Discriminating Reader

Memory Palaces

2012-02-17T06:41:00.010-08:00

I have, on occasion, envied those who had one single childhood home, a single place within four wall that house all their memories. Some people, I realize, grow up in one place, then inherit it from their parents and raise their own children there. Many of my best friends' parents still live in the homes where I visited them, street addresses I know by heart, for which I'll never need GPS.

For my family, such as not the case. Throughout my childhood, my dad was a preacher, so we moved from one preacher's home--property of the church--to another whenever he changed jobs. Our first home, the one we still call "the little red house" had been theirs, built right next door to my grandparents and ours until I was nearly grown, but the next several--Oakland, Eastwood Drive, Alabama Street, Knud Drive (our one foray out of the state of Alabama) and Pearl Street--were perfect metaphors for the Christian life: This world is not my home; I'm just a'passin' through.

When I was a teenager, my parents decided they needed to build some equity and bought a house, the one I most closely connect to my teenage years, but by the time I was in college, they moved out to a farm house--then back to the previous house. When I married, they moved again, and again, and... Well, you get the point.

While other people have decades of hidden treasures in their attics, we have the boxes, but they move from attic to attic (or basement to basement). Some of the boxes, we realize too late, never make the move.

I finally have found the benefit to these moves--which in my married life I have mimicked as well. As I've been reading Joshua Foer's work Moonwalking with Einstein, a study of memory, I learn that one of the best tools for memory is a wide variety of familiar places in which to store memory images. He cites the story of Simonides, who was able to recreate the names of the people killed when a wall collapsed in a building right after he spoke--then exited, by connecting people's names or faces to their location within the room. That tool has been used for years since to help others store their memories in what are called "Memory Palaces."

Foer began investigating the phenomenon of memory after discovering that a group of individuals who considered themselves Mental Athletes (MAs) compete annually for national and international titles as Memory Champions. He discovered that contrary to what most people assume, good memories are made, not born. In fact, he agreed to work with one of the competitors for a year to prepare himself for competition.

Along the way, Foer researched and interviewed people with exceptional, remarkable memories, as well as those with the worst memories, such as the man who lost the part of his brain responsible for recalling memory to a brain-eating herpes simplex virus. As a result, he can have the same conversations over and over without realizing each time isn't the first time. This called to mind the novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, the story of a Japanese math teacher whose current memories, as a result of a car accident, are reset every eighty-something minutes, leaving his expertise in the field of mathematics as sharp as ever.

One of the key strategies he learned, one his mentors said he might consider at first a party trick, involved building "memory palaces," places he knew well where he could store visually exaggerated and thus memorable images he wished to recall. He demonstrates with a long to-do list, which Foer places throughout his childhood home. (One of my friends who read the book earlier this year says she can still recall the entire list, using the same technique.)

In order to remember many different kinds of information, then, some must travel, gathering as many memory palaces as possible. While my friends still living in their childhood homes must look around for other memory storage options, I have a long way to go before I ever have to leave home--or homes.

Not Such a Light Read After All

2012-02-10T06:22:00.001-08:00

For reputation's sake, I must say, here at the beginning, that I wasn't a David Cassidy fan--or a Partridge Family fan, although I will admit to watching the show and to knowing enough of the songs and lyrics to be able to pass in some circles.

When someone recommended this book, I think I recall her calling it a "guilty pleasure" or maybe a "light read." Being something of a book snob, I pick and choose carefully, knowing that any book I read means one I will never get to read down the line. Something about the description of this one, however, prompted me to take that time, and I am glad I did.

The narrative hook of the story, revealed early, occurs when a grown woman from Wales discovers, while going through her late mother's closet, that she had actually won the "Meet David Cassidy" contest when she was thirteen--a trip to Los Angeles with a friend. But her mother never told her. Ouch.

Pearson takes the reader back to the angst-filled early teen years (I know, it's a redunancy) when the only thing she wants more than to meet--or perhaps marry--David Cassidy is to feel sure she belongs, that her friends really are friends. The daughter of a Welsh working class father and a strict, disappointed German mother, Petra is a gifted cellist--invited to play for Princess Margaret--who would chuck her talent if it meant possibly being left out.

She and her closest friend Sharon spend hours studying The Essential David Cassidy magazine as if they were prepping for the MCATs, as well as all the other mags appealing to girls--those that point out their flaws and how to camoflage them--then prints an article on how to have a positive self-image, the irony of which, Petra observes, they didn't realize until they were much older.

In a parallel story line, one rarely mentioned in reviews but just as clever, twenty-four-year-old Bill lands his first journalism job writing for The Essential David Cassidy, not just feature articles, but he actually ghost writes the letters from Cassidy to his female fans. (He tells his girlfriend he's a rock journalist, suggesting he's interviewing Led Zepellin and the Stones, but writing under a pen name.)

Moving from Petra's (and Bill's) younger years to their full adulthood, Pearson brings the two together, when Petra, learning of her mother's deceit, calls the publisher's office (still home to a range of popular magazines) to demand her prize. For anyone interested in life's fairness, readers also learn the fates of the other girls in Petra and Sharon's circle of young friends.

As an added bonus, the author also includes her interview with the now-middle-aged Cassidy, a Vegas performer, not fully at peace with her hearthrob teen idol years.

In my odd mix of reading, I sometimes finish a book without thinking of anyone in particular who might enjoy reading it as well. As I read I Think I Love You, I found myself calling or email friends and sisters close to my age before I'd even finished the book.

Time Travel

2012-02-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

I may not classify myself as a major Stephen King fan, but I've always loved the idea of time travel. I watched that old Christopher Reeves movie Somewhere in Time an embarrasing number of times. I loved The Time Traveler's Wife, even spending a visit to Chicago traipsing around to the spots I remembered from the book. I even loved a movie--whose title escapes me--in which a guy inadvertently ended up in the Old West riding a motorcycle. (Favorite bit of dialogue:

"Where'd you get that map?"

"The Exxon station.")

For people of my generation and my parents', November 22, 1963, is one of those handful of days that I mark with "where I was when" memories. November 22, 1963 is evidently Stephen King's first time travel novel--one he admits in the epilogue that he tried to start years and years ago. The novel unfolds as a high school English teacher discovers (or is led to) a portal to 1958, through which he must travel in order to stop the Kennedy assassination, believing that in turn he may stop a number of historical tragedies that resulted--Vietnam, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

He learns that no matter how much time he spends in the Land of Ago, he returns just two minutes after he left. Since he must always enter at 1958, he stands to age five years in those two minutes.

If the story had focused mainly on the Kennedys and that so-called Camelot, it would have been a different book. Instead, Jake Epping, who must go by the name George Amberson (printed on his vintage identification, makes friends--and enemies--and falls in love along the way.

The characters throughout the novel become conscious of the butterfly affect--the exponential change brought about by the slightest events. A recurring theme King's protagonist explores is the "obdurate" nature of the past--and the "harmonies."

While King fans won't experience some of the same level of horror as that of his other works, they will recognize King's style. The book runs long, and if there is one main fault, it comes in the end, when he must rely on a second-hand telling--a Reader's Digest condensed version of what has happened while he was away from the present time. I'm not sure if this is a real flaw or if the details simply overwhelmed me as a reader. (If he had followed the "show, don't tell" rule of writing, the book would have been much longer. It just felt hurried to me.)

For readers who aren't King fans, I'd recommend the book as one part alternative history, three parts love story. The woman Jake/George loves, with her own complicated story line, proves as engaging as Marina Oswald and more present in the book than Jackie.

Speaking the Unspeakable

2012-02-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

When I read Emma Donoghue's novel Room, I was able to remind myself, "This is fiction." That story, told in the voice of a young boy born to a mother held isolated by the man who kidnapped her, was unquestionably influenced by the story of Jaycee Dugard. Now Dugard has written her own story, even reading for the audio version of her memoir, A Stolen Life.

Most people became aware of at least some of her story when she was rescued after being held for incomprehensible eighteen years by the man who kidnapped her when she was eleven years old. During that time, she gave birth to two daughters, fathered by Phillip Garrido, the man who held her. Most difficult to believe, Garrido's wife Nancy was aware of her presence the whole time, even interacting with her.

Dugard explains in the beginning of the book what prompted her to tell the story, when most people can believe she would want only to put the events behind her. She explains, though, her belief that people--especially children--who are harmed by others should be encouraged to speak up, to accuse those who abuse them, not be held captive by shame they could not have avoided.

Her narrative also helps readers to understand why she never attempted the escape, even when her physical constraints were loosened. This is a story of emotional manipulation of a child and young woman. Throughout the order, she found ways to learn and, when her daughters came along, to be sure they were educated.

Like Donoghue's Room, Dugard's story doesn't end with her rescue and return to her family and to the outside world. She describes the hounding by the press, the noble actions of many of the law enforcement officers who took part in her rescue and protected her throughout those emotional early days, and the comforting reassurance of her mother's continued hope and unfailing love. These details can't overshadow Dugard's feeling that her captivity was prolonged by the failure of authorities to follow through, particularly Garrido's parole officers, who never investigated the family's backyard, where she was held.

Shortly after finishing the book, I saw the news that Elizabeth Smart, another high-profile victim of kidnapping, has announced her engagement, something she did publicly not by choice but because of pressure from the press to know and tell everything. With Dugard's experiences fresh in my memory, I wished for both these strong girls the respectful privacy they deserve as they attempt to reclaim their lives.

Time Travels

2012-01-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

I suppose almost all books are vehicles for time travel. After all, I visited Madame Bovary recently, then moved to 1984 (or some version of it) as I read 1Q84. While I've been reading Stephen King's latest novel, November 22, 1963, which sends his protagonist back in time from the present to 1958 to live for a few years (in a couple of minutes), I listened to a YA audiobook that had come recommended to me at NCTE, Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. Sure enough, it's about time travel.

In this case, the narrator Miranda is a sixth grade girl in New York City in the 1970s, living through what seems to be minor events in her day as her mother prepares to compete on the $15,000 Pyramid with Dick Clark. A chain of events that occur on her way home from school affects her relationship with friends, classmates, and neighbors.

Throughout the story, Miranda chooses to read her favorite book--A Wrinkle in Time--over and over again, rather than choosing to read anything new. The book connects her to one mysterious character, the boy Marcus, who punches her best friend without provocation on their way home one day, which seems to be a pivotal point in the chain of events. She also finds that her least favorite classmate Julia also loves this book, and the three of them share fascination with the possibilities and repercussions of time travel.

Before I read the book, I was warned that when you get to the end, you feel you need to start over and read it again. I now understand why. If I do take the time to go back through the novel, I know I'll pay closer attention to the titles, all possible topics for the lightning round of Pyramid.

I will wait until I finish the Stephen King book before I even begin to comment on it, but I have noticed that in all three of these books set in the past, I realize how much cell phones and internet have changed our lives.

Not Just Another Desperate Housewife

2012-01-16T05:54:00.001-08:00

I'll confess that there are so many classic works of literature that I can't say for sure whether I have read or not, since I know so much about them. Surely I read Madame Bovary at some point in one of my world lit classes (probably the one I recall best from college, with an instructor who obviously kept applying lipstick all day, until her lips looked larger, more clownish than any collagen-injected starlet. The woman often wore sunglasses on top of her reading glasses, and in a throaty voice--the result of her chain-smoking, she would tell us, "Now we're not just going to read the bawwwdddyyy parts," and then she went on and did just that.)

Since I had recently learned of the new translation by Lydia Davis of Gustave Flaubert's classic, I didn't have to think twice when I came across the audiobook at the library. Listening on my way to and from school, I groaned at the woman's self-deluding escapades, at the sometimes vicious actions of her neighbors, and at her poor gullible husband.

After finishing the novel, I still recall some of the zingers--those powerful lines that made me groan or laugh out loud. How much credit goes to Flaubert and how much to Davis, his most recent translator, I don't know. I suspect I will want at least to peruse the book in print. Not a student of French, I find that sometimes the place names, the Alex Trebek-style pronunciation intimidate me. I realize that I might not even recognize some of the cities and towns on a map, something I feel compelled to remedy.

The story maintains a modern feel, despite the period-style clothes and manners. After all, Emma's ultimate downfall and death came from reliance on too-easy credit, living above her means, wanting more that she could afford on her husband's income, and her deception to postpone paying the piper.

With this classic under my belt, maybe soon I will be ready to tackle the newly translated War and Peace. Time will tell.

1Q84: Tengo and Aomame

2012-01-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

A good book can get in the way of everything. That's been the story of my life. I'll confess that as a student, I sometimes tucked a novel inside a textbook. I have holed up in the restroom reading or lingered in the parking lot before work with a good book. Last night, knowing I was kicking off the first day of classes this semester at eight o'clock, I still stayed up until midnight--on the dot--reading the last two or three chapters of Haruki Murkami's novel 1Q84. This book is one that made its way to my list when I attended the English conference. It was one of Carol Jago's recommendations. (I remember her saying, It's a big book, but it's a love story!) I kept running into positive reviews, so I threw out the title at book club and those in attendance agreed to tackle it.

I'm not sure about the hardcover, but on my electronic reader, the book had 1452 pages. For me, though, they flew by. The book begins with alternating chapters following two almost-thirty-year-olds, Aomame and Tengo, in Tokyo. She has a regular job as a fitness trainer, and then a not-so-conventional avocation. I won't spoil it for you. Tengo teaches math at a "cram school" but is also an aspiring novelist, but he is an early reader of a manuscript submitted to a first novel contest by a seventeen-year-old that, though poorly written, has a fascinating story. His involvement goes beyond normal--or ethical.

As he title hints, Murakami sets the novel in 1984, the year--once the setting for Orwell's chilling picture of the future, but now part of our nondescript past. The world the characters inhabit, however, seems out of joint. While the story depends on its fantastic elements, the characters engage readers so personally and directly that, like the bodyguard character who hears the details, we find ourselves going along with them.

As I read, I frequently considered how differently the story would have unfolded if set in our modern world, with cell phones and Google. The impact on the plot would have been immense.
How soon we forget the challenge of locating people or finding information in our own lifetime.

There was so much about the novel that I enjoyed--the literary and musical references, the beautifully crafted plot details, woven together like find strands of an air chrysalis (Don't google the term. Read the book.) Something tells me this book, its plot and its characters, will reside in my head for a long time. I wonder if I'll ever look at the moon again without thinking of it.

What I Read in 2011

2012-01-01T15:21:00.001-08:00

Each January, as I compile, or at least revise, my new year's resolutions, I also take down my wall calendar and transfer the titles of the books I read during the year to my Book-Woman notebook, which I've maintained since 1997. I realize that the list isn't as complete as I wish. For example, I rarely list the works I read from the assignments on my syllabus for literature classes. Otherwise, I'd have Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Paradise Lost, and more every year. I notice that I have listed several poetry books this year, but I know without a doubt that I read many more complete chapbooks and full collections of poetry this year. Rather than adding those here, I'll devote another post in a few days to add my favorite poetry of 2011. For now, here's how the list stacked up:

Steig Larsen, The Girl Who Played with Fire.
---. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed.
Heidi W. Durrow. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.
Patti Smith. Just Kids.
Stewart O'Nan, Songs for the Missing.
Nick Hornby, Slam.
Tim Peeler, Checking Out.
Jane Hamilton, Laura Rider's Masterpiece.
Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire.
---. Mockingjay.
Laura Dave, London Is the Best City in America.
Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper.
Sharyn McCrumb, Devil Amongst the Lawyers.
Ann-Marie McDonald, Fall on Your Knees.
Glenn Cooper, Secret of the Seventh Sign.
Emma Donaghue, Room.
Helen Losse, Seriously Dangerous.
Sarah Addison Allen, Peachkeepers.
Neil Gaiman, Coraline.
Sioghan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone.
Gary Shytengart, Super True Sad Love Story.
Nancy Horan, Loving Frank.
Paula McLain. The Paris Wife.
Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter.
Sara Gruen, Ape House.
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life.
Ann Patchett, State of Wonders.
Glenn Cooper, Book of Souls.
Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty.
Lisa Genova, Left Neglected.
Nicole Krauss, Great House.
Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters.
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book.
Tea Obrecht, The Tiger's Wife.
T. C. Boyle, The Women.
Silas House, Eli the Good.
Rebecca Hunt, Mr. Chartwell.
Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi.
Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing.
Jodi Picoult, Sing Me Home.
Ann Napolitano, A Good Hard Look.
Scott Owens, Something Knows the Moment.
Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints.
William Kuhn, Reading Jackie.
Jessie Carty, Fat Girl.
Malaika Albrecht, Spill.
Lisa See, Dreams of Joy.
Deborah Rodriquez, A Cup of Friendship.
Wes Moore, The Other Wes Moore.
Pierre von Rooyen, Saturdays Are Gold.
Ken Follett, Fall of Giants.
Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother.
Charles Frazier, Nightwoods.
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom.
Laura Schlessinger, The Care and Feeding of Husbands.
David Sedaris. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.
Hillary Jordan. When She Woke.
Brad Metzer, Book of Lies.
Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone.
Adam Rex, The True Meaning of Smekday.
Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere.
Alan Bradley, Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie.

That's the list for the year. I must add one book in progress: I'm just a little over halfway through IQ84, Haruki Murakami's fascinating story set in 1984 Tokyo. The book weighs in at a heft 1452 (at least the electronic version), but that shouldn't discourage anyone wanting an engrossing tale of two lives connected for twenty years--since the two were ten--that intersect in the strangest of world. It's an ideal book to read as I straddle 2011 and 2012. Meanwhile, my list for the coming year is already stacking up.

