns David, age twelve, who is unhappy with his new step-mother and his new home outside London where his parents hope he'll be safe from the ravages of World War II.  After a German bomber crashes behind his family garden, David finds himself in a fantasy world, pursued by both a pack of human like wolves and the mysterious Crooked Man.  A friendly woodsman rescues him and sets him off on a journey to find the king who may be able to send David back home.

The adventure that follows pays tribute to many classic fairy tales and children's books.  The woodsman inspired by Snow White,  the human-wolves from Red-Riding Hood, the Seven Dwarfs appear as does Sleeping Beauty.  The journey to see the king is right out of The Wizard of Oz as is the possibility that it all may be a dream meant to reveal David's confused emotional state.   (This also references Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.)  David is a reader with a library full of books just like these so the novel can naturally make his imagined world real.  That the book's overall structure mimics The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe which had not been written yet as its characters are contemporaries of David is a nice touch.

It's a very good book.  I enjoyed it.  I recommend it.  But I wouldn't recommend it to young adult ages 12-18.  I think they are both too old and too young for it.  The Book of Lost Things is a gentle story.  There is some action, there are some dark elements to it, but it's a sweet tale about a little boy who has lost his mother in the end.  I think readers in the 12-18 brackets will lose patience with it early on.  I know this may seem crass to say, but The Book of Lost Things doesn't have the sex and violence this age group is used to.  If you're looking for Twilight, or The Hunger Games, or even Harry Potter, you're not going to find it in The Book of Lost Things.  The adventure aspects of the novel are more suited to an elementary age group say grades four to six,  kids young enough to be excited when they recognize the seven dwarfs from Snow White and innocent enough to still enjoy being tucked into bed with happy ending.  12-18 is too old. 

Paradoxically, 12-18-year-old readers are also too young for The Book of Lost Things.  It's a very nostalgic book.  The story is about a 12-year-old but the narrative voice is fully grown, adult, experienced and able to present an adult take on  David's story.  The narrator appears to be telling a children's story, but he's really telling a children's story to an adult audience, one with and adult perspective on the story's events and on the character of David.  It's a children's story you have to be grown to fully appreciate.

I'm sure there are 12-18-year-old-readers out there who have read The Book of Lost Things and loved it.  Recommending a book for a wide range of readers is a risky thing, something that can never be 100% accurate.  There's always an exception, sometimes many.  But my advice on reading The Book of Lost Things is to wait until you are older.  Like me. 

If you're interested in reading The Book of Lost Things let me know in  a comment below.  I have one, slightly used cope to give away.  I'll have Dakota select a winner Saturday morning, so please enter by midnight on Friday, Feb. 19.   I'm going to have to limit this one to mailing addresses withing the United States, but it is open to people of all ages.  ;-)

Sunday Salon: Ark of ARCs

Advanced Review Copies are taking over my life.

When I started this blog I had no inkling of ARC's. I knew they existed, but I never expected to get any.  I assumed they just went to critics who wrote for newspapers and magazines.  I think it was almost a year into blogging before I got my first Advanced Review Copy.  I was very excited. I used to envy people who got them.  Careful what you wish for....

I've a large stack of them now.  Any day I come home from work and find a package from a publisher with a free book in it is a happy day, but the ARC's are starting to crowd out the rest of my books.

Some I've finished and  need to review:

1. Benediction by Jim Arnold about a middle-age gay man who is going through prostate cancer.  It's actually pretty funny.  I was afraid to read it at first, but I loved it.
2. Admit One by Emmett James. A memoir that focuses each chapter around a particular movie.  I loved the idea; the book I only liked.

Some I still need to read:

1. The People of the Abyss by Jack London. Written in 1902, Mr. London writes of the time he spent living among the poor of London's East End.
2. The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo.  A crime thriller by a Scandinavian author. 
3. This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. 
4. Chow Hounds: Why Our Dogs Are Getting Fatter - A Vet's Plan to Save Their Lives by Ernie Ward, D.V.M.
5. What to Do With an Unused Prom Dress by Tina Ferraro.  Because I mentioned The ABC's of Kissing Boys  in last week's post which came to the attention of the author, Ms. Ferraro is sending me five copies of her previous book What to Do With an Unused Prom Dress for my class book clubs.  She's even going to sign them all.  How cool is that?

That  makes five ARC's I'll need to read and review along with the two I've already read and still need to write up.

It never rains, but it pours.