Can't Help Loving the Canon

2011-12-16T08:48:00.000-08:00

For all my posting, I realize that not only do I not write much about what I read to teach, but I don't usually even jot the titles down on my calendar where I list all my reading. Today, though, as we wrapped up a semester of British Literature I (Beowulf to Swift), I was struck by just how much I've enjoyed all the reading. As a pleasant surprise, a number of students stayed after to make similar comments about King Lear and Paradise Lost.

Certainly little of what I've assigned in the class all semester has been easy reading. The physicality of the textbook doesn't help much either. The book--paperback at that--is about the size of a large brick, almost cube-shaped, which doesn't lend itself to stacking atop a pile of books. The pages are as thin as a Bible's, and the print warrants reading glasses, even for the young. I've discovered that since the works are far beyond copyright limits, if they ever were covered, I can usually download them on my electronic reader for nothing. Now that I've mastered note making and bookmarking on the device, I've managed to make the most of the reading experience. Interestingly, I often find that when I go to transfer my notes to my instructor's copy before class, I've often made the same notes as before.

(Let me add this note: Even though I've read almost everything I teach before (often many, many times), I feel an odd moral obligation to read it again "in real time," not only so I'll be fresh for class, but so that I can realize the time constraints of my students' reading.)

When I teach these classic works of literature, I'm usually reminded of exactly why they've lasted--not simply because they are old, dusty, museum worthy artifacts, but because they really are timeless. Beowulf is exciting, Paradise Lost, grand; "A Modest Proposal" does what all good satire means to do: makes us laugh (or groan) then makes us think. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight merits reading aloud--with gusto.

What made me particularly happy today was seeing that after enduring a full semester under the reading load, quite a few still seemed to share my love of this required reading.

I think I'll come back next semester.

The Other Scarlet

2011-12-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

By coincidence, I've had two Scarlet-related posts within a month, totally unconnected. My most recent book I finished, this one a book club choice, was Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. On the cover, the book is describe as a parody of Margaret Mitchell's iconic Gone with the Wind. I wonder, though, if that appeared before or after the court case in which Mitchell's estate accused Randall of plagiarism. (More research will follow. See you later, Google.)

While a charge of plagiarism is a bit over the top, the parody label misses the book's tone altogether. The story is told through the journals of a woman named Cynara, daughter of Scarlet O'Hara's Mammy (she of the swishing red petticoats), ***SPOILER ALERT***half sister to Scarlet (who is simply called Other throughout the book) and mistress to R---- (obviously Rhett Butler).

Rather than focusing on the pre-Civil War South or slavery in particular, this novel takes readers into the world of race and racism just at the end of the war. Amid all the changes the winds are blowing in, Randall has readers thinking more seriously about racial labels, particularly the "one-drop rule" and about ownership of oneself. She prompts readers to think the idea of responsbility to a person--even with good intentions--who pays for one's freedom.

I've long been fascinated with significance of names, of owning our names, of respecting or disrespecting others by knowing, acknowledging or remembering their names. The last sure sign that Cynara is her own woman comes through her ownership (and careful protection of) her real name.

I enjoyed her secondary characters--those borrowed and those she invented, "Miss Mealy Mouth, for instance, her thinly disguised Melanie Wilkes. Her glimpse of "Ashley Darling" also takes an interesting but not unexpected twist.

More than the authorized sequel Rhett's People by Donald McCaig, this novel made me want to revisit the original novel (not the much revisited movie) to recollect the whole story as I first knew it. How could the Mitchell estate object?

Wondering About Rereading

2011-12-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

Flipping through the New York Times Sunday "Book Review" this afternoon--an exercise in procrastination, I'll admit--I came across a piece by David Bowman, "Read It Again, Sam." He is discussing the rereading habits, particularly of famous authors. Coincidentally, I'd had a conversation after class with a couple of students. One said she never reread a book because she knew that meant that she might be reading something new at the time; her friend admitted that she had some favorite to which she returned again and again.

I understand both camps. I fall into both from time to time. As an English teacher, of course I read some works again and again as I teach them. I've never felt I was fair to rely on my memory from a year or more ago when I asked my students to come to class fresh from reading a text. My own reading at their scheduled pace also helps me understand the reading load I've assigned. As a result, I've read Macbeth and many other Shakespearean plans more times than I can count. To that, add To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, The Once and Future King, Cold Mountain, and even Paradise Lost--well, you get the point.

This self-discipline also leads me to change up my syllabus regularly to keep from tiring of books, short stories, plays, and poetry I love.

Today, though, I'm thinking that I may have missed some wonderful books that others find such pleasure that they return again and again. So rather than giving my own rereading list, I want to solicit lists of YOUR favorites. Since books are my favorite gift to buy this time of year (easy to wrap, too), this might be a good time to shake up my own list. I'll follow up in a week or so.

Just in Time for Christmas Shopping: The Book List

2011-12-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

I post all kinds of book lists here throughout the year, but almost every November I attend the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, where I not only come home with new ideas and resources for teaching, but I also accumulate a book list that would keep me busy reading all year long. Naturally, I want to share. On the list below, the first books are those shared at my favorite session "Readers Among Us," a regular offering at every conference in which participants share what we've been reading (for pleasure, not for teaching). We are asked to write down titles we mention and turn them in . In a week of so, the compilation arrives. I've included this list, along with other titles I heard from other conversations, formal and informal. In some cases, I've added a few notes as well.

Without further ado, here's the list:

Readers Among Us – Session K-11

Chicago 2011

The point of this session is to discuss we are reading as teachers who read. Many of us were drawn to our profession because we liked to read. At the conference we are so concerned with what everyone else is reading or with what we have to read that we neglect what drew us here in the first place. Here we have what our readers are reading. Feel free to distribute our list to everyone.

The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison – I keep going back to tis novel because it forces me to reconsider what happens when an individual, a family, a community internalizes pain and hatred from within and without

The Dune Series – Frank Herbert – I appreciate that this sci fi goes beyond science and provokes the reader to think about politics, economics, ecology, religion, and so much more

Little Bee – Chris Cleave

The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver –

Circle Mirror Transformation – Annie Baker

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Out of Oz – Gregory McGuire – Last book in the Wicked Series

The Sword of Truth Series – Terry Goodkind

A Parchment of Leaves – Silas House

On Writing – Stephen King

War and Peace – The Pevear/Volokhonsky translation – Leo Tolstoy

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma – Jack Lynch

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel (sequel yet?)

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky – Heidi Durrow

First They Killed My Father – Loung Ung

Lucky Child – Loung Ung

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs

When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead (last year’s Newbery; you’ll finish and

want to read it again immediately)

Russian Winter: A Novel (P.S.) – Daphne Kalotay (ballerina who donates

jewelry…surprise ending)

State of Wonder – Anne Patchett

Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann

Bossy Pants – Tina Fey (hilarious book; ugly cover)

Stiff – Mary Roach

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet – Jamie Ford

The Glass Palace – Amitov Ghosh

Loving Frank – Nancy Horan

The Lemon Tree – Sandy Tolan

The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates – Wes Moore

The State of Wonder – Ann Patchett – A researcher in Southe America does not respond to the drug company that is funding her research. Two doctors go in search. Great book club book.

The Eyre Affair – Jasper fforde

Readicide – Kelly Gallagher

That Used To Be Us – Thomas L. Friedman

The Little Prince – Saint Exupery

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Needs to be read regularly

The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

The Given Day – Dennis Leary

Columbine – David Cullen

Mary Ann in Autumn – Armistead Maupin

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson

The Master – Colm Toibin

Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein – Julie Salamon

Just Kids – Patti Smith

Must You Go – Antonia Fraser

Kosher Chinese – Michael Levy

The Sorcerer’s Apprenticeships: A Season in the Kitchen of El Bulli

The Tiger’s Wife – Tea Obreht

The Buddha in the Attic – Julie Otsuka

We the Animals – Julie Otsuka

A Long Hard Look – Napolitano

Blood, Bones and Butter – Gabrielle Hamilton

The Women - T.C. Boyle

Slam – Nick Hornby

Juliet Naked – Nick Hornby

Great House – Nicole Krauss

Fall of Giants – Ken Follett

When She Woke – Hilary Jordan

Visit From the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

Dreams of Joy - Lisa See – Sequel to Shanghai Girls

The Invisible Bridge – Julie Orringer – WWII, Jews in Hungary – Family saga

Major Pettigrews Last Stand – Helen Simonsen – Comedy of manners-funny in a Jane Austin way-but set in modern England, with protagonists in their 60s

Three Men in a Boat – Jerome Jerome – Farcical travel/adventure – Oscar Wilde meets Monty Python – On the Thames – Written over 100 years ago and still funny and relevant

I Think I Love You – Allison Pearson – Woman revisits her teen obsession with David Cassidy

The Winter Sea – Susanna Kearsley – Scotland, The Old Pretender, present/past switching

Okay for Now – Gary Schmidt – Young boy 1967, tough family life, brother has retunred from Vietnam, kid is trying to draw Audobon plates (as a metaphor for his life)

The Return of Captain John Gonnett – Elizabeth Speller – WWI, British mystery, desertion, suicide

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

States of Wonder – Ann Patchett – Perfect book club book (medical ethics-fertility drug) like Heart of Darkness with female main characters

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson – Berlin-WWII, American Ambassador to Germany (like reading a newsreel)

Fall of Giants – set in WWI, beginning in a Welsh mining town -
Girl Who Fell From the Sky – Durrow – Bi-racial child, remarkable story

* * * * * *

Other books from my notes that didn’t make it onto the cards, thereby missing the list:

Marcello and the Real World, Francisco Stark (best book on Asberger’s)

The Feed, M. T. Anderson (social networking—great on audio!)

The Sense of an Ending (Booker) reminiscent of Flaubert’s Parrot, tiny and

brilliant

Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh (two perspectives on the

opium trades wars; third book expected)

IQ84, Harukami Marakami—long book, love story

Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer—nonfiction, memory championship

From Carol Jago’s list (anticipated annually):

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (new translation by Lydia David, “the

original desperate housewife)

The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (nonfiction)

Lost and Found, Shaun Tan

The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Adam Sisman

Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman (was a Chicago Big Read)

Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Game of Thrones (series), George R. R. Martin

The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje

Other titles that were shared at a Roundtable:

The Grief of Others, Leah Hager Cohen

The Dirty Life, Kristin Kimble

Battle of Jericho, Sharon Draper (1^st or 3 books re: bullying rituals)

Unbroken, Laura Hildebrand (author of Seabiscuit)

While I Was Gone, Sue Miller

Sorta Like a Rock Star, Matthew Quick
Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the

Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag, Karl Tobein

The Hangman’s Daughter, Oliver Potzsch and Lee Chadeayne

Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott

There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz

Scratch Beginnings (Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream, Adam

Shepherd

Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh

Berlin: City of Stones, Jason Lutes (Book one)

Scarlet

2011-11-27T12:43:00.000-08:00

In her new novel, Hillary Jordan has managed to channel Nathanael Hawthorne, along with George Orwell or Margaret Atwood, as she sets her tale in the not-too-distant future, when Hannah Payne, a girl raised in a fundamentalist Christian family in Texas wakes up in a cell after having been chromed, the punishment for an abortion. Instead of wearing Hester Prynne's embroidered A on her bosom, she has had her skin turned bright red through an injection process known as "melachroming." After her release, she becomes a pariah, rejected by former friends and family. Of course, her minister, now in a key government position, comes to her defense--but not quite in the way he should.

In the story, Hannah is forced to question everything she believes, everything she's been taught. While some of Jordan's take on God and religion, censorship, sexuality, right and wrong, government is controversial, she doesn't draw any lines, leaving the book as a good catalyst for further discussion about what we believe and why.

While the allusions to The Scarlet Letter are unmistakable and certainly not coincidental, Jordan doesn't let Hawthorne's tale hijack her own. Instead, she ties in enough connections to make a perfect pairing. The story also serves as a cautionary tale about political and philosophical extremism. Looking under the futuristic surface, though, this is a love story, a coming of age story, a family story.

An Embarrassment of Riches

2011-11-22T08:28:00.000-08:00

If my life leans toward excess in any area, it's books. If there is some tapeworm analogy that would apply, feel free to supply it. I just never feel as if I have enough. I could probably stop right now, never buy another, and still be able to read new material for years. But I won't.

I'm self-disclosing here for a reason: Once again I attended the fall convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, held this year in Chicago. As a teacher of English, I have been blessed to be able to go to this conference quite often during my career, starting as a first-year teacher. The timing is perfect--close enough to the end of the semester that I need a boost, fresh material, contact with comrades serving in the same trenches. Every year, I get to see some friends that I know only through NCTE, teachers and writers from all over the world.

I will confess, though, that one lovely benefit of attendance is found in the mammoth exhibit hall (this time, actually three halls) where booksellers and other literary and educational vendors not only display and sell their wares, but often provide generous giveaways and deep discounts. The title of Nancy Pearl's Book Lust provides the perfect diagnosis. Other teachers, administrators, media specialists are doing just what I am--loading up! I ended up shipping home a couple of boxes before I left, then met three young preservice teachers on the plane who had opted to ship home their clothes and travel with their new books. Why didn't I think of that?

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for the packages, along with the booklist I always get via email a few days after the conference, a list of dozens of book recommendations from one of my favorite sessions "Readers Among Us." Before my Christmas shopping is in full swing, I'll have more stacks, more lists, more notes beckoning me more strongly than that bag of research papers I'll be wagging home for the Thanksgiving holidays.

Isn't It Ironic?

2011-11-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

I missed Franzen's first novel Corrections, the one that caused such a brouhaha when he declined to have Oprah's seal of approval on his book cover. At least, I haven't read it yet. I feel sure it's sitting somewhere on my bookshelf. I may have started the first few pages then abandoned it for the time. This new novel Freedom is just as weighty a volume, and it kept me interested throughout, but I just didn't like the characters very much. Since the point-of-view moves between third person perspectives with focus on the wife Patty Berglund in her autobiography (written in a distancing third person) to accounts of her husband Walter, his college roommate and on-again-off-again best friend rocker Richard Katz, and their son Joey, who moves in with the neighbors during high school, sharing a room with their teenage daughter Connie.

The novel is unquestionably political, but I find that all political views are skewered and satirized. Walter dirties his hands with political money to build a bird preserve in order to promote his pet cause, population explosion. Their son makes and forfeits a fortune, while still in college, obtaining shoddy parts for war vehicles. Patty teeters on the brink of sanity at times, making damaging decisions then opening herself up for attack.

Even as I found myself disliking the characters, I couldn't look away. I suspect they and their story will stick with me longer than other narratives that I found less abrasive. I may find myself skimming the shelves, looking for Corrections aftera ll.

Nightwoods

2011-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

The first mention I recall of Charles Frazier dates back years ago, when author Donald Secreast appeared at the Writers Symposium at Caldwell Community College and mentioned that his friend had a novel coming about about the Civil War--"and it's going to be big." I bought a copy of that novel Cold Mountain the week it was released and read it on a trip to China, discovering while there the poems of Han Shan, about another Cold Mountain. Evidently Frazier too had discovered these ancient poems, using one as an epigraph to his first novel.

For me the novel passed an all-important test. I used it in APP Lit class (1. without getting tired of it and (2. finding that it appealed to girls and boys. The book provided so many ways into discussions of style, of foreshadowing, of symbolism. But it was a good story. The movie had it's high points, but as one friend pointed out, "I don't need to see the movie. I've already seen it in my head."

I also enjoyed Thirteen Moons, since I have family interest in the Cherokee and what happened before, during, and after the "Trail of Tears." When Frazier appeared to promote the book as part of the Novello Festival in Charlotte, he also had a Cherokee "wise woman" who had translated the Removal section of that novel into Cherokee--phonetically and in the Cherokee syllabary.

This third book Nightwoods moves forward into the twentieth century, but still takes place in the mountains of Western North Carolina, with a road trip to and from Florida. Again, Frazier introduces engaging characters readers love or love to hate. The protagonist of the story, Luce, lives alone at a lodge, once the vacation site of wealthy mountain vacationers, but long empty, until she ends up with custory of her murdered sisters twins. Lacking the maternal instincts, she finds herself nonetheless determined to break through the walls Frank and Dolores have thrown up.

Frazier brings in Stubblefield, who inherits land and the lodge, upon his grandfather's death. He arrives with memories of a younger Luce from their youth. As he forges his place in his former home, he finds himself entangled in the life at the Lodge.

The novel's antagonist Bud Johnson ends up in the area, seeking the kids after he is acquitted of killing their mother, his late wife. His interest is not in their well-being but in what they may have taken with them and what they might betray--should they choose to speak. He plays as coldhearted a villain as any of the Home Guard in Cold Mountain.

The setting of the novel, mostly across the lake and beyond the small town, moves with the story from late fall to winter, eventually burrowing deep into the mountains, with trees still marking ancient trails to deep darkness. A recurring theme, hinted in the epigraph, is the necessity of being paid, but also of paying: nothing comes without a cost. The motifs of blood --redemptive and punitive--and of fire--giving light and warmth, wreaking destruction--surface throughout the novel as well.