Full disclosure:  All of the books discussed above are Advanced Review Copies received free from the publishers.  The comic of Noah's Arc comes from here.

Short Story Saturday: Werner Herzong Reads "Curious George"

I found this a few weeks ago over at Andrew Sullivan's blog. 




"Taking an agent of chaos out of the jungle"  I love that.

Friday Picture Reading: Support Your Library Stormtrooper

Image from Studenthacks.org

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

Froggy Welsch is trying to get up my shirt.

 

 Opening line from The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

 

Reasons why The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things could get you into trouble if you try using it for 7th grade book clubs:

 

1. The narrator is seeing this guy who is trying to get to second base with her.
2. The narrator kind of wants him to get to second base.
3. He gets there.
4. The narrator has serious problems with her mother.
5. The narrator goes to Seattle against her mother's wishes.
6. While in Seattle the narrator and her best friend get piercings.
7. One is a tongue piercing.
8. Several girls at the narrator's school have serious eating disorders.
9. She hears one of them in an adjoining bathroom stall.
10. The narrator's best friend has a slight crush on a boy who turns out to be gay.
11. The narrator's visits her brother's dorm where he has a keg of beer for a 'sluts and virgins' party.
12. The narrator's brother is accused of date rape.
13. He's guilty.
14. The narrator discusses masturbation.
15. Characters in the book listen to feminist leaning musicians and read banned books.

 

Reason' why I loved The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things so much I almost wish I taught high school where it would be totally appropriate to use with book clubs:

1. The narrator is a wonderful person.
2. The narrator has a weight problem.
3. She's strong enough to deal with her problem; she just doesn't know it yet.
4. She has a winning sense of humor, really. I'm not just saying that because she's overweight.
5. She makes several lists. I like lists.
6. She's brave enough to get a piercing. I once went to a piercing parlor with a friend who got one but I was too chicken. No tattoos on me either, but my brother has several.
7. The narrator is brave enough to face the truth about her brother and still keep him in the family.
8. The author is brave enough to make him guilty. I thought it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A lesser writer would have taken that route.
9. While the narrator's parents are far from perfect, the author gives the novel two other adults who actually know more about the issues she's facing than the teenage narrator does. How often does that happen these days.
10. The narrator still lives with both of her parents.  They're all trying to work things out.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.

Opening to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie translated from the French by Ina Rilke.

During China's Cultural Revolution, two young men, the best of friends, are sent to a remote village for re-education.  Two things help them make it through the years they spend away from their families, their school, their city: a beautiful girl and forbidden copies of Balzac.  The boys fall in love with both.

This is the basic premise of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke.  The book is slight, a quick read at just under 200 pages.  The story is light-hearted, the boys face neither serious danger nor serious consequences though they constantly push against the authority they live under.  The characters are well-drawn, fully believable people.  The setting is well described  The plot keeps the reader moving along at an entertaining clip.

I just didn't like it. 

Maybe it reminded me too much of what I didn't like about City of Thieves which is also about two young men basically having a rollicking adventure in the midst of terrible tragedy.  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was picked by my book club which has been picking very safe reading lately.  I keep thinking of Franz Kafka as quoted on Gautami Tripaty's blog, "We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us."    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress neither wounds nor stabs.  A book set during China's Cultural Revolution ought to do both.

I grew so tired of the rich kid protagonists and their cultural superiority, their clear sense that they were better than everyone in the village, that by the end of the book, I was beginning to root for the Cultural Revolution a bit.  I'm not rooting for the Cultural Revolution, not at all, but when do we get the story of those villagers?  What was it like for the peasants who spent tens, maybe hundreds of generations in isolated poverty while the world grew rich around them.  What was it like to suddenly see a violin in middle-age when you'd never seen anything like it before?  I'm looking for the Chinese writer who'll give voice to those villagers, write their version of The White Tiger.  I bet that book would wound and stab. 

In the meantime, Dakota ate my copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.  So there.

Sunday Salon: What's New In Young Adult Literature 2010

Just about every year I attend the What's New in Young Adult Literature seminar put on by the Bureau of Education and Research for teachers and librarians.  This is a travelling show run by Patti Tjomsland who is a high school librarian near Seattle.  Ms. Tjomsland reads all of the new YA books every year, over 400 titles.  From this she makes a master list of just over 300 that she can recommend, puts those in a book and presents 40-50 of them to at the seminar.  It's like spending an entire day listening to a very enthusiastic librarian give one book talk after another.  For some people that would be hell, but to people like me it's heaven.  Go figure.

Trends in Young Adult literature --- Lots and lots of Twilight like series.  Just about every supernatural creature you can name will be loved by a human girl in one series or another.  Some of them look promising, but the sheer number of them began to depress me a little.  Sequels will be everywhere this year.  No one is writing one book anymore, it's trilogy, trilogy, trilogy everywhere you turn.  The end of the world is nigh.  Be it alternative historical disaster via steampunk or zombie apocalypse, the future does not look good.  Fun maybe, but not good.  And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home to YA lit this year. 

These are some of the titles I'll be looking for in 2010 as possible book club books for my 7th graders.  I was looking for funny books so my list may be a little skewed.  My classroom book clubs need more funny books. 

• Zombie Queen of Newbury High by Amanda Ashby.  Young Mia accidentally puts a curse on her entire high school turning them all into zombies.  Fast paced and funny. Possibly based on my life?!
• Swim the Fly by Don Calame.  Two 15-year-old best friends vow to see a naked girl by summer's end.  Lots of boy humor, for the audience that loved Sherman Alexie's Part-Time Indian.
• Fire by Kristin Cashore.  Fire is a human-shaped monster, unimaginably beautiful, with the ability to control the minds of those around her.
• Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko.  When I told my students this was finally out in paperback so we might be able to get a set for book clubs, it was all I could do to contain them.
• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen. A love story about two insomniacs who share a very late-night life.  Ms. Dessen is very popular with the girls in my class.
• The ABC's of Kissing Boys by Tina Ferraro.  Funny and sweet with enough mean girls and backstabbing to keep things from getting too darn cute.
• The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks.  Nina is sick of the vampires in her support group but must join the gang when one of them is staked.  Quirky humor.
• Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel.  Third in the Airborn series.  I've many very loyal fans of these in my class.  There is rumor of a possible fourth book.
• Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow by James Rollings.  Jake and his sister are blasted back into the past to save an ancient society from an evil ruler. First in a series.
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan.  Seven generations after a plague has turned most of humanity into vampire/zombie creatures one group of people hides behind a very high fence. 
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.  Sounds like a must have book to me.  I'm told the kids who loved Holes loved this one. 
• Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork. Marcello has Asperger's.  His father insists he work in his office over the summer to prove he can function in the real world.  His boss disagrees.
• Bull Rider by Suzanne Williams.  The kids in auto shop are passing this one around.  Hero takes up bull riding after his brother returns from Iraq missing an arm.
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfield.  I'm 100 pages into this and enjoying it.  It think I will buy a set of five for book clubs once it's in paperback.

The seminar had about 1/3 the usual audience this year and no bookseller in the lobby for the first time since I've been going.  Times are hard for libraries and schools. 

In other news:   Earlier this week Carin at Little Bookish gave me the One Lovely Blog award.  Thank you Carin.  Please stop by Carin's blog sometime.

This is very off-topic but does anyone know what's up with Technorati?  I checked my authority, which is how they rank websites, yesterday after ignoring it for two or three months and it's just about tripled to 426.  My daily visit rate has stayed about the same since October, around 100 a day more Sunday to Wednesday, less Thursday to Saturday.  I did some looking around and found that Huffington Post has a Technorati authority just over 800, but that Eva's blog, A Stripped Armchair, has a slightly higher rating.  I love Eva's blog, it's wonderful, Eva's wonderful but I can't imagine she gets more daily readers than Arianna Huffington's site does.  Though I'd rather have Eva than Arianna over to dinner.  I imagine it would be hard to get a word in edgewise with Arianna and Eva's read more books.  Though I bet Arianna would bring a very good wine.  She's very rich.

Dakota's Favorites: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick knocked my socks off.  I do not understand why it has not had a much wider readership by now.  Mr. Selznick combined the use of words an pictures in a way no one had done before and no one has done as well since.  Here's my review from January of 2008.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick is the winner of this years Caldecott Medal given each year to the best picture book for children. The medal is well deserved.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is the story of an orphaned French boy who lives in a Paris railway station. He moved there to live with his uncle after his father died. His uncle was the stations clock keeper, in charge of winding all the stations clocks and of keeping them all in good repair. Hugo's uncle drinks and ends up disappearing on night, so Hugo maintains the clocks himself in the hopes that no one will notice his uncle is gone and send him to an orphanage.