The only bump in the narrative for me came when Frazier juxtaposes two scenes out of time sequences, tricking readers into thinking Bud has found the children in hiding, then tossing him into a campsite of deer hunters, leaving me to try to unravel the significance of the earlier scene.
I suspect that I may want to read the novel again, this time to see how the pieces fit together.

Meanwhile, I'm still reading...

2011-10-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

I realized this week that I have at least two or three books I finished that I still haven't mentioned here yet, mainly because about this time every year, real life catches up with me. The essays to be graded sit stacked beside me, filling me with guilt until motivation kicks in and I reach for the proverbial red pen. But I've been reading.

I finished Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. I got such a kick out of his The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-time, yet I hadn't gotten to this book (although it sat there on my shelf with several other neglected volumes.) Without giving away too much, this book had a scene as shocking or unnerving as the one more graphic scene in The Professor and the Madman. If you read it, you know to what I refer.

The novel opens with the protagonist George Hall discovering what he fear is cancer (although all indications point to eczema). He goes through the course of the novel dealing with his wife's infidelity, his son's alternate lifestyle, and his daughter's forthcoming marriage to a man he considers wrong for her. It has the making of such a dark novel--but I laughed so much through it. Sometimes, I'll admit, I groaned simulataneously, but so much of the novel is funny--in the way that British novels amuse--wry, quirky.

The tension builds until the wedding--a fiasco on so many levels. And anyone who has been closely involved with weddings--or gala on that level--knows the potential for disaster.

Since my book selection process has absolutely no pattern to it at all, I can't possibly predict accurately where my reading will take me for the rest of the year. But stay tuned: I'm near the end of Charles Frazier's Nightwoods, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and Isabel Allende's Ines of my Soul--all at the same time Maybe I'll even get those papers graded.

Follett--Doing What He Does Best

2011-10-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Ken Follett's fiction when I read The Key to Rebecca, which I picked up in part because of the reference to my favorite Daphne DuMaurier novel. While I was familiar with his suspense novels, I kept having friends tell me I needed to read his historical novel Pillars of the Earth. My brother-in-law credits the book with his decision to pursue a building career. The sprawling tale follows a master builder who dreams of building a great cathedral--which he does--and follows a variety of characters from all social levels during the time period leading up to and including the death of Thomas Becket. He waited more than twenty years before following up with World Without End, set in that same cathedral city during the time of the plague.

Now Follett has embarked on what is to become (I hear) a series set in the twentieth century. The first, Fall of Giants, begins in a Welsh mining town, first introducing Billy Williams (Billy Twice) on his thirteenth birthday, his first day in the mines, then Earl Fitzherbert, who owns the mine, and his family. As in his earlier historical fiction, Follett introduces strong women characters--Billy's sister Ethel, a maid in the earl's home, and the earl's sister, Lady Maude, a strong-minded suffragette.

Other threads of the story follow a young German diplomat, who attended college with Fitz, an American working for President Wilson, and a pair of Russian brothers. Follett manages to show the conflicts that led to World War I through a variety of perspectives, and he continues those different viewpoints through the course of the war and the complications as the major world power dealt with the Armistice.

I've always known more about World War II than the first "war to end all wars," but after reading this book, I was able to see the attitudes after the way, particularly in Germany, that would eventually give rise to Nazi power.

Although he deals only slightly with the death of the Czar's family, I learned so much about the revolution leading up to and following the end of that reign. He also suggests that many of the aristocratic families feared social revolution in Great Britain as well.

Since Follett creates characters that draw my interest and empathy, as well as a number of others who were despicable or at least flagrantly self-absorbed, I can't wait for him to finish the next book.

Can't Help Lovin' a Book List

2011-09-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

In one of my literature classes recently, as I was introducing the Arthurian legend, I mentioned T. H. White's The Once and Future King, writing it on the board and telling my students, "This is on my top-five list of favorite books ever. After a brief silence, one student piped up, Mrs. Posey, that's at least the eighth book you've mentioned so far this semester that's on your top five list.

They got me! Even if writers stopped writing, I'd never be able to complete even a top 100 list that would remain as the top favorites.

One of my favorite class assignments (there I go waxing hyperbolic again) asked the students to compose their own top ten book list and then share them. The variety of approaches was wonderful. One girl in the class with a long-term boyfriend, also quite a reader, compiled a list of good books for couples to read together. One young man asked if he had to limit the list to ten and came up with a favorite book from each year of school, starting with kindergarten.

In the newest edition of With Rigor for All, a professional publication by NCTE's past president Carol Jago, one of the most prolific readers I know, she has provided a number of good lists in the back--"10 Short Classics for Readers Short on Time," "10 Books for Girls Certain They Will Never Meet Prince Charming," even "10 Most Commonly Stolen Books from My Classroom Library." While I had ready many on her lists (some at her specific recommendation), I realize that now she's made my "to-read" list even longer.

If I were to try to list the books that I love most, those I wish I could get everyone to read, may of them are considered classics. Instead of giving myself a limit, I thought I might just see where the list takes me. Maybe others who read the blog will share your lists too.

Here goes...

T. H. White, The Once and Future King (I already told you. I know.)
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Pearl Buck, The Good Earth
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
John Irving, The Cider House Rules
Leon Uris, Trinity
Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth
Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

This list is just off the top of my head. An hour from now, I'll think of something I can't believe I omitted. I didn't even begin to mention books from my earlier period of reading (Charlotte's Web, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Little Women, and such).

Listing is one of those exercising in remembering--and sharing. Top five? Top ten? I can't see how!

A Cup of Friendship

2011-09-15T05:53:00.001-07:00

This week as bombs have blasted the U. S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, I was finishing Deborah Rodriguez's novel A Cup of Friendship. I haven't yet read her first book, The Kabul Beauty School, a memoir which, I learned, came under some criticism and claims of exaggeration. I'll leave that kind of controversy to Oprah. This book introduced me to some aspects of life in Afghanistan, not only for the locals, but for expats and for Americans and Brits working there.

Sunny, the protagonist of the novel, who has come to the country with a boyfriend who spends much of his time away on furtive missions, runs an American-style coffee house. This setting is a perfect backdrop for a variety of employees and patrons whose lives intertwine. They all have back stories: most sympathetic is Yazmina, recently widowed and pregnant, who manages to escape from drug lords to take her as payment for debts her uncle owes.

An older uneducated widow and her son also work for Sunny, and they are at odds over the old and new ways. She hides a secret romance with a tailor she loved before her marriage, a man who has been writing her letters for years, letters she can't read and has to hide from her son, now the man in the family, in control of her life. A female journalist from Britain and a recently divorced wife of a diplomat from Beacon Hill by way of Missouri grow into an unusual friendship and partnership with Sunny as they see egregious injustices toward women.

Throughout the novel, bombs go off, affecting the characters directly or indirectly, and I'm reminded of the lesson I learned when I read Reading Lolita in Teheran: The citizens are victims of politics and religious extremism. Though lighter reading than A Thousand Splendid Suns, this novel touched on similar issues, particularly related to human rights of women and to some of the destruction wrought by the Taliban in the country.

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." As travel becomes at times more dangerous, vicarious travel through the pages of a books--novel or memoir--can perhaps provide the kind of fatalities the world needs right now.

Dreams of Joy

2011-09-12T19:23:00.001-07:00

Every once in a while, I read a book that I enjoy so much that I want to go ahead and blog about it before I finish. This time, I did make myself wait, but just barely. I discovered Lisa See's novels through my book club awhile ago. We always seem to enjoy historical fiction, getting some of our travel in vicariously as well. We started with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, progressing on through Peony in Love and Shanghai Girls.

I didn't pick up Dreams of Joy right away, and I'm not sure why, except that I just had such a large stack of OTHER books to read. I had obviously missed the information that it is a sequel to Shanghai Girls, this time following daughter Joy, as she gets caught into the idealism of the Maoist Revolution while in college. When she feels responsible for the death of the man she always knew as her father, she takes off for China to find her "real dad" and to take part in what she believes will be the excitement of change.

In the novel, See moves back and forth between that of Joy and her mother Pearl, who returns to China to find her. The story of what happens when idealism runs head on into reality leads to some real horrors. I knew very little about China during this particular period, so the book just whetted my appetite to learn more.

Looking back over the four books, I realize that while what I like about her writing style remains consistent--the details that put me right there, the characters who become so real--no two books are alike. This particular sequel could certainly stand on its own, but read along with Shanghai Girls, the reader gets to know four generations of a family of strong, survivor females.

Since I visited China in 1997 with my friend Debbie and her family when they adopted their daughter Allie, I am particularly interested in that country.

Reading Jackie

2011-09-05T13:30:00.001-07:00

Celebrity biographies aren't usually my first choice, but William Kuhn took a different approach to the former first lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis that caught my attention. In Reading Jackie, instead of focusing on the aspects of her life that have been most public, especially her White House years, including the assassination in 1963, he proposes to show a different look at her through her reading life, and especially her surprising midlife career as an editor.

The pictures that emerges is a woman full of contradictions. She experienced a life of privilege, yet often felt she didn't quite belong. As a girl, she loved to curl up with a book, a habit that continued through her life. Kuhn reports that as she approached her death, friends read to her from her favorite books (while her Kennedy sister-in-law perched in the corner, providing unnecessary commentary on visitors.)

When she began her career at Viking, no doubt many suspected she was hired for her connections--certainly useful in the publishing business. Throughout her career, though, she not only showed the work ethic that marked her successes, but she was often described sitting on the floor of her small, nondescript office, working on a layout, or running down the hall in stocking feet, working on a deadline.

Her colleague helped to protect her privacy. She was famously uncomfortable with photographers, for example, and sometimes canceled appearances at book parties when she learned too many would be in attendance. Her move to Doubleday came as a result of a decision to publish a Kennedy-related book despite her opposition.

At other times, though, she was able to overlook elements of books that might have been expected to make her squeamish. In her friend Diana Vrelland's book Allure, Onassis was able to look past sections including Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas, despite these women's rather public connections to her late husbands.

Kuhn showed how Jackie promoted what she most loved--dancing, eighteenth century European life, collections and relics of royals--French, Russian, and Indian. Her travels often opened up her interests. She also championed causes important to her, adding books to her list related to Civil Rights--particularly opposition to George Wallace--before his political about face.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was also shown as the "closet feminist" she has been called. She was reported to have advised that women avoid marriage and keep their money separate, something she clearly did with the last love of her life, Maurice Tempelsman. In her friendships and in the books she chose to edit, she often seemed acutely aware of women who had made marriages with powerful men who sought to overshadow or even belittle them.

I was surprised by some of the titles on her list, particularly The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell's book in association with the television series with Bill Moyers. As the woman who created the association of Camelot with her husband's administration, she has lived a life of myth. Through the lens of her books, readers will learn that she is a many-layered woman who grew far beyond her most public, tragic role.

Light Reading, Heavy Issues

2011-08-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

With my summer at its official end and school starting back up, I'm determined not to cut back too much on my pleasure reading. Sure, I'm already reading along with my students the literature assignments--Beowulf, "Story of an Hour," "Rose for Emily," and more--but my own
reading with no agenda, no lecture notes, no test keeps me sane. The last couple of books I've picked up have not been purely literary, but they both dealt with some serious issues.

Anyone familiar with Jodi Picoult knows that her formula is to take some big issue and add several more, then end with an unexpected twist. Sing Me Home takes on in vitro fertilization, gay marriage, alcoholism, and the Christian right. The book certainly gives book clubs plenty of opportunity for discussion, but somehow, the twists and turns didn't ring true, and some of the stereotypes gave me pause.

Joshilyn Jackson is an old Alabama girl. In fact, the first of her books I read was Gods in Alabama. This newest book Backseat Saints was a slow start when I first began reading, but for some reason, I picked it back up and enjoyed it so much more. Even though most of the story takes place in Texas or California, not Alabama, the main character's Dixie tone was pitch perfect. Even though Jackson's novels can deal with serious issues, she manages humor to balance. Roe Grandy (Rose May Lolly) the protagonist is an abused wife warned by a gypsy at the airport "It's him or you" and realizes she should kill her husband. In her first attempt, she shoots the leg off her dog Fat Gretel. No funny, of course, but certainly unexpected. Never having lived with abuse, I find it hard to imagine what causes people to stay in such a threatening situation, denying the truth, always going to the ER after "falling down the stairs." The difficulty of getting away is more evident--and the cost of leaving.

Jackson's literary references in the book caught my attention--books I have read and loved, familiar lines, beloved characters. This young woman's reading life perhaps gave her the imagination to reinvent herself, to become someone else in search of a new life.

I don't even have the heart to look back to see what I planned to read at the beginning of the summer. I never work my way down that list without veering off. I'm glad to know that any I missed are still waiting on my shelf, ready for me to curl up on the couch and escape temporarily into another world.

Caleb's Crossing

2011-08-14T17:05:00.001-07:00

I've read four of Geraldine Brooks' novels --A Year of Wonder, People of the Book, March, and now Caleb's Crossing--and I can say that she doesn't just rework the same formula. She's taken me all over the world at all times from present times back through history. This book tells the story of a young girl Bethea, the daughter of a minister in the seventeenth century committed to educating and evangelizing the natives in the area. The title, I learned, by the end of the book, refers to many crossings, literal and figurative.

Brooks illustrates the range of attitudes toward religion, ethnic diversity, and especially women's roles in the time period. Caleb--an English name Bethea gives to the Indian boy who calls her "Storm Eyes" is the nephew of a wise man of his tribe and is destined to follow in the same path before converted to Christianity and educated by Bethea's father. The two first meet in the wild and become friends, learning each other's language, despite societal sanctions such a relationship.

The novel takes many tragic turns, not particularly unexpected in this time period--death in childbirth, shipwrecks, drowning, consumption. Bethea ends up serving an indenture at a school adjacent to the new Harvard College in order to pay for the education of her less-than-motivated or capable brother Makepeace. Despite her conditions, she seeks every opportunity to learn--Greek, Latin, Hebrew.

Although much of the attention in the book focuses on breaking down the walls of prejudice between the European settlers and the native Indians, I came away thinking of the effect on girls who are deprived of a full education. Ironically, here in the U. S., where education is readily available, it's easy to take it for granted (or to waste the opportunity). While the jury's still out on Greg Mortenson, he has certainly brought to the world's attention the importance of educating girls, which he says changes not just an individual but a family, a tribe, a community.

Note: I listened to the audio recording of the book, read by actress Jennifer Ehle. I found her enunciation of every article a a little off-putting. Maybe it's just my problem.

Revisiting Flannery

2011-08-09T04:30:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I'm a Flannery O'Connor fan. I gained my genuine appreciation several years ago when the literature anthology I used for AP English (Bedford Intro to Lit) included four or five of her stories. I'd read one or two before, but when I read--and taught--several together and had the advantage of some accompanying essays by and about her, I became a real fan.

One of my favorite culminating activities was to host a talk show (Think Sally Jesse Raphael or Maury Povich) during which my students came in character. I let them decide on themes related to the recurring ideas we saw in the book. They were easy to locate--Misfits, Bad Kids, Dysfunctional Families. Television producers today would find a gold mine in June Star or Joy/Hulga or Manley Pointer.

Ann Napolitano's new novel A Good Hard Look is set in Milledgeville, Georgia, O'Connor's home town in the sixties, the years leading up to her death from lupus, the disease that also claimed her father at an early age. In this book, though, Flannery and her mother Regina are just two of the characters whose lives intersect, sometimes in the same violent way that her characters' did.

Cookie, a hometown girl, returns from New York to marry Melvin, a wealthy young man she met there and convinced to move to Georgia for her. Lona, the bored wife of a policeman aspiring to be chief, becomes too close to Joe, the high school boy she takes on as an assistant as a favor to her mother, who looks after Lona's daughter Gigi during the day.

While Cookie is working in the local women's clubs to ban Flannery O'Connor's books, which she believes make the town look "just awful," her new husband is giving Flannery driving lessons and building a strong and unusual friendship, a secret he keeps from his wife.

Napolitano has done her homework, including details from O'Connor's life--her trip to Lourdes at her mother's insistence, her writing, and in particular her legendary peacocks, which play a prominent role throughout the story. The author keeps the research light--enough to sate O'Connor fans, to be convincing, without letting someone else's stories take the place of her own. Rather than throw up too many plot details, she instead shows the author's anxiety, her need to get it right, knowing that her writing is all she'll leave behind.

Napolitano's writing is good, her eye for detail, for mind-searing images. She also handles the subject of religion, faith, and grace, important themes in O'Connor's works, with credibility and sensitivity. Readers may find an urge not only to read more by and about Flannery O'Connor, but also to take a look at Napolitano's earlier writing as well.

Eli the Good

2011-08-04T06:30:00.001-07:00

Every semester, the English department is faced with the challenge of selecting a book to be used in all our developmental reading and writing classes, and in any other courses at the teachers' discretion. Sometimes the choice is influenced by our plans for our Writers Symposium. We've hosted Ron Rash when we taught Serena and Clyde Edgerton in connection with The Bible Salesman. Last spring, we really stepped out on a limb and invited poets from North Carolina--Cathy Smith Bower, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Scott Owens, Tim Peeler, Ted Pope, and Joseph Bathanti.

This fall, since we are introducing a new course, Vietnam History, a class that will follow the same interdisciplinary plan we use in our Holocaust class. Literature about the Vietnam war is plentiful. In one of my favorite courses in grad school, War Literature, I read many of them--Dispatches, The Short-Timers, and The Things They Carried, among others. This year, we took a different direction, selecting Silas House's novel Eli the Good.

With a ten-year-old protagonist, the book is sometimes labeled Young Adult Fiction. (I can't help wondering how To Kill a Mockingbird or Diary of a Young Girl would have been shelved today.) Set in 1976, the novel examines a family whose father is beginning to experience flashbacks (before PTSD was acknowledged as real). Meanwhile, his estranged sister, newly diagnosed with cancer, comes home. During her brother's overseas duty, she participated in war protests and was captured in an iconic photo that has made its way into history textbooks.

House weaves in stories of generational conflicts and the effects of parental actions on children. He allows the gray area to remain. The book provides no easy answers about the war; consequently, I expect it to produce some ripe discussions in our classes. Since our students' ages range from teens to sixty and over, the varied perspectives should produce some powerful conversations and good opportunities for related research.

Funny in Farsi

2011-08-02T18:16:00.001-07:00

Back in November when I attended the NCTE convention in Atlanta, one delight was hearing Firoozeh Dumas speak. Her book Funny in Farsi tells the story of her family that moved to California when she was in elementary school, long before the Shah's departure and the hostage crisis. She wrote the book, her memoirs, in part to show that we are all more alike than we are different.

In fact, when she first tried to pitch the book, she was told it didn't have enough oppression. Let me say up front, if you want heavy politics and oppression, this is not a book for you. On the other hand, if you want to enjoy a bookful of genuine laughs about quirky families, this may be your cup of tea. She covers the time from second grade until adulthood, including her marriage to a Frenchman whose family never did accept her. In her epilogue, she admits that the story became more about her father than she expected.

I was surprised to learn my younger son had read the book as a college assignment--and then gave the book to a friend. While this book might not give a complete, rounded picture of the Iranian immigrant experience, it gives a view that's been overlooked. Most of all, it's a great family story.

Disney-Free Kipling

2011-08-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I keep finding myself drawn to read Kipling's The Jungle Book, maybe for the first time. I was first challenged to do so by Carol Jago at the NCTE conference a couple of years ago, when the focus was on new and old classics. I realized that while I had read parts, most of my images came from the Disney cartoon, which I remember seeing in the theater in the eighth or ninth grade.

Further inspiration came from my reading of The Jungle Law, the story of Kipling and a young boy who was his neighbor, when he lived in America with his new bride while writing this classic. Neil Gaimann's The Graveyard Book, further enticed me to read it. When I found the book as a recurring motif in The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht, I figured three's a charm.

The stories are simple, but with layers of meaning. They could easily be read aloud to children at bedtime, or they could be used metaphorically to represent events throughout history and politics. I somehow hadn't realized that Mowgli's story is just one of those collected in The Jungle Book. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, that brave snake-killing mongoose, is another of Kipling's heroes. I hadn't read his stories of the white seal looking for a home safe from humans or elephants herding other elephants. One human's account of conversations between animals, whose language he had managed to pick up without their knowledge, put me in mind of Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing, in which the protagonist learns the language of the local natives by immersion.

Reading The Jungle Book compels me to return to other classics for the first time. The debate continues in education for the teaching of the classics. Some advise assigning these wonderful works during school lest they never be encountered voluntarily. Others suggest that if we assign then too early, young readers will believe they have really read them and not turn back later.

My own re-reading of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth hit home this point. I had read--and loved--the book in ninth or tenth grade. The paperback I re-read in my thirties still had my maiden name penciled in the inside cover. But as an adult, I read the book as such a parable. I brought more to it the second time. I believe the same is true of The Jungle Book.

Black Dog

2011-07-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon Rebecca Hunt's novel Mr. Chartwell without any prior knowledge or recommendation. (A friend at my book club asked where I got my reading suggestions, and I said, "Everywhere." Sometimes, the discoveries are pure serendipity--I do judge a book by it cover or I choose an audiobook because it is there.)

Someone too bent on realism might pass this one by. The protagonist Esther Hammerhans advertises for a boarder for her empty room--formerly the office of her late husband. To her surprise, the first person (and I use that term loosely) to respond it a huge black dog. A talking dog. A pushy talking dog. He bullies her into letting him stay, offering a large financial sum for a temporary stay. She learns, though, that he is Winston Churchill's "black dog"--the personification of his bouts of depression. Indeed, Churchill is a character in the novel as well, getting ready to announce his retirement from Parliament.

Esther, who works at the library at Parliament, is looked after by well-meaning friends, trying to get her through the second anniverary of her husband Michael's death with a dinner invitation and a little matchmaking. The quirky tale not only led me to read more about Churchill, but it used the "black dog" analogy beautifully to present a picture of how depression can move in and take over a life.

I'll admit that I enjoy hearing a book well read in a British accent. I wonder if Brits get the same sensation from hearing something decidedly American read in a soft Southern accent. From time to time, I considered picking up the book in print to go back to some passages that invited further consideration. Maybe I still will.

Tiger's Wife

2011-07-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

Tea Obreht's novel The Tiger's Wife was one of the Lemuria First Editions Club selections that appeared on my doorstep before I'd heard of it. After that though (as often happens with their selections), I began to hear lots of chatter from other readers. The story is told by Natalia, a young doctor, and by her grandfather (a physician himself), who tells her stories--or more precisely, variations of two stories--the deathless man and the tiger's wife.

Set in a Balkan country torn by war throughout history, often spurred on by religious and ethnic rivalries, the story intertwines factual details with myths and legends--as the best stories often do--and as a result, truth often trumps fact.

Having recently read two novels by Glen Cooper dealing with the impact of knowing one's time of death, I couldn't help making connections with this story, particularly the tale of the deathless man--a man cursed by immortality by his uncle Death. Because many of the stories told by Obreht's characters are told in fragments, the way we all tend to tell our family stories, the reader has the feeling of coming to the same story or even from many perspectives, particularly those of time.

The novel seems to be as much about secret-keeping as story-telling, often as a proof of love and loyalty as much as a means of self-protection. Something about this book makes me believe that its small, beautifully drawn details, its complex characters will stay with me for a long time.

I suspect, too, that I'll be turning to Kipling's Jungle Book soon--and not just the Disney version. After this book, The Graveyard Book, and The Jungle Law, I realize someone is telling me something.

It's ONLY July 14

2011-07-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here it is, Bastille Day, mid-July, and I feel as if summer's nearly over. Ridiculous. But since I get more reading done in the summer, though, I feel "time's winged chariot" fast on my heels. My to-read stack doesn't seem to diminish at all. (Does anyone else remember school cafeteria spaghetti? It had a weird supernatural quality for me: I ate and ate and the quantity never seemed to change.)

I keep revising and re-prioritizing. Something catches my attention, and another book slides back down the list. I try to imagine if I had to queue my reading list the way I do Netflix DVD orders. I'd constantly be clicking move up and move down.

For now, I'm working on a couple I can't wait to share--one audio, one print--but I hear little voices over my shoulder whispering "Read me next."

Weird Sisters

2011-07-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

Although Eleanor Brown's novel The Weird Sisters may lack the elements of literature that stand the test of time, it offered two elements that caught my attention right away. First, of course, there's the title's allusion to Shakespeare's three witches that encounter Macbeth and Banquo in Act I. Second, the novel is a story of the relationship of three grown sisters.

As a Shakespeare lover of the first order, I enjoyed the way the whole family, inspired by their professor father, work lines of Shakespeare into their conversation. The plot brings two sisters home--in semi-shame, Bean after losing a job when caught stealing from her company, Cordy, pregnant after wandering across the country aimlessly after dropping out of college. Their older sister Rose, a non-tenured math professor also returns home when her fiance accepts a temporary position at Oxford. All converge on the house after their mother's diagnosis with breast cancer and must wrestle with their own pasts and futures.

Rather than playing with subtleties as she works in the Shakespearean references, Brown just goes for the obvious fun. The girls are named, after all, for Rosalind, Bianca (oh yes, the second daughter), and Cordelia, the youngest, and Daddy's favorite.

As one of five sisters myself, I had no problem believing that three sisters could be so very different or that each could be jockeying for position as the parents' favorite, always fearing disappointing the family.

Returning to a small college town, the sisters must find their place (and in a way that only happens in make-believe), jobs just fall into their laps--at the local sandwich shop, at the library, at the local college.

The book has no heavy message or deep meaning (unless you're really looking for one). It's just a quick fun read--and a chance to brush up your Shakespeare!

Weaving a Story Line

2011-07-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Nicole Krauss through her novel History of Love, a book that sat on my shelf awhile before I ventured in. That book reminded me in a way of Jonathan Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (and yes, I did have to look up the title again to remember which adverb goes with which adjective). Both have young narrators and weave together what at first seems to be disconnected plot lines. Both also have threads of Holocaust narratives as well.

I started Great House once unsuccessfully, then picked it back up during my vacation and couldn't put it down. Again the pulls together characters with only thin connections--if any at all--in New York, London, and Jerusalem. The single connection is a large, usual desk, first introduced by a narrator (one of several) who agrees to keep furniture for a young poet returning to Chile. The desk is the single piece to which she becomes attached, eventually using it while writing her novels. The other characters include the husband of another, more famous author who owned the desk, a brother and sister whose father recovers personal items lost during the Holocaust, a son who returns home to stay with his estranged father in Israel after quitting his job as a judge in England.

The significance of the title also makes a late appearance in the narrative, reinforcing the idea of collective memory. I have finally learned to highlight and make notes in my i-Book, so I can at least look back for the patches of yellow.

This is not the kind of narrative for which I could provide a spoiler. In fact, this is one of the handfuls of books that I finish then turn back and re-read the last chapter or two, just to be sure I comprehend how the story is resolved. I can often (well, maybe I should say sometimes) read a book and feel satisfied when I'm finished without needing to talk about it. This is not one of those books. I have a genuine desire to go back through and chart the people, places, and timeline. I have a need to talk about this clever, intricately woven tale with someone else. I'm just not through with it yet.

Road Reads

2011-07-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

This past week my husband and I headed to Arizona for one of our "bucket list" destinations, the Grand Canyon. Of course, I packed more than enough to read on the way, but I have to admit that the scenery on the trip was so overwhelming that I didn't bury my nose in a book for most of the car trip. I did, however, have plenty of plane time during the cross-country trip.

On the way there, I finished Lisa Genova's new novel Left Neglected. Her novel Still Alice, about a woman with early onset Alzheimer's was so beautifully written. The author's expertise as a Harvard-educated neuroscientist brings a credibility to her books, but her writing holds up literarily as well. In this novel, the main character Sarah Nickerson who, with her husband's help, balances a family and a powerful, high-powered career until a car accident leaves her with a serious brain injury called left neglect. Because of injuries to the right side of her brain, she can't use--or even see- her right arm, right leg; she can't see food on the left side of her plate or people on the left side of her room.

The drama in the book comes not only from the changes to Sarah, but the changes in family dynamics. Her mother, who practically disappeared from life after losing a son in a drowning accident, comes back into her daughter's life. Genova introduces a group that helps handicapped individuals to ski, and she provides information at the conclusion of the book.

Both of Genova's books could easily have veered into maudlin tear-jerkers, but instead, both presented women who faced tremendous life-changing events with dignity.

Check back in a day or two for my review of Nicole Krauss' Great House. For my review of Ann Patchett's State of Wonder from the Raleigh News and Observer, check this link.

Art Voyeur

2011-06-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

Anybody who knows me well knows that while I would never consider myself an artist, I love the visual arts. On a trip to New York, I choose MOMA over shopping. In Paris, I went to the d'Orsay when most of our group went somewhere else. For several summers, I've tagged along to Chicago when my husband had a trade show, and I spent hours each time at the Art Institute. I must give some credit to Mrs. Evans and Mr. Flowers, team teachers of the Humanities class I took in high school. If that class didn't get us ready for Jeopardy, nothing would.

I just finished An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin--yes, that Steve Martin. The comedian, the guy with the arrow through his head, one of the newer members of Steep Canyon Rangers. This book immerses readers in the art world--New York City's art world (with an assumption that there is no other). Daniel, the narrator is an art writer and friend of Lacey Yeager, a larger-than-life character determined to rise to the top of the art field by any means necessary. She starts in the catacombs of Sotheby's and uses her wits more than her scruples to succeed.

Martin has created exciting, believable characters that draw a reader through his story, but he impressively fleshes out the details of the changing art climate and the effects of politics and economics, moving through 9/11 and the more recent banking crisis. The narrator is endearing and ingenuous. I could imagine a young Steve Martin playing him. He maintains a cautiously affectionate relationship with Lacey, while maintaining shrewd objectivity.

I seem to remember that after the success of The DaVinci Code, I saw an illustrated edition, including the works of art that play a role in the story. I could imagine the same with this book. Martin includes enough about real artists, living and dead, that I wondered which were actually fictional. Somehow I can imagine art collectors and gallery owners reading and trying to identify themselves--with Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" playing softly in the background.

Something for Everyone

2011-06-21T19:08:00.001-07:00

This seems to be my year for sequels and series. Earlier this year one of my sisters kept recommending Glenn Cooper's Book of Souls. Then before I got to it, she advised that it was actually the second book, so she turned me toward Secret of the Seventh Sign first. As I wrote earlier, this book, set in 777AD, post-WWII, and present time, between the Isle of Wight, New York City, and Nevada, was a cross between the typical suspense-driven airplane book and historical fiction like Pillars of the Earth.

Book of Souls follows the same character, recently retired FBI agent Will Piper as he finds himself drawn into danger and intrigue surrounding a book going to auction in London dated 1527. This time Cooper manages to bring in threads of Shakespeare, John Calvin, and Nostradamus.

The novel addresses some serious questions related to God, fate, predestination, and such without purporting to present a solid answers. The question readers may take away, though, is whether or not they would want to know exactly when their own lives will end. Along the way, the story is entertaining and clever, a good summer read.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Hickory, NC

Third Time's a Charm

2011-06-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

In all my years book clubbing, I think I've only failed to finish the book before the meeting twice, and Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, which won the Pulitzer prize was one of those. The fact that I began it during my busy season (research paper grading, exams, final report cards) didn't help. The book, too, is so firmly researched that it often felt more like a text book reading that escape, which doesn't always hinder me.

I started with my electronic reader version, spinning away at the stationary bike or walking on the treadmill, and I got stuck. Then I borrowed a hardback copy from a friend and ventured a little further before stopping and moving on to more plot-driven books.

But I couldn't abandon the book altogether, so when I found the audio version at the library, I knew I was meant to finish, and so I did. Now admittedly, I was at a disadvantage in some parts listening, since the characters' names and many of the places in those parts of the world--from Rome to Egypt and all in between--aren't standard fare. On the other hand, I had at least passing familiarity with the stories involved via Hollywood and Mr. Shakespeare, as well as the many legends and myths floating around.

I also knew not to expect a happy ending, although I wasn't sure about the asp. Having visited Turkey, and Ephesus in particular, last summer, I was drawn in by the parts of the story that took place there. My familiarity with Herod, the Caesars, and even Caligula from Biblical accounts and from history lessons also drew me into the story.

By the time I reached the end, I realized that not only was I glad to have made my way through the sometimes dense text, but I had more threads I wanted to follow: What did happen to the library at Alexandria? When exactly did Latin become a dead language? How do writers such as Schiff have the stamina to pursue their research so completely and relentlessly?

I am ready to move on to fiction again (and already have), but for now, I'm glad to have spent this sojourn in that ancient world. I feel ready to travel now.

The Pullet Surprise

2011-06-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

Not usually drawn in by awards (maybe because I'm jaded by Oscars and the like), I am still drawn to the Pulitzer Prize winners each year--not that I always read them, but I at least check them out. This year, I started Cleopatra: A Life as an electronic book then tried the hard back, only to give up for awhile. Now I am listening, and find it much easier to get through--even with, perhaps even because of, the footnotes.

The prize for fiction this year went to Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, a book recommended to our book club before winning the prize. After reading it, I find that description of the book falls short of the experience. I couldn't even say, if my life depended on it, whom I would call the protagonist. The setting itself ranges from the early seventies at least until a time noted only as 202_, a future less bleak than that of Super Sad True Love Story, but at least more communication dependent and more arid then the present. It also moved from San Francisco to New York.

Each chapter in the book weaves in characters from prior chapters: Sasha, a college dropout, drop in, recovering kleptomaniac, and mother; Bennie, at first a member of a rock band called th Flaming Dildoes, then a music producer, and a washed-up has-been hoping to make a comeback. Other characters, just as significant are childhood friends of Bennie, family members, even a sleazy music producer who preys on younger women, dragging his own children along on trips with the woman of the day. Scotty makes an appearance first as one of Bennie's young band members, then a practically homeless man who brings a huge fish he's just caught to Bennie's office and then--well, no spoiler for you now.

I'd love to know something about the Pulitzer process, since I sometimes find myself surprised to find that I've just read the winner (Edward P. Jones, The Known World and Elizabeth Stout's Olive Kitteredge come to mind). This year, I wonder what books didn't quite make the cut.

I can't help believing that this book has those small incidents and images that will keep coming up in my reading memory for awhile. Maybe that's part of the criteria.