He desperately wants to stay in the train station because he is trying to repair a automaton that he believes his father made. The automaton is a small mechanical man sitting at a writing desk poised pen in hand ready to write. Hugo believes that the automaton will write a message from his father. He steals parts for the automaton from an old man who sells wing-up toys in a booth at the station. The old man catches him which propels the books plot forward in very surprising and exciting ways.

What makes The Invention of Hugo Cabret so unusual is that the book is told through both words and pictures. The balance between the two is about half and half. For example when Hugo is pursued through the station by the station agent we are given a series of drawings that show us the chase, turning the book into a kind of static movie. The act of turning the page helps build the suspense; each drawing shows the next twist or turn of Hugo's escape attempt, and we rush from picture to picture along with him. The illustrations also include photographs from the time period showing the railroad station and various silent movies that also figure in the plot of the book.

I found The Invention of Hugo Cabret impossible to put down. I read the entire thing in one sitting. Dakota's dinner was 45 minutes late as a result. The drawings are wonderful in their own right; the story is well written. The plots twists are a delight and come in both written and illustrated form; you do have to pay attention to the pictures. So, I'm giving The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick five out of five stars.

I found the automaton described in the book to be a bit far-fetched. It's a mechanical man that can draw a very detailed picture once it's wound up. So I checked out the actual automaton that it is based on. The Franklin Institute for Science has one that was donated to them. They did not know who made it, but they repaired it and wound it up. It drew several pictures and wrote out several poems then signed the name of it's maker just as the automaton in Hugo Cabret does. It's an amazing machine, built around 1810. Here is a video of it. Truth is stranger, and more wonderful, than fiction, I guess.

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The Moment of Psycho by David Thomson

The movies had always encouraged the idea that we were safe, secure, and warm in their dark.

Opening to The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder by David Thomson

When Janet Leigh stepped into the shower in Alfred Hitchcock's, Psycho, American movies grew up.  The forty-five seconds of film that followed forever changed American culture.  At least, that's the central argument of David Thomson's entertaining book The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught American to Love Murder.

Mr. Thomson lists three major firsts for American movies in Psycho which, taken together, mark a moment when movie-making matured beyond anything the censors or the studio system could ever hope to control.  The first is, of course, the murder in the shower of the Bates Motel.  Never before had a major star, one given top billing, been killed halfway through a movie.  It's not happened often since.  Audiences squirm in both fear and a kind of delight throughout the scene. It's terrible, but it's also kind of fun.   This realization led to Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Jason Vorhees, Saw III.

The other two firsts slip by almost unnoticed today.  While the Janet Leigh character is her motel room she makes a little list subtracting the 700 dollars she spent on a used car from the 40,000 dollars she stole from her employer.  This is silent film-making at its best, badly out-dated in the early 1960's when Alfred Hitchcock, a former silent film director, made Psycho.  Janet Leigh proceeds to tear up the list and flush it down the toilet, marking the very first time a toilet was ever flushed in an American movie.  Later in the film, the toilet will serve a significant role in solving the crime.

The third and final first takes place in the opening scene.  Janet Leigh and John Gavin are in a hotel room putting their clothes on.  No one says what is going on in so many words, but it's clearly the middle of the day so the adult audience knows the two have just completed and lunchtime tryst.  This is the first time a post-coital scene ever appeared in an American film. 

Sex, functioning toilets and murder.  Psycho in a nutshell. 

Mr. Thomson has more to say about the movie. He does an excellent job placing Psycho in its historical/social context so that it's very easy to see why it was such a popular and revolutionary movie in its day.  He also provides plenty of insider information about the making of Psycho, the struggles Alfred Hitchcock had with his producers and the wonderful marketing campaign for the movie.  I've included the famous long trailer Hitchcock made featuring himself leading a guided tour of the Bates Motel.  I fail to see how anyone could have watched this trailer and not been desperate to see Psycho. 

Fortunately, Psycho is available for instant viewing on Netflix.  It still holds up very well.  The frankness about the characters sex lives keeps the movie from feeling dated.  The acting is all very good--it's hard to watch Tony Perkins as Norman Bates knowing that he did not even warrant a nomination for his performance, even harder to believe that Bernard Hermann's musical score failed to win an Oscar as well.  The first murder scene is still disturbing, maybe even more so knowing that it's coming.  The second one is still something of a let down.  The ending still makes little sense, but no one really cares.  Psycho is all about the shower.  No actress has ever been able to enter a shower since without causing at least a few audience members to fear for her life. 