Not Going Ape over Ape House

2011-06-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

Without question, I have been a picky reader much longer than I was ever a picky eater (although now only my elementary report cards bear testament to that former affliction, which I wish had lasted into adulthood). There are some authors (whom I will not name for fear of offending others whose literary palates differ from mine) whose works I will not read--or even pick up. I think of one, beloved by high school girls everywhere, who spoke at a national conference I attended a few years ago. I skipped the session and chose, instead, to line up at the UPS office in the hotel to mail home my free books. Right behind me was the woman tapped to introduce the man. She had stayed long enough to do her job--then left without hearing him speak. I understand that.

Sometimes, though, I'll find myself loving a book that my friends or colleagues scorn or criticize. I may understand their opinions and choose to like the book anyway. As a rule, I can buy into "the willing suspension of disbelief." While I am deeply satisfied by a satisfying ending, I don't even require a happy ending, or a tidy ending. No resolution? That's fine as long as it's not just a pretense to make way for a sequel. (I quit reading James Patterson after one book, threads left hanging everywhere.)

I have been listening to the audiobook of Sara Gruen's Ape House. I loved Water for Elephants. This new book has come recommended by people I trust. Maybe the listening experience contributed to my disillusionment, but I think not. The underlying premise was clever and quirky. Who doesn't find the apes who can communicate in ASL fascinating? Gruen also does a remarkable job building uncomfortable tension and suspense, compelling me to keep reading (okay, listening), but the thread of the story involving John Thigpen (derisively called Pigpen) and his wife, the aspiring author, was too unbelievable. Over and over, I wanted to yell, not at them, but at the author: He wouldn't have said that, done that. . . . She would never have acted that way one instant and then this way the next.

I found myself wishing this had been one of those "choose your own adventure" books, giving me some editorial say so. I wanted to give obvious advice to the characters. I don't think the book would have ended far sooner had I done so. Spoiler alert: Who in her right mind would adopt a meth lab pitbull that had escaped a crippling explosion and sneaked his way into an unrelated man's hotel room? A dog named Booger? Who would have made the dog wear sweaters? Who would have been distracted by the dog for an hour or more after finding her husband's hotel room ashtrays overflowing with lipsticked cigarette butts and stinking of smoke and cheap perfume?

But I finished the book, and I'll continue to find the Bonobos fascinating. Now, though, I'm ready to go on to my next possibly great read.

Blood, Bones, and Butter

2011-05-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I read a book I know others will enjoy, I simultaneously realize there is no way I can explain it in a way that piques their interest as it should. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter is just such a book. To say the book is about food, while true, is also an understatement.

The author grew up in a family where food was central. She opens with her memories of the book outdoor lamb roast her father organized and carried out each year. Even her accounts of her pure delinquency when her mother left and she and a brother remained behind--basically alone--don't prepare the reader for the woman who develops.

Hamilton didn't end up with her own restaurant Prunes in New York City after going the traditional route--culinary school. In fact, after having to complete high school and college in a nontraditional setting, she earned a MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, "the Harvard of the Midwest." She learned everything she knows about the food industry the hard way, from the bottom up.

She started out waiting tables, prepping for huge generic catered meals, tending bar, even underage, finally landing in her spot as owner and chef by following anything but a logical business plan.

And that is only part of the story. Hamilton married an Italian (an Italian Italian-from Italy), the father of her two sons, and went with him each July for three weeks in Italy with his family, going from Rome to their summer villa in the South, then back. These vacations not only provide rich materials for food writing but such introspection and awareness of family dynamics.

Hamilton's rich use of imagery, of figurative language might slide by a reader not mining for such, but would land smack in the subconscious, prompting one to mull over just why this book is so evocative and provocative. I'll admit that I had to figure out how to add notes and highlights to my eBook so I could return to some of the most powerful passages. For now, though, I think I want to cook some eggplant.

Famous Men and Their Women

2011-05-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

By one of those odd coincidences that occur in my reading life, I just finished two books that were oddly parallel: Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, the story of Mameh Cheney, the woman for whom Frank Lloyd Wright left his wife and six (count'em six) children. I'll confess that by chance, I had an abridged audio (which I consider something of an abomination), and I could often tell where the cuts were made. For a lot of reasons, I can't (or won't) reveal much of the plot, and I'll even encourage you NOT to read anything about the relationship if you plan to read the book.

I've always been interested in Wright, particularly since one of the homes he designed is located in my hometown, Florence, Alabama, built for the Rosenbaum family. In my absolute favorite high school class, Humanities, we had an architecture unit and were able to tour the home. Over the last several years, I've also read Blue Bailett's YA novel The Wright Three before visiting and touring Chicago, and I made the trip out to Oak Park for the F. L. Wright tour, as well as to the Robie House near the University of Chicago.

I couldn't help, though, as I read the book, sympathizing with the spouses and families abandoned.

Then I read Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, a novel based on Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife. The writing was particularly good, I thought, and the author used historical and biographical research as well as Hemingway's fiction to weave her tale. Perhaps the most memorable turn of events occurs when Hadley manages to lose Hemingway's only drafts of writing, a detail I must research.

The story was such a name-dropper, bringing in all the expatriates--Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein, credited with dubbing the crew the "Lost Generation." While much of the story is set in Paris, it begins back in the states and travels throughout Europe,--Lausanne and, of course, Pamplona.

In both books, I marveled at how these not-yet-discovered geniuses managed to travel and live either on credit, hope, or the generosity of wealthier friends. Both stories were heartbreaking, and although neither purported to be anything more than a novel, the bones of the stories, grounded in truth, were both compelling.

I've Seen the Future--Again!

2011-05-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

Recently, I found myself in the future through all three of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy (the first now about to be filmed just a few miles from here!) Now I've just made my way through Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, and once again, the future looks bleak.

During grad school, I took a comp class in which the instructor used utopian and dystopian literature as a central focus of much of our writing, particularly the research. I remember reading Samuel Butler's Erewhon, published in 1872. Reading his view of the future--or Orwell's 1984--after the fact was thought-provoking, but provided a reminder that it's often not what we worry about that happens. It's what we weren't expected.

In Shteyngart's case, though, he certainly taps into current concerns--our Chinese debt for instance (the big gold yuan symbol on a heavy gold chain appears around necks of at least two characters), the effects of our wars in faraway places and our treatment of returning vets, and of particular concern to me--the replacement of text and talk (called verballing) with electronic options. Even the iPhone is mentioned as retro in the book. Everyone wears tinier and tinier devices called apparats, used for everything. Lenny Abramov, the main character, collects and yes, even reads, books. But when he attempts to read on a plane, people around him complain about the smell.

The extreme worship of youth is central in the novel. Lenny works for a company selling eternal youth--or life--to HNWI's (High Net Worth Individuals). The central love story examines Lenny's obsession with Eunice Park, a first generation Korean American twenty years his junior. Told through Lenny's diary and Eunice's electronic communications (some modern version of email and Facebook), the tale plays on the dramatic irony in the difference between contrast between Lenny's and Eunice's interpretation of events in their lives both small and large.

I guess I'll have to wait a little longer for a more positive view of a future with a sound America, a peaceful world--and a future in which books are safe, even valued.

War Stories from Closer to Home

2011-05-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

The structure of Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone reminded me from the beginning of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, short stories with a common setting whose characters overlap. Fallen too writes a fictional account based on her own experience, a Ft. Hood wife of a soldier deployed to Iraq.

The stories move back and forth between the base, where wives are facing fears that range from roadside bombs to females serving in the field near their husbands. They deal with gossip, cancer, and childrearing alone --or with the makeshift families developed among the other wives.

The most painful accounts are those of the less-than-perfect homecomings, especially the story of Kit, a soldier returning injured to his young wife who wants her old life back--alone.

With my own friend's sons and even former students having spent time in Ft. Hood, I'm reminded that Fallon's stories only offer a slice of that experience, but what she offers has the ring of truth.

In and Out of Room

2011-05-10T05:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a book review will draw me in, I'll buy the book, and then hesitate about starting to read it. Room by Emma Donoghue was just such a book. The premise was obviously inspired by a true story that surfaced not long ago--a young woman abducted and held for years against her will, giving birth in captivity--but the use of Jack, the five-year-old son who had never ventured out of the 11 X 11 room where he was born, as narrator certainly gave this novel a twist.

The book sat on my shelf, about eye level, and still I hesitated. Then after a couple of strong recommendations, I came across it in audiobook at the library. This version (a Hachette audiobook) used a young boy as Jack, but also incorporated other voices for Ma and other characters--and it worked.

I hesitate to say too much about the plot because it's a tale told in a way readers need to experience without too many preconceived notions. Too often, if I think I already know a plot, I am reminded just how much more there is to a good book that just plot. In this book, though, the plot peaks midway through the story, and just when I think I've reached the resolution, it takes a completely different turn. Since I was listening on my ride to and from work, I'll admit that at times, I wished I had taken the print copy along too, so that when I was forced to leave my car in the parking lot and go in to work, I could have at least sneaked a peak at what happens next. At times the suspense was killing me. I wanted to have what NPR tags "driveway moments."

Aside from the story, which made me care so much for the two main characters, the victims of a horrendous crime, I also found myself thinking so much about underlying issues the books subtly touches: our overwhelming abundance of possessions, the toll our national curiosity takes on survivors of such experiences, the complications in multigenerational relationships, particularly as marriage and remarriage come into play.

My favorite exchange in the novel occurs when the mother tells her psychiatrist, after the ordeal, that she sometimes wants to slap her mother. He asks if she ever wanted to slap her before the abduction. She laughs wryly and says, "Oh. I have my life back."

At its best, Donoghue's novel shows not only the resilience of the human spirit, but the capacity to make the best of what we have, creating the best world we can with what we have within our grasp.

Audio Roulette

2011-04-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

As picky as I am when choosing books, I can't afford to be when settling for audio. Unless I'm willing to fork over thirty-five or forty bucks for a one-time listen--and I'm usually not--I often have to rely on the library's selection (far too many Danielle Steel and Nicholas Sparks for my taste) or what I can find at outlets. Recently, I've gone through a mixed bag. Of the last three I've gone through, I honestly can only remember two titles. One, London Is the Greatest City in America, I honestly bought because of the title (and the price), and it certainly proves the old adage, don't judge a book by its cover. I thought it was simple figurative.

I honestly considered a one-line review: I just finished London Is the Greatest City in America. You shouldn't even start it. I suspect the author thought of the (somewhat) clever title and managed to try to build a novel around it (which had almost nothing to do with London, by the way). The narrator was annoying at best, and she seemed to come from a family people with commitment issues. Enough said.

My last book, though, was certainly memorable: Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper is certainly not my usual cup of tea, but I couldn't quit listening. The main character is a former mob hit man, now a doctor, an intern, in the witness protection program. The story could easily be an airplane book, the language was salty, to say the least, but the edgy humor kept me going. The story moves back and forth between the present day, when he finds himself at risk again when one of the patients on his rounds ends up being a mobster who recognizes him and leaves orders to have him killed in the event of his (imminent and unavoidable) death, and the flashbacks, when his entrance to the mob follows his discovery of the grandparents who are raising him as the victims of a hit, probably by a mobster wannabe being "made."

I particularly found the lurid details of the medical world interesting, so I was glad I didn't his "eject" as the music started up to signal the end. I listened halfway through the credits and heard the disclaimer, warning not to take any of the medical information as factual. Now I have to wonder--which was true and which wasn't? I don't ever plan to follow the process outlined in the novel for removing one's own femur to use as a knife, but I wonder about some of the facts about how much insurance money goes toward patients who only technically live, in the absence of a DNR--do not resuscitate--order.

This is the time of year when I get more of my book fix through audio, since my sitting on the couch time at night requires massive essay grading, but my drive time is all my own. Fortunately, in just over a couple of weeks, I'll have the whole summer ahead of me--and I have a big stack of books just waiting.

Practice What You [T]each

2011-04-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

During the final unit of my literature course this semester, I have asked my students to keep a record of poetry they are reading outside of that specifically assigned on the syllabus. Their motivation to do so (other than because I said so) is to find a modern poet (ideally, a living poet) on whom to base their research essay. For that assignment, I ask them to read at least eight poems by the poet they select, then narrow to three poems for their analysis of style. They will also complete a shorter, more informal essay, an idea I took from Carol Jago, her "Goldilocks" assignment: find one poem that is too hard for you, one that is too easy, and one that is just right. To set a good example (and because I love it anyway), I am recording my own reading (though I'll admit some slip by uncharted. I'm listening to Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac every morning, receiving emails from Your Daily Poem and from Poem a Day, attending readings, and perusing the April Poetry magazine, for which we are planning a book club-type discussion at the end of the month. Since I'm participating, as usual, in Poetic Asides's poem-a-day challenge, I'm not only writing my own, but reading dozens every day. By now, lots of these poets have become friends--a few I've met face-to-face, but most only through cyberspace. This time of year, when I am overloaded with "nondiscretionary reading" (i.e. essays for grading), what a pleasure to be able to grab a quick read, a poem or two, sandwiched between my other duties and chores. If time allows, I like to pass them on.

Five Days In...

2011-04-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

My teaching job offers me such wonderful opportunities to indulge my love for poetry--and my odd desire to talk about it. Talk about a wonderful way to kick off National Poetry Month: Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute has a 23-year history of putting on a Writers Symposium and bringing in some top-notch writers. Some garnered much fame after they visited our campus; some were already well-established. The plaque in E Building that holds the list of their names, and it's impressive.

This spring, we chose a poetry focus and it's lasting all month. We kicked off, though, with current NC poet laureate Cathy Smith Bowers and her friend and predecessor in the post, Kathryn Stripling Byer. In order to entice our students to attend, I'm using as a supplementary text The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat, edited by UNC's Michael McFee. Not only are Byer's poems included but Fred Chappell, James Applewhite, Robert Morgan, Heather Ross Miller, the late Reynolds Price and more, all NC poets.

My students are assigned to keep a chart of the poems they read during this unit in Lit, with an eye toward a formal essay on the works of one living poet (or only recently deceased) and an informal paper, one Carol Jago shared, her Goldilocks project--Find one poem that's too easy for you, one that's too hard, and one that's just right. I'm keeping my own chart and finding so many great poems. I've also read Tim Peeler's Checking Out, a collection of poems set in and around a local hotel where he once worked the night shift. Great character development!

I'm reading Bowers' Like Shining from Shook Foil, her latest poetry collection, which includes two poems I especially love, "Syntax" and "The Napkin."

The best part of the NPM celebration at school is the increased likelihood that others will have read the poems I have--or have heard them read by the poet.

Another exciting part of the celebration for me has been the chance to encourage others to write. I've visited the Early College high school located on our campus and presented poetry-writing workshops, and I've also taken part in a similar workshop for any of our college students interested in writing poetry.

I'm most pleased that after lots of years of talking about poetry, I'm right in the middle of a whirlwind of poets and readers, practicing what we preach.

It's National Poetry Month: Let the Fun Begin

2011-03-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me well knows I get a kick out of National Poetry Month. I'll admit that, like Black History Month or Women's History Month or Men's Health Month--or any of those other celebrations--a month isn't long enough. Not really. But it's a great opportunity to introduce--or reintroduce--poetry to those who may not consider themselves fans, while those of us who love poetry can revel in an exces.. With that purpose in mind, I plan to read poetry voraciously this month and to report on what I read. I will also be looking for chances to hear poet's read their works, starting tonight at Caldwell Community College in Hudson, NC, where NC Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bower will be reading and tomorrow at noon when she'll be joined on campus by her predecessor in the post, Kathryn Stripling Byer. If you need other ideas for celebrating the month, check out my guest post at Poetic Asides. I invite your ideas and reading suggestions as well. Check back through the month for fun links too.

Listening...Nick Hornby's Slam

2011-03-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

My options for audio are so much narrower than my other reading choices. I go through the libraries, book stores, Ollie's, Tuesday Mornings, anywhere I might get an audiobook for no more than the regular price of a book. I was pleased to discover that Cracker Barrel (which has a great borrowing program at a minimal cost) has finally upgraded to CD and unabridged books.

On my recent trip to Nashville, I made a special stop at the bookstore in the Tanger Outlet where I'd scored some really good ones for under ten bucks last year. I picked up Nick Hornby's Slam, among others. After having enjoyed Juliet, Naked, I thought this one might be fun too.

Although the protagonist is a teenager turning from fifteen to sixteen, I wouldn't exactly all this a YA novel. At first I wasn't sure if I'd get into the story abouta skater (because only a dweeb would call himself a skateboarder) who talks to his Tony Hawk poster. And TH answers him--or at least seems to. The answers come directly from the (only) famous skateboarder's autobiography

Sam was born when his own mother was 16. So when he learns on his own sixteenth birthday that his girlfriend Alicia is pregnant, he has a lot to discuss with Tony Hawk. Maybe I am a sucker for a British accent (It does make the story more interesting. I don't know why), but I found myself becoming more and more engrossed in the story, which was funny, sad, touching, and thought-provoking. The difference in age and social class between Sam's mom and Alicia's parents adds to the conflict--and at times, the humor.

The author--or Hawk--sends Sam on a couple of time travels into the near future (where he doesn't know his own son's name)--the source of much tension and discomfort--but cleverly handled.

The book might be great extracurricular reading for a high school abstinence-based sex ed course (since Sam decides he'll probably NEVER be interested in sex again, once he's made one big life-changing mistake). I don't expect to see the book on the Accelerated Reader list at the local middle school any time soon.

The Amazing Flexible Booklist

2011-03-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

I've never made a to-read short list that I've followed exactly. Something always gets in the way--such as another book. But since I am determined to make a tentative list, I've been perusing my shelves, my eReader, and my notes from conferences and from friends.

Some of the books on my list--and my shelf--come directly from my Lemuria First Editions Club, books that arrive on my doorstep every month, signed by the authors, almost like magic. Some I knew about before they arrived; almost certainly, though, I hear about them soon. They have a knack for picking books down in Jackson, Mississippi. From those shelves, I'm planning first to read these:

Madison Smartt Bell's Devil's Dream (about Nathan Bedford Forrest)
Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone (military wives waiting at Ft. Hood)
Joseph O'Conner, Ghost Light
Amy Greene, Bloodroot
Sonny Brewer, ed. Don't Quit Your Day Job

Others on the shelves calling my name:
Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi (I heard the author speak in Orlando and can't wait for this one.)
Marcus Zusak, I Am the Messenger (by the author of Book Thief)
Dava Sobel, Longitude
Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin' (yes, I confess I haven't read it yet!)
Emma Donoghue, Room
Nancy Horn, Loving Frank
Alice I Have Been,
Gary Shtenygart, Super Sad True Love Story (from Carol Jago's list)
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
Nancy Mitford, Savage Beauty (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
John McPhee, Silk Parachute

This last I chose when I heard the title mentioned on Writers Almanac. McPhee, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, wrote a beautiful, quirky piece about his mother near Mother's Day several years ago. It struck me enough that I wrote him, and he replied with a lovely handwritten note. I am trusting that the silk parachute in the title is a reference to that same lovely essay. I still have it torn from the magazine and filed in office with other essays that I've particularly loved. I can't wait to see what else he's included.

I may have to add Sarah's Key, since several people have recommended it, and my sister Amy insists I must read The Book of Secrets. Now all I need is more time to read.

Prioritzing Reading

2011-03-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

First, just a thought: Would more young people read books if they felt guilty for taking the time away from other things? I know that some days i have so many pressing responsibilities (and competing hobbies) that time spent between the covers of a good book feel like a genuine guilty pleasure. But I keep reading.

Right now, I need help arranging my "to read" pile. It shifts like the line at the grocery checkout, everyone jockeying for the shortest path to the fromt of the line. I am reading Cleopatra: A Life, the Pulitzer-prize winner, because it's a book club choice, but I'm overwhelmed trying to decide what next.

Since I feed my need to read regularly--okay, excessively--I NEVER run out of books to read. Between bookstores, English conferences, and generous friends, I will never ever run out of something to read. (And right now the latest Oxford American sits on my nightstand. Ahhh!)

Before I throw out my choices in a post (coming soon to a computer screen near you), I'd love to hear others' recommendations for the next "must read."

When the Future Meets the Present

2011-03-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

How timely that I've found myself reading my way through Suzanne Collin's Hunger Games series as dictatorships and autocratic governments are under revolt overseas. Panem, the setting for the three novels (including the second and third, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay), is a futuristic American, twelve--or thirteen--districts ruled by The Capitol, which requires each district to send "tributes" to participate in a battle royal each year.

As the second book ends and the third begins, a revolution is underway, but District 13, the new alternate government seems in many ways as controlling as the old one they seek to supplant. After watching Mubarek's government toppled, and seeing Qaddafi (choose your own spelling) under attack, I realize how far removed we are from our revolution, so much so that we have a hard time identifying with rebels so intent on change they are willing to risk their lives and homes.

The trilogy's protagonist, seventeen-year-old Catniss Everdeen seems an unlikely figure for the rebellion, but in so many of the recent protests and attempts, the faces on our television screens are young. The third novel in the series gives an interesting look at how media can manipulate images for good or for evil, alternately rewarding and punishing independent thinkers. Not feeling completely comfortable myself in futuristic tales, I was relieved when a glamorized, made-for-TV version of the unlikely hero was scrapped for a natural girl. Now as I wend my way through the last book in a series (my second series in a month--and the only one besides Harry Potter in years), I'm wondering how many other parallels I'll see between her world and mine--or what my world is becoming.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

2011-02-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

No, I haven't discovered the missing Larrson novel. Just by coincidence, the book I picked up next happened to have a similar title. Heidi W. Durrow's novel was recommended to me by a bookseller back in November. The novel is told from a number of points of view, varying chapter-by-chapter, but the main character is a young girl Rachel Morse who survived a fall from a rooftop in which her mother and two brothers died. She is sent to live with her paternal grandmother and to make a new life as the new girl. Fitting in becomes more complicated on a number of levels: Rachel's mother was a Danish woman who had married a black American serviceman. She inherited a mix of features that leave her father's hair and her mother's striking blue eyes. A thread of the plot addresses the way in which race shapes how we view ourselves and how others see us.

Among the minor characters is a young boy James, who changes his name to Brick after witnessing Rachel and her family's fall. He runs away from home--already an unstable environment, since his mother ignores him in favor of her Johns--when the police try to question him about the fall. Most of the characters in the novel are directly or indirectly affected by alcohol and drug addiction. The one stable adult in Rachel's life is her the fiance of her aunt who dies as the result of a drug reaction after a freak accident. This man is protective of her, giving her an opportunity to work with him and others in a rehab facility. Most of the characters, including Rachel, have many layers of character, and even the plot leaves readers questioning just what exactly made Rachel's mother Nella grow so hopeless.

Ironic, isn't it, that this particular "Girl Who" story leaves the Scandinavian region for America, but leaves a young girl fighting for her life.

Thoughts on Valentines Day or What to Do While Waiting on Your Muse

2011-02-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

I'll admit that I've never had a knack for special holiday gifts and celebrations. I never find my cute Valentine's Day pins until about March or April. I either think of some great gift idea on the 12th but can't pull it off or I think of a great idea on the 16th of February and can't remember it for 363 more days.

Valentine's Day (like all holidays) is even more of a challenge for women than men. At least men have the no-brainer options of flowers or chocolates. But what do you get a man? A Valentine's Day tie? Please. No.

We celebrated the occasion a few days early with a trip to the mountains, and while there I read in one of the little local mountain papers some Valentine's gift suggestions. I'll admit the mix tape appeals to me, but I also liked the picture frame suggestion--maybe not a photograph but a poem.

Then this morning, heading off to work, I heard Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on NPR, and he read a Valentine poem by Ted Kooser, rekindling an old envy. When Kooser served as the national poet laureate, he spoke at the NCTE convention (one of the first--if not the first to do so). In one session, he mentioned that he kept a mailing list of women to whom he mailed an annual Valentine's Day poem. I missed the mailing list, but two of my colleagues shared their mailing addresses, and sure enough--along came their poems on postcards, suitable for posting on the bulletin board where I could see and envy.

Evidently two or three years ago, Kooser collected and published the poems in a book called, appropriately enough, Valentines. All day I've been thinking about the gift of poetry. No one receiving a poem as a gift is likely to critique it (unless you have the misfortune of one poor well-meaning poet I encountered: spell check couldn't overcome her faux pas, leaving a reference to the "genital winds" that blew in her face in a poem submitted to a writing contest.)

What does it take to write a Valentine's Day poem (or a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving poem)? You already have a couple of the most important elements--a purpose and a deadline. One cannot wait wistfully for the muse to strike when a deadline approaches. For those who lack the poetic bent, there is the option of parody (unlike plagiarism in which the object is to steal, not to attribute and honor). Take a poem you love and adapt it: Shakespeare compared his love (real or imagined) to a summer's day. That leaves you three other seasons. Wallace Stevens had "Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird." You can pick your number and your focus.

Keep in mind that rhyme is not necessary (and can be a deterrent, not an asset). Keep it concrete. Avoid love, dove, above rhymes and choose objects from nature that make the abstract concrete.

Humor can be romantic. I still have a slim volume of poems I bought from the Scholastic Book order in tenth or eleventh grade. Some of the poems are sober classics; others make me giggle. You'll never know if you can do it unless you try, right?

If all else fails, pick up a volume of someone else's poems and add a romantic inscription: On my own, I don't have the words.

End of a Series--or Not

2011-02-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

I had read the first of Steig Larsson's novels The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before I heard a little of the author's story--delivering the three novels, then dying. That seemed to settle the matter of sequels. I was warned not to start the second novel The Girl Who Played with Fire until the third was released, and by the end , I knew why. Even though it ends with a sense of resolution, there were so many threads begging to be tied up.

A lot of my reading friends say they don't feel drawn to read these books, and I'll admit that based on the synopsis, I might not have been drawn to them either. I didn't find myself identifying with any of the characters in the way I might in other novels, but I began the first book out of curiosity and continued reading based on the recommendation of other readers whose suggestions usually prove reliable.

This weekend I finished (listening to) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and I felt prepared to say goodbye to Lisbeth Salander, Mikhail Blomqvist, and the gang. I know more about Sweden, the cold war, journalism, police work, and computer hacking than I did before. I'll confess that I empathized with Salander, even when I couldn't put myself in her place. I wanted to see her warm up, trust people, develop some social skills. I'll admit that I also liked her getting away with the loot too.

Now, though, I just learned that at his death, Larrson reportedly left a finished manuscript on his laptop, in the possession of his long-time girlfriend but claimed by his family. It's going to be tied up in the courts for awhile, I imagine, but that should just build an interest in whatever the Girl is going to do next.

Just Kids

2011-02-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe from the time she arrived in New York City in 1967 until his death in1989. Like other celebrity stories, I considered the playlist I would compile for the book; unlike other books that will be shelved alongside this book, it often borders on poetry.

In parts of the story Smith is an envy-inspiring name-dropper. Living at the famous (or infamous) Chelsea Hotel, she and Mapplethorpe not only crossed paths with the poets, artists, and musicians of their day; they befriended them. Encounters with the likes of William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Salvador Dali, and Johnny Winters happen often enough to see commonplace--until the reader is reminded that these were two twenty-three-year-olds, trying not only to survive in New York City, but to become artists.

It is their mutual support and exploration of their artistic talents that make up the story. Robert eventually focuses on the photography that gained him such controversial attention. Patti continues to produce drawings, but becomes a rock star.

The insight Smith has into her own coming-of-age makes this her story, although I imagine she sees it as her tribute to Mapplethorpe and the enduring love the two shared until his death, despite all the twists and turns their individual lives took. Moving from a socially awkward girl who defied the stereotypes her appearance evoked to a confident, strong, successful icon as the seventies unfolded, Patti Smith develops on the pages as an honest, endearing woman, channeling her art to share her own exceptional love story unfolding as the world changes

Confessional: I Write in My Books

2011-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

My relationship with books is a complicated one, I'll admit, but I have never been squeamish about writing in books. As a student, I'll admit, I often doodled to harness my attention at least to the page, not the clock. As a notetaker, though, I realized that writing in the margins cut out a step in studying; instead of flipping back and forth from textbook to notes, I could look at one place.

Highlighting, by the way, does not satisfy my notetaking needs. Yellow highlighter marks seem to say, "I'll read this later." I prefer instead notes and underlining with a very sharp no. 2 pencil. Very straight lines.

No longer a student myself, I nonetheless read (and reread and reread) the texts I assign my students. My marginal notes and the odd assortment of symbols I have developed help me to zero in on the passages I find most significant.

Honestly, though, I write in almost all of my books, even--especially--the ones I read for pleasure. Now if I'm reading one from my collection of signed first editions (and--gasp--yes! I do read them), I abstain. I use psot-it notes instead. Most of my books, though, are replete with wispy little marks--questions, quotes, symbols, foreshadowing, shifts. Often, when reading a book again after a few years, I'll flip to the inside back cover and find the same passage referenced from before.

I construct family trees and character lists as I read. I make notes of topics I want to discuss with my book club or with other reading friends. I love my well-worn books not inspite of the marks but, at least in part, because of them.

This week, I recived a link to a blogger at "Slow Reads" that echoed my feelings about "How to Write in a Book," (despite cultural prejudices against such) and offered some good suggestions for how and why to do so. I hope you enjoy.

Truth in Fiction: Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed

2011-01-28T09:01:00.001-08:00

After finishing The Girl Who Played with Fire, while waiting for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final novel in Steig Larrson's trilogy, I picked up Wally Lamb's novel The Hour I First Believed. Larrsen's novels are certainly products of a lively imagination, and Lisbeth Salander's escapades in particular may stress the bounds of credibility.

Lamb's book, by contrast, is obviously the result of some meticulous research of the recent and past history. Somehow I had bypassed this book, even though I had enjoyed the two others he had written that I had read before. I had no idea as I began the book that the protagonist Caelum Quirk is an English teacher, nor that the pivotal event of the novel is the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.

If Lamb had made up the story it might have seemed as inconceivable as Larrson's plots and Salander's shenanigans. But it is true. Quirk and his wife Maureen, a school nurse who hid in the library on that tragic day, are fictional, but so many of the specific events that unfold are not.

The school shootings occur early in the novel, though. The couple return to their native Connecticut after the tragedy, where Mrs. Quirk suffers from PTSD. Lamb also incorporates details about Katrina, the Iraq War, and even the Civil War and such important historical characters as Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, discovered in the pages of the letters and diary entries of his female ancestors. He also tackles a wide range of controversial issues--the Iraq War, prison reform, alcoholism and drug abuse, and dysfunctional family relationships.

I might have enjoyed the novel just as much if Quirk had taught math or science, but the perspective of an English teacher, along with the references to literature, composition, mythological archetypes, and academia in general, rang true.

As I escape back to Stockholm and resume my willing suspension of disbelief, I continued to be haunted by Caelum Quirk's long journey toward what he recognizes as "the hour I first believed."

This Time the Book Is Mine

2011-01-26T05:09:00.001-08:00

I've had lots of opportunities to share other people's books here, but finally, I have one of my own. Let the Lady Speak is a chapbook (a small collection of poems, for those who wonder) containing the poems that won the November [2009] Chapbook Challenge on Poetic Asides.

I've been writing with hundreds of other poets on Robert Lee Brewer's site for about three years now, and I have not only been motivated to write more, but I've built some solid friendships with other poets all over the country--and the world.

The collection's theme let me speak through the voices of lots of other women--historical and literary, as well as those in my own life and my own family. The cover shot--a photograph of my mother and me on the day I was born--inspired the first poem in the chapbook.

I've tried out my technology skills and added a shopping cart button right here on the blog, so you can order. My first printing was small, and I have just a few left, but the next printing is in the works. I look forward to feedback from my own readers.

Series Reading

2011-01-07T18:04:00.001-08:00

I'm always reluctant to begin reading the first book in a series, knowing that I am, first of all, likely to find myself committed for the duration. Because I enjoy reading a variety of literature, the idea of sticking with a series to it's conclusion can feel a bit confining. Sometimes I just stumble into series. For example, I read the first Harry Potter book when it was the only book. Somehow, on a friend's recommendation, I read it even though I didn't consider fantasy my usual genre.

After that, I was hooked. I read Ken Haruff's second book Eventide before I even knew he had a first book Plainsong, so I had to read them out of order. I didn't lose anything in the process, but I'll admit I sometimes wanted to read the second book again.

I read the first Twilight to see what the hoopla was all about. That was enough for me. I didn't need to keep going, even though some friends whose reading choices I respect couldn't wait to read them all. Now right at the turn of the new year, I find myself caught up not just in one but two series. First, I had read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I hadn't started the second book because I was advised to wait until the third book came out because, I was guaranteed, I would want Togo right to it. Then The Girl Who Played with Fire appeared on CDs at the local library, and I set out listening to the 15-disk set. I finished today, and I can't get the third one soon enough. I do think I'll go audio again.

The. The title Hunger Games kept popping up in recommendations, so I decided to check it out. Promoted as a Young Adult novel and set in the future, the book had a female protagonist forced to compete in the Hunger Games, a sort of futuristic cross between Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" and Survivor. The author Suzanne Collins makes no attempt to tie up loose ends. I feel strongly compelled to keep reading simply because I want to know what happens next.

Without meaning to do so, I've let outside forces preempt my reading list.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:2nd St Ln NW,Hickory,United States

2010 Reading List

2011-01-01T17:21:00.001-08:00

I thought I'd take a lesson from the alleged BBC list of books that made the Facebook rounds with the challenging (infuriating) claim that most people hadn't read them. As usual, I'm posting the list of books I read this past year, and this time I'd like you to do something similar to the BBC note: Delete all on my list but the ones you've read and post either in comments to my blog or post in a Facebook note (and tag me). I'd like to know which ones you liked best, etc. While you're at it, feel free to let me know some good books I missed.

(I realize now that I've not listed all the poetry collections and chapbooks I've read this year. That may be a separate post.)

Books I read in 2010:
Annie Proulx, Close Range
Victoria Vinton, The Jungle Law
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Gin Phillips, The Well and the Mine
Don DeLillo, The Falling Man
Phillipa Gregory, The Virgin Lover
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest
Ron Rash, Serena
David Small, Stitches
Michael Connelly, The Scarecrow
Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Billie Letts, Made in the USA
Barbara Kingsolver, Lacuna
Anita Shreve, A Change of Altitude
Anna Quindlen, Every Last One
Joanne Proulx, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet
Francine Prose, Anne Frank
William Kamkwanba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Celia Rivenbark, You Can't Drink All Day if you Don't Start in the Morning
Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars
Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Mary McDonagh Murphy, Scout, Atticus and Boo
Irene Latham, Leaving Gee's Bend
Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Year
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell
Edward Bloor, Tangerine
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Ron Koertge, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs
Stacy Morrison, Falling Apart in One Piece
Charles Portis, True Grit
Greg Iles, The Devil's Punchbowl
Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
Cathy Smith Bower, The Candle I Hold Up to See You
---. Book of Minutes
Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut
yoke Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
Rebecca Wells, Ya-Yas in Bloom
Neely Tucker, Love in the Driest Season
Janet Evanovich, Finger Licking Fifteen
Louis Sachar, The Card Turner
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed
Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Suzanne Collins, Hunger Games

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Dateline: Hickory, NC

Testing 1...2...3...