Under the Dome by Stephen King

From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester's Mill gleamed inthe morning light like something freshly made and just set down.

Opening to Under the Dome by Stephen King.

It must be nice to be Stephen King.  To be so successful that your publisher will publish anything you write.  To have such a loyal readership that they'll buy and read anything you publish.  To be able to do whatever you want.

Life in his new novel, Under The Dome, is anything but nice.  One morning, for no reason anyone can determine, the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine finds itself encased in an enormous dome.  Though no one can see it at first, no creature or object can pass through it.  Even air has a difficult time.  People are killed when their cars, trucks, airplanes smash into the dome at full speed.  Claudette Saunders first flying lesson does not end well.  One victim is cut in half while gardening when the dome suddenly arrives.  The rest of the novel explores what happens to those caught inside the dome.  Things do not go well.  This is a Stephen King novel.

Before you dismiss Under the Dome as adolescent fantasy, I'd like to remind you that Jose Saramago won a Nobel Prize for writing books just like this.  What happens when the entire world becomes blind?  What happens when the nation of Portugal breaks free of Europe and floats out to sea?   Why is one a best seller and the other a Nobel Prize winner?  

Although I know Mr. King is a voracoius reader, I've no idea if he's read Blindness or not, nor do I mean to suggest that anything fishy is going on, but if you've read the first half of Jose Saramago's novel, you've read a loose outline for Under The Dome. In both a cross section of people are isolated from the rest of society.  They have to overcome their differences to deal with their newly isolated lives.  Unfortunately, the cross section of people includes a criminal element so corrupt that life in isolation with them soon becomes unbearable.

The reader's enjoyment of both novels is predicated on how likeable characters are.  We have to root for their survival or we won't make it through the hardships they face.  Mr. King's cast of characters is much larger than Mr. Saramago's but its heros are just as likeable; its villians just as despicable.  The problem with Mr. King's characters is a product of his success.  His readers are familiar with the people who live in the small town Maine of his novels.  There is no one new in Under The Dome, no one who stands out like the doctor and the doctor's wife in Blindness do.  At this point, one Stephen King town is too much like another.  Take away the dome, add a vampire, and Chester's Mill becomes Salem's Lot. 

But then that's a large part of the fun with  Stephen King novels--ordinary people from ordinary towns, not much different from people like us, placed in an extreme situation.  Trapped in a stalled car facing a rabid dog.  Chained to a bed by a crazed fan or a suddenly deceased lover.  Snowed in at an empty resort hotel.  Unable to flee an island in the midst of a severe storm.  Caught inside a mysterious dome.  Mr. King is like a world traveller who keeps going back to the same place again and again.  Fortunately for him, he has a substantial number of readers more than willing to keep going along for the ride.

Must be nice. 

Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers

I hope you mess this up!

Opening to Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers.

Lockdown is Mr. Myers second recent look at the lives of young men behind bars in America. An alternative to Monster, Lockdown is the story of Reese, a fourteen-year-old sent to a special juvenile facility called Progress for stealing perscription pads from a doctor's office. Reese is not exactly a star inmate. He  has problems with the other boys in Progress, typically because he comes to the defense of  'Toon, a smaller boy Reese befriends, who is bullied by the older, bigger inmates.

When he is not in trouble, Reese is allowed to work at a nearby senior home where he is given the job of helping Mr. Hooft, a bed-ridden old man who'd rather be anywhere other than a home waited on by a black teenager. Over time the two share their stories and become friends. Mr. Hooft was also in prison as a child, in his case a Japanese prison where all Europeans living in Shanghai were sent after the invasion of China during World War II.

Reese has few people in his life who are on his side. His mother is willing to sacrifice him in order to hang on to her current boyfriend  The other inmates at Progress, outside of 'Toon, cannot be trusted.  The gaurds are waiting for him to screw up and sure that he will. The warden believes Reese has blown every chance he gave him and does not have much faith in him as a result.  Mr. Hooft and Reese's little sister Isis are the only ones who believe he can turn his life around.

Unfortunately, Reese's story is all too common in the United States today. To their credit, neither Reese nor Mr. Myers point the blame for Reese's situation at anyone other than Reese. While the deck is certainly stacked against him, Reese knows he must choose how he'll play the cards he has been dealt. Those of us who started life with a better hand would do well to remember that the family we are born into could easily have been one like Reese's. Would we be able to play our cards any better than he did?

Full disclosure: I received and Advanced Review Copy of Lockdown from the publisher.