2010-12-27T17:40:00.001-08:00

I've moved one more step ahead in the digital age: my husband gave me an iPad for Christmas. Thank goodness I had children. Without Ben, I'm not sure how far along I'd be with the more subtle uses of the device, but for now he's helped me set up for blogging. Since I just posted, I don't need to say much more, but I wanted to be sure I knew how to blog on the go. Next lesson: iBooks!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Reading and Riding

2010-12-27T12:06:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine what I would do if I weren't able to read while I'm riding. As long as I've been reading, I've made the most of car time with a good book. The only real limit has been light. I remember reading one of the Pippi Longstocking books--I think it was Pippi Goes on Board, the one that had Pippi and readers fearing that Pippi's father was dead--on the ride between our new home in Columbia, Tennessee, and our hometown of Florence, Alabama, where all the kinfolks lived.

We made the drive regularly, especially since Daddy moved my sister Amy and me in time to start school, but Mama and sister Becky didn't move until my sister Jeannie was born in mid-September. I would read until I could not longer catch a few words as we passed street lights.

This past week, we headed back to Alabama, this time from our North Carolina home, and I almost had time to finish Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. When the sun set and I could no longer read by natural light, I considered using the flashlight app on my cell phone. That's when I decided I needed to give it a rest. Some books are easier to put aside than others. This was not one of those.

From page one or two, the narrator Marion had me hooked, telling of the day he and his twin brother Shiva were born in "Missing Hospital" (the locals couldn't pronounce Mission) to Sister Mary Joseph Blessing, a nun whom no one had suspected was pregnant. The plot line, on the surface, is intriguing enough to pull me in, but the writing kept me reading. The story had a perfect balance of suspense, surprise, and superb character development.

Twin stories have always fascinated me--The Thirteenth Tale, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Her Fearful Symmetry, among others. Verghese does such an excellent job of distinguishing between the two brothers, while still acknowledging the mysterious link between twins. In this case, he includes a range from betrayal to self-sacrifice.

This book also passed another interesting test for me. My first instinct when finishing the book was to turn back to the beginning and re-read the opening chapters. Meanwhile, I was ready to start Hunger Games, only half of which I was able to read before the sunlight faded on I-85.

After eating, praying, loving. . .

2010-12-17T07:48:00.000-08:00

When I picked up the audiotape of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed, I'll confess that I thought I was buying Eat, Pray, Love (since that title was written on the box larger than the actual book title:

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.

Maybe I exaggerate. But I honestly didn't realize I had a different book until it started. With the movie out, I figured I needed to know about the book to be able to hold my own in conversations about it. Committed, however, ended up being quite an interesting reading experience. Gilbert writes about her decision to marry--after feeling quite determined she'd never go down that (bridal) path again. The tensions (particular at airports) after 9/11 certainly set things in motion, since she was in a long-term committed relationship with a man of Brazilian citizenship living in Australia (or Bali).

As I kept listening, I was particularly interesting in her research into the historical, religious, sociological aspects of marriage. She and "Phillipe," her prospective husband, spent time in Laos while awaiting the completion of her background checks and his immigration papers. While there, she interviewed women of the community about their own marriage, often provoking incredulous laughter. She also delved into the marriages of her grandmother, her parents, and older neighbors.

In one chapter, she discussing the contrast between Greek and Hebrew mindsets (designations not determined by one's nationality and heritage but beliefs and philosophies.

Having been "committed" to marriage myself for more than thirty-four years, the book didn't change my own feelings about marriage, but it certainly piqued my interest and gave me food for thought.

Calling All Christmas Readers

2010-12-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

Like most people, I have my favorite Christmas movies, the ones I can watch over and over again--It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol (any of the many productions), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, The Christmas Story--the list is long. I actually remember watching the now-classic Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer the first time it aired on television. Wow! What graphics!

I have favorite Christmas books and stories I read each year too. My all-time favorite is Truman Capote's short story "A Christmas Memory." I always imagine the narrator as Dill, the little neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird, since both characters are more than loosely based on Capote himself. This story is the most sensory Christmas tale, the funniest, and the most heart-wrenching. It begs to be read aloud, and for many years, I did just that in my classroom. (Yes, even high school students enjoy a little read-aloud from time to time.)

For a complete change of pace, nothing beats "The Santaland Diaries" from David Sedaris' hilarious holiday collection of stories Holiday on Ice. In this particular story, he recounts his experiences working as a Santa's elf at Macy's Department Store in New York. The story will make you laugh out loud. Do not--I repeat, do not--read it in a place where laughter is inappropriate, such as a church service--or a state-mandated English end-of-course test.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is another wonderful modern classic, and the story is presented on stage somewhere near you (trust me on this) every year. While you're looking out for Christmas dramatic productions, let me recommend The Sanders Family Christmas, a musical sequel to Smoke on the Mountain set in a rural Baptist church during the Christmas season right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Sounds serious doesn't. You'll be wiping tears, but they'll be tears of laughter.

I always forget how wonderful Dickens' A Christmas Carol really is, thinking that because it's so familiar that it may not bear repeating. It never fails to move me. A few years ago, I found a companion book, Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, written by Tom Mula, an actor who played in Dicken's classic and began to wonder if Marley, who took time out of his own torment to save Scrooge, might also have achieved redemption.

There are others--many others--I could name, but I would love to hear the stories and books to which other readers turn year after year to get into the Christmas spirit.

Not About the Capulet Girl or Nudity

2010-12-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

I may not judge a book by its cover, but it certainly came catch my attention--not necessarily the artwork but the title. I'll admit that Nick Hornby's title Juiet, Naked caught my attention, but the blurbs I read about the book lured me in. This book by the author of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity follows three characters, so it took me awhile to realize that the actual protagonist is Annie, an almost-forty-year-old woman who works in a museum in a small seaside English town and--at least for part of the novel--has been living with Duncan, a college English teacher obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a former rocker who retired without explanation following a successful novel he called Juliet, after a well-publicized breakup with a real Julie.

Duncan's fascination with the now-reclusive Crowe is only fueled by the internet, where he interacts with other self-proclaimed "Crowologists," speculating about the elusive Crowe. Annie even goes on holiday with Duncan to America for a sort of Tucker Crowe pilgrimage.

When without notice the novel is re-released in its "naked" form, Duncan posts a rave review, and Annie decides to post her own response to what she considers the inferior production and is surprised to receive an email from Crowe.

The novel follows all three characters (and the audio version even uses three different readers) as Tucker eventually visits London after one of his children by one of his ex-wives has a health crisis. The novel is clever and funny, quirky and--yes--British. Don't expect to find it on a class syllabus. It's just an amusing read, but I even found myself sympathetic toward poor nerdy Duncan and several of the other minor characters.

My Inner Sisyphus

2010-11-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

I'm overwhelmed. And I'm not even talking about Christmas shopping lists or the box in the backseat full of research papers I must grade and soon. Over the last month, I have been bombarded by book titles. Honestly, sometimes I wish my favorite writers would take off some time--only those who could afford to do so, of course--and let me catch up. I know, though, that catching up is a total impossibility. Between the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October and the NCTE conference, with sessions and exhibitors taunting me, I know I can never make even the slightest dent in the list of books I want to read.

If I never left the house and had nothing to do but read, I'd never catch up. Not only am I facing all the brand new titles, but I'm admitting to the classics I have yet to read. Right now, I'm listening to Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked and reading Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stones. Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by the title The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by D C Pierson, and I have Eat, Pray, Love and Wally Lamb's last big novel on audio in my back seat. I also want to read the young adult book Countdown by Deborah Wiles before giving it away to a younger reader friend who covets it.

Just arranging and rearranging my bookshelves is a constant reminder of the futility of my task. To make matters worse, I have other interests--so many other interests, a family I love and a job to which I go happily five days a week. When's a girl to read?

Readers Ourselves--the List Continues

2010-11-23T18:05:00.000-08:00

As I've reported before, one of my favorite conference sessions every year is called "Readers Ourselves." Facilitated by the same four people every year, the session invites participants to sit in a circle and talk about what we've been reading lately. There are a few loose rules: write down the titles you mention (and authors if you know them); talk about books you are reading, not the books you are teaching; focus on adult reading; try not to monopolize the discussion.

Michael Moore, one of the facilitators, takes all the lists and compiles them, trying to check spelling and fill in authors' names. He includes annotations readers left behind (and sometimes some of his own.) I'm posting the list here without further comment. Unlike the list of books circulating on Facebook right now, the BBC doesn't care who has read these:

Readers Among Us – 2010 Orlando, Florida Version

This is the special session at NCTE each year that focuses on what was as adults are reading. We don’t care what your students or children are reading…there are hundreds of such sessions. This session is for big people and their books. These are the books NCTEers are reading to inform their personal lives.

* Room: A Novel – Emma Donoghue – 20-something-year-old mother who is confined and creates her own world. Short listed for the Booker
* Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann – Multiple narrative center around Philippe Petit 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers.
* Ape House and Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen—A scientist tries to reconstruct her life after an explosion in her research lab releasing the apes inside
* Mennonite in a Little Black Dress – Rhooda Janzen – Rhoda’s memoir about her life after her husband leaves her for a man and she is in a terrible car accident. She returns to her parents home in a Mennonite community to recuperate
* Island Beneath the Sea – Isabelle Allende – Follows the lives of the Blacks and plantation owners before and after the slave revolt in Haiti.
* Little Bee – Chris Cleave – Incendiary – A stunning, beautiful, brutal book. It’s so hard to imagine that a story this harrowing could possibly end on such an affirming uplifting note…but it does. The voice of Little Bee is captivating-this book feels true on so many levels, An important novel
* Summerland – Michael Chabon – Young Adult novel by the author of Kavalier and Clay
* Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and American Childhood – Annie Dillard
* Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin – Two Mississippi men black/white involved in a missing girl case *
* The Help – Katherine Stockett – anyone whose reads it loves it
* Wolf Totem – Jiang Rong
* Lit – Mary Carr – author of Liar’s Club
* Just Kids –Patti Smith – About Patt’s relationship with Robert Maplethorpe
* Black Swan Green – David Mitchell – Takes place in 1982-83-in small town England. Also the author of Cloud Atlas
* Stoner – John Williams – Beautifully written novel of a poor farm boy who goes to college at around the time of WWI and becomes a college professor – Also wrote Butcher’s Crossing –featured in NYRB Classics
* Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese – A great story with cultural and family conflict. Makes one question homeland and family and what we leave behind when we mature. The book follows twin brothers who become doctors.
* The Invisible Bridge – Julie Orringer – Paris 1930s, Hungarian Jews – an ALAN recom
* Was God on Vacation – Jack van der Geest – WWII - 16-year-old young boy when Hitler invades Netherlands. Became a member of the Dutch Underground, becomes a political prisoner, escapes from Birenwald concentration camp, becomes a member of the French Underground, becomes a member of the 101 Airborne Division, etc.
* Skeletons at the Feast – Chris Bohjalian – Another WWII
* Those who Saved Us – Jenna Blum – A college professor interviews Germans who lived through the holocaust hoping to get some insight into her elderly mother’s behavior and the mysteries of her early childhood
* Sarah’s Key – Tatiana de Rosnay – Another WWII – Paris and Jews
* Guernica – Dave Boling – Germany’s bombing of this idyllic Basque town featured in Picasso’s famous painting
* Imperfectionists – Tom Rachman – Rome
* Mr. Peanut – Adam Ross – Stanger story of three marriages including Dr. Sam Shepherd
* Juliette – Anne Fortier Juliet, Naked – Nick Hornby (back to his High Fidelity themes) – A young woman is surprised when a recluse famous rocker begins emailing her. The rocker is the idol of her boyfriend who is in the process of breaking up with her
* The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup : My Encounters with Extraordinary People – Susan Orlean – A collection or profiles by a NYer writer

Don’t Reads:
* Freedom – Jonathan Franzen – One of the more famous do not reads
* Wolf Hall – Do Read but not before the sequel
* The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson – sort of read
* On the Road – Jack Kerouc – Don’t read; instead, do buy and listen
* Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger – Comment from someone: Hated it! Author of Time Traveler’s Wife The Gargoyle – Loved or hated…take your pick
* The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found – Don Snyder – Colgate professor loses his job
* My Reading Life – Pat Conroy – True story – at our institution we have a freshman seminar all freshmen take. We also have all freshman buy the same book and we have a campus wide discussion. We’ve done Race Matters, Band of Brothers. One year we picked The Lords of Discipline. Conroy, who was close by in Beaufort, SC, was invited to come to a freshman convocation (academic get-up, a whole campus event). Length of talk – twenty minutes. Remember about 2500 kids bought this book. We offered a $2000 honorarium and expenses. Pat said, sure he’d do it for fifteen grand. I will never read another word this shakedown artist writes. Sorry…when you do the list, you can write your editorials too.
* The English Teacher – Jim Harrison – Don’t bother unless you really like Harrison
* The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver – Continuing along with the don’t bother books but we all liked the Poisonwood Bible
* The Swan Thieves – Elizabeth Kostova – Author of The Historian
*Luncheon of the Boat Party – Susan Vreeland – Author of Girl in Hyacynth Blue
* To the End of the Land – David Grossman
* Here, Bullet – Brian Turner – Poetry by author who served in Bosnia and Iraq- Powerful imagery. Reads more like a memoir than a collection of poems. Relatively short. Helped me understand the atmosphere of the Iraq War Zone than any other book
* The Good Soldiers – David Finkel
* Alexander Hamilton – Ron Chernow – a tome but worth it
* Griftopia – Matt Taibbi – Writer for Rolling Stone
* Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspergers - John Elder Robison
* Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Aspergers – Tim Page
* Mockingbird – Kathryn Erskine-girl with aspergers-brother killed in a school shooting
* Forger’s Spell – Edward Dolnick – nonfiction plot to full Hitler with fake vermeer
* The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine – Lost Jeffersonian case of wine…remarkably young
* The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal – Ben Mezrich – don’t read-watch the movie
* Columbine – David Cullen – Myth-busting good journalism
* Beslan – Timothy Phillips – Chechnian attack on an elementary School
* The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot—true story of woman whose cancer
cells were harvested in 1951 and still used for scientific study
* On Gold Mountain – Lisa See, nonfiction (her family story)
* Zeitoun – Dave Eggers – Author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – about Katrina
* Why Students Don’t Like School – Daniel T. Willingham
* I Shall Wear Midnight – Terry Pratchett - Fantasy that Connie likes – Author of Discworld (great in audio)
* The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollen
* Righteous Porkchop – Nicolette Hahn Niman
* In Defense of Food – Michael Pollen – How to eat healthy foods
* Slow Death by Rubber Ducky: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things – Bruce Lourie
* Star Island – Carl Hiasson
* Our Kind of Traitor – John LeCarre – Don’t bother…no one cares about these people but still well written go back and read the George Smiley trilogy
& Anyone But You – Jennifer Crusie
* Blindness – Jose Saramago
* A Reliable Wife – Robert Goolrich
* The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Steig Larrson
* Prose Translation of the Canterbury Tales – Peter Ackroyd
* Gunnar’s Daughter – Sigrid Undset
* The Autobiography of Mark Twain – (Volume 1)
* The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
* The Snapper – Roddy Doyle – Poor Irish family and pregnant daughter
* A Charmed Life: Growing Up In Macbeth’s Castle: A Memoir: Liza Campbell
* Regeneration – Pat Barker
* Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy – Gary D. Schmidt
* Thirteen Reasons Why – Jay Asher
* The Green Sweater – Krystyna Chiger
* The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
* The Summer We Read Gatsby – Daniell Ganek
* The Double Bind – Chris Bohjalian
* A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Tolz – Interesting adventure with quirky characters
* The Disappearing Spoon –Sam Kean -Stories of the Periodic Table

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

2010-11-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

I might as well quit starting off so many posts saying that although I don't usually read nonfiction
. . . . because I realize how many books I've read this past year have been nonfiction. This latest, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, is a fascinating blend of science and biography of an African-American woman whose contribution to the world of science and medicine--although without her knowledge--has worldwide impact.

While she was being treating for cervical cancer in 1951, doctors harvested some of her cells and discovered that they continued to grow prolifically. Since then, they've been sent into space and have been used in studies not only related to cancer but polio and HIV. While the cells have been sold commercially to labs throughout the world, Lacks' own family didn't even know about the cells for many years, although they were living in poverty with numerous health problems.

Skloots first heard about Henrietta's cells (identified as HeLa cells) while in school and began a quest of many years to tell the story, breaking down barriers of resistance in Henrietta's family, to learn about the real woman. Skloots' style, blending science and narrative, created a fascinating story with the pace of a novel. I was as fascinated to see the picture of Henrietta's cells (above) as her grown children were.

As a side note, I was glad to see the book made the short list of titles on Carol Jago's"Intrepid Reader" at NCTE this weekend.

Every Avid Reader's Fantasy

2010-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

yAs I usually do this time every year, I just attended the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, held this year at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort (in --you guessed it--the happiest place on Earth). I've been coming to these conference since I began my teaching career, and they never disappoint. For those of you who aren't English teachers, I won't burden you with the all the professional topics. (Those I'll be posting at http://alabamatarheel.wordpress.com.)

I will be telling you about the book-related sessions, conversations, and exhibits in my next few posts--as soon as I get home and unpack my book of notes.

Since the outgoing NCTE president Carol Jago is one of the most voracious, passionate readers I know, one thread that ran through this conference was the value of literature to our lives. At these kinds of sessions, one is likely to hear talk of pedagogy, assessment, empowerment--all the education jargon--and I won't downplay the importance of good sound teaching practice. But when people were talking about about reading, they came alive.

Suffice it to say that my shoulders are aching now from carrying bags loaded with my last-minute book acquisitions from my last loop through the exhibit hall. I have others in a box en route to my house and others in the back seat of my friend and fellow-conference-goer Jane's car (assurance that we have to meet somewhere between my house and Durham soon for the hand off.) One of the most fun parts of the conference each year is the exhibit hall, where most of the major publishers show. Sure, there are lots of textbook publishers and other educational companies there, but lots of the books are the ones we want to read for our own pleasure.

I leave the conference each year not only with a renewed sense of purpose but with a reading list that could easily carry me through to next November.

Coming soon: Readers Ourselves Booklist and Author Sightings

Say It Isn't So!

2010-11-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

The first email I received this morning came from my daughter in Nashville, announcing that Davis-Kidd, my favorite bookstore there (one of my favorite bookstores anywhere) is closing as a part of the Joseph-Beth Chapter 11 proceedings. These announcements are becoming more and more frequent, in part because of the decline in reading, in part because of all the online shopping avenues, and in part because of electronic books.

Surely I'm not one of a meager few who enjoy the experience of shopping in bookstores. I like the displays, the sales tables, the infused scent of coffee and pastries. I like to strike up conversations with strangers as we peruse the shelves. I tend to monopolize the time and attention of the employees the way I once took over the elementary librarian as my personal assistant.

I like to discover new authors, and I like to check off my own "already read it" list. I don't know any way to singlehandedly save bookstores, especially independent bookstores, except to buy more books and to encourage others to do so. I think more book clubs should hold meetings in bookstores. I think Christmas shoppers should consider the advantage of doing a majority of their holiday shopping there. (Just consider how much easier books are to wrap and to transport.)

I think of students who sign up for online classes only to find they miss the actual physical presence in the classroom. I consider all the disappointing online and catalog purchases--clothes I should have tried on before buying. Can you imagine in later years waxing eloquent about a well-loved website?

Maybe bookstore rescue parallels the old starfish story: I can't save them all, but maybe I can make a difference to one!

Pat Conroy's My Reading Life

2010-11-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

Since I read Prince of Tides many years ago, I have made a point to read all of Pat Conroy's books--the novels and the memoirs. As a teacher, I loved The Water Is Wide," but I found Lords of Discipline and The Great Santini just as powerful and, at times, shocking.

I have noticed that ever Conroy novel has one good sports chapter, the story of a big game that can stand alone as a short story.

I know he's criticized for his big, blustery style, something of which he is well aware. When he's at the top of his game, his writing is lyrical. I can smell Savannah when he takes his readers there. He can also be completely outrageous--and I enjoy that too. I don't think I'll ever forget reading the scene in Prince of Tides when the statue of the Christ child is used to club to death the evildoers breaking into the house. I was on a plane as I read, and I so drastically want to tell someone about what I had just read. (Did I mention the man-eating tiger in the same book?)

Conroy has just released a new memoir that's right up my alley, which he called My Reading Life. His chapter topics range from his mother's early influence to that of Gene Norris, his beloved English teacher, as well as a mean librarian, an independent bookstore owner in Atlanta, and a number of his favorite books and authors--Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Tolstoy's War and Peace, James Dickey, and Thomas Wolfe.

The book is evidence of Conroy's self-awareness. He not only knows his influences but recognizes the marks they leave on him. His revelation of his own reading habits are infectious. He decided at sixteen to read at least two hundred pages a day, working his way through the list of great literature, sometimes more than once, and discovering new writers along the way. He had a lot to say about poetry and poets as his muses.

He also pays tribute to one of the strongest human urges, naming "Tell me a story" as "the most powerful words in the English language"(303). I heard him speak at a local college a few years ago, and afterwards I ran into a friend who asked, "Do you really think all those stories he tells are true?" I had to remind myself that she was not Southern. Of course they're true. Down here we all have similar stories of our own.

One particular line in the book struck a chord: "Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends" (311). Exactly.

Anybody's List

2010-11-13T18:07:00.001-08:00

Recently, I came across a blog post that was circulating on Facebook with the intriguing title "A Year of Reading: 100 Things About Me as a Reader." I'm a sucker for a list, especially one related to books, so first I looked over that list, making those internal comments--"yeah, me too" or "nope, not me!" Then I started my own. I'll admit that some of my items are adapted from her list. I enjoyed a chance to think about my reading practices, habits, and preferences. Not 100 yet, but here's my list:

1. I can read keep more than one book going at a time—if they’re different modes (audio, eBook, traditional.)

2. Sometimes I read a book from the library and then feel I have to own it anyway.

3. I feel guilty borrowing books I know I probably won’t read.

4. My fourth grade teacher read the entire Little House series to us.

5. I love to read aloud.

6. If I don’t have an audiobook for the car, I get twitchy.

7. When I was back in school, I would find an author I loved and to read all of his or her books, working my way through the library shelves.

8. I have a hard time getting rid of books.

9. When I donate books to the library’s book sale, I too often end up going myself and buying more than I gave away.

10. I’ve read lots of books late, late at night—even on vacation—sitting in the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake the family.

11. I like to have books signed by authors.

12. I actually read my signed first editions.

13. I am an author groupie.

14. Few things make me happier than for someone I like or love to read a book I’ve read so we can talk about it.

15. Sometimes I judge a book by its cover.

16. I never read the last page ahead of time.

17. I always rush to get to the end of a book then feel sad when it’s over.

18. Lots of times, after I finish a book, I immediately re-read the first chapter—or the last chapter.

19. I don’t feel bad about loving a book someone else hated.

20. I hate to waste my time on lightweight books (which doesn’t mean I don’t like humor. I do!)

21. If I really love a book I’m reading, I call my dad (or someone else who’d like a particular passage) and read.

22. I read with a book mark on which I write notes about passages I like--or words I want to define.

23. I write in my paperback books with a very sharp pencil and very straight lines.

24. I don’t find the eBook experience at all inferior to traditional books, but I wish I could write on them and share them.

25. If you borrow one of my books and don’t give it back. I remember. I may not accuse you of stealing, but I remember.

26. I read Little Women and The Wizard of Oz for the first time in the first or second grade.

27. I can read in the car without getting carsick.

28. I have read while driving. Not proud of it, but I did it.

29. Local bookstores make me happy in the same way art museums do.

30. My elementary school librarian influenced me as much as any teacher I ever had.

31. I have many friendships based almost completely on our mutual love of books.

32. I married a man who loves good books. I can't image living with a nonreader.

I'd love to see your lists too.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

2010-11-03T04:42:00.000-07:00

At the recent Southern Festival of Books, I had a chance to hear from several authors to whom I've been introduced through the Lemuria First Editions Club. I joined several years ago, and each month, almost like magic, a new signed first edition shows up on my doorstep. At the festival, I heard from Sonny Brewer, Rick Bragg, Lee Smith, and Brad Watson. At two different sessions, I heard from Tom Franklin, a name I recognized, having read Hell at the Breech, a story of murder and attempts at justice in 1898 Alabama. I also realized his novel Smonk still sits in my "to read" stack.

Franklin's latest novel Crooked Letter Crooked Letter (a reference, as any young spelling student knows, to the mnemonic device for spelling Mississippi) has been getting lots of attention since its release. It was among a short list of suggestions of fall reading on the Today show last week, in fact.

With all the books discussed at the festival, this was one of the novels I bought, only to find another signed copy--from Lemuria--at my door when I returned home. A sign? Perhaps.

This time Franklin sets his novel in the last twentieth century and present day. He follows two protagonists, Scary Larry, accused of murder as a teenager and suspected again, and Silas, the town's one policeman, a black man, who at one time had lived with his mother in a cabin on Larry's family's property and had for a short time befriended Larry.

Silas, normally relegated to directing traffic when the plant shift changes, begins to follow hunches and finds victims of murder or attempted murder--real police work. When Larry is found near death and bleeding from what many believe is a self-inflicted gunshot, Silas reenters his life.

Franklin shared a person incident from his teenager years that inspired a critical incident in Larry's life during a breakfast session in which he and three other writers discussed, among other things, how they handle elements of their stories drawn from people they know, people who might recognize themselves. His sharp wit and sense of humor--and my earlier enjoyment of his previous novel--led me to the book table as soon as the session ended. Now that I've read one copy and shared the other, I'm ready to add Crooked Letter Crooked Letter to my list for those who ask for reading suggestions.

Note of trivia: On this season's ticket for the Alabama-Mississippi state game, the printers omitted one of the humpbacks.

Halloween Worthy Nightmares

2010-10-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

This time each year I see such a strange dichotomy: horror films and images of death juxtaposed alongside Disney princesses and babies in pumpkin suits. This morning, though, as I rode to work listening to a scene from James Frey's Million Little Pieces, the book that caused Oprah such controversy awhile back, I lived vicariously through my worst nightmare.

Using all too well the age old advice, show don't tell, Frey gives every detail of his experience in the dental chair, having four teeth replaced and repaired with no anaesthesia. In fact, he spent the greater part (during a double root canal) strapped down, holding two tennis balls with a Babar the Elephant book held firmly to his chest.

I won't skirt the issue: I suffer from dental phobia. Sure, I know that modern advances have changed dentistry (although I still can't find a dentist who offers routine laughing gas for all procedures, something I truly desire), but I suffer from a long history of dental anguish--abcess at age four, an old Army dentist who drilled through my tooth into a nerve (also when I was four). I endured cavities upon cavities no matter how often I brushed and flossed. As a result, riding in to work, I might as well have been sitting strapped in that chair with Frey, overwhelmed by the smell of burning teeth, feeling grit under my tongue, the halogen lights in my eyes, the sharp metal probing my teeth, my gums.

This Halloween, I don't worry about vampires, ghosts, or goblins. Just keep the dentists away from my door.

An Embarrassment of Riches

2010-10-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

After several years of intending to attend the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, I actually made it there this past weekend. October is by far my busiest month, with a number of conferences calling to me, while my husband is heading off to the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, NC. Still, the location of this festival (in the same town with my daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren) has more than its share of attractions to me, and the line-up looked great.

I didn't arrive in town for the Friday sessions, so I tried to avoid even looking at that schedule, sure I would be sick to know what I'd missed. I did, though, manage to hear from a number of writers I read and admire--Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Rick Bragg, Sonny Brewer, Tom Franklin, and Brad Watson--many of them whom I had discovered through Lemuria's First Editions Club.

I also made sure to hear Louis Sachar, author of, among other things, Holes, a YA novel I enjoyed that was made into a successful movie. Even though I had to sacrifice another couple of tempting sessions, I managed to see the screening of Hey Boo, the documentary Mary Murphy has been making about the making of To Kill a Mockingbird, which gave birth to her book Scout, Atticus, and Boo, which I read this summer. This film, not released yet, is unmistakably a labor of love. She's managed to talk to not only many well-known writers and celebrities, but she also interviewed Nelle Harper Lee's older sister, Miss Alice, still practicing law at 99, as well as the couple who befriended Lee in New York City when she was writing and gave her one year for Christmas a year off work to finish the book.

Of course the festival also had its share of exhibits--lots of books and book related merchandise (including the t-shirts I had to have). The weather couldn't have been nicer, and I left town with a few more good reads, lots of book notes, and a longer-than-ever "must read" list.

Sharing Books

2010-10-08T20:54:00.000-07:00

To lend books or not may not have the gravity of Hamlet's question of simply being, but I will admit that I feel such contradictory impulses. First, I know that I have a genuine need to talk about books I read with others who have actually read too. I know that sharing one of my books doesn't guarantee that will happen. (In fact, I know because of the number of borrowed books sitting unheeded on my shelves. They ooze guilt.)

Only through trial and error do I learn who returns books. I can tell you any number of people who are in possession of books that belong to me. (If you are reading this and you have my John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius or Leif Enger's Peace Like a River then yes, I am talking to you.) I had to wait a dozen years to get my copy of Hondo--not the Louis L'Amour cowboy novel but a biography of Hondo Crouch by his daughter Becky--and I only got that one back because I saw it on the bookshelf at the home of the guilty party and stole it back.

I'll also admit that I am a book thief, but not without guilt. After reading Louisa Mae Alcott's Little Women, I was ready to read Little Men. My great grandmother had a copy she had borrowed from a friend who died before she returned the book. For some reason, I didn't read her copy but instead borrowed a copy from a friend's brother. He too died while I had the book. Coincidence? I don't know. But I'm not lending a copy to anyone.

Actually, I try to practice book amnesty regularly, giving back books to the friends to whom they belong, not admitting whether I've read them or not. This clears room for more books too.

Meanwhile, I've realized that one of the few drawbacks to reading eBooks is the inability to share them. I always feel guilty recommending a book to a friend, who asks, "May I borrow it?" I have to admit that I don't have a copy to share. Fortunately, this isn't enough of a drawback to deter me. After all, they have the option of buying the book or using the old library card.

Slim Volumes

2010-09-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

One advantages to the rich offerings of poetry in my area is the opportunity to build my collection of full-length books and chapbooks from poets at all stages of their writing careers. Once a month at Poetry Hickory, a second Tuesday night event at Taste Full Beans, a local coffee shop, I am treated to short readings from the semi-open mic session followed by a couple of featured poets. If I arrange my schedule to arrive in time, I get a chance to share in the discussion with other poets too or to participate in a writing workshop before the readings.

While it's all too easy to let novels sit unread on the shelf, waiting until I have time to read them, books of poetry provide the perfect reading climate. Aside from Dante's Inferno or Milton's Paradise Lost, books of poems, especially chapbooks, can be read in one sitting or they can be read a few at a time--while I wait for a traffic light or an appointment.

When I read fiction, I often mean to go back and find a passage I particularly enjoyed, but if I fail to leave behind a post-it note, those readings are often lost forever. Poems, however, have those convenient titles. Returning again and again is an option I choose over and over.

Last week, at the second event in Lenoir-Rhyne University's Visiting Writes Series, I picked up a couple of books of poetry by Cathy Smith Bowers, recently named the new poet laureate of North Carolina. I had read her work before, but only a poem here and there. I took home my copies of The Candle I Hold Up to See You and The Books of Minutes and read them almost immediately. In the first, I was pleased to find two or three of the particularly poignant or humorous poems she had read for us that night. One of my particular favorites "Syntax" had appeared in The English Journal, the NCTE publication I have read for years. This poem serves as a warning for any teacher, particularly anyone who professes to teach creative writing. Another poem in the same volume "The Napkin" packed that lovely punch in the end. (One of the best things about attending a poetry reading is being able to observe the physical response of an audience to a poem.)

The other collection of poems by Bowers was set up in the format of The Book of Hours. Throughout the book, she uses a clever fixed form called, of course, the minute. These poems contain sixty syllables in three stanzas: 8-4-4-4, 8-4-4-4, 8-4-4-4. Within the limitations of the form, though, she achieved such a variety of effects. I'll admit that this was the first book of poems I had stayed up to finish while reading in bed.

I'm not sure how people gauge their responses to other people's poetry, but one litmus test of mine is that the poems inspire me to write poems of my own in response. As Keats said, "Poetry ...should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost as a remembrance." I find that my notes from poetry readings often contain all the margin notes, bits and pieces of memories just waiting to be set down on paper in just the right shape.

Getting It: Mockingbird

2010-09-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

If you read this blog with anything approaching regularity, you probably think I have an obsession with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird--and you're right. But this time I'm on a different track--at least partially. Kathryn Erskine's novel Mockingbird is the story of Caitlin Smith, a fifth grader with Asperger's Syndrome whose middle school brother was killed by a school shooter. His unfinished Eagle Scout project remains in the living room, covered by a sheet, a constant reminder to Caitlin and her grieving father that Devon will not be finishing it.

Caitlin tells her own story--the perfect textbook example of a naive narrator--as she tries to come to terms with what is lacking in her skills set. She can belch the alphabet, a skill that serves her well on the playground during the younger children's recess, but doesn't help much with making friends her own age. She is also an avid reader with a particular interest in the dictionary. One word she tries to understand--and attain--is Closure.

Erskine's title is an allusion to Lee's novel. Caitlin knew the book well and the movie better. Her brother had nicknamed her Scout, and she believes that with funny glasses and different clothes, her dad would be just like Atticus.

Erskine gives voice to the girl in a gentler way than Haddon did in The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime. The uses capital letters and exclamation points freely, sometimes realizing someone is screaming "and it might be me." The book lacks the strong language that keep some teachers and parents from using Curious Incident with younger readers. For young adult readers, though, the strongest lesson, one learned not only by Caitlin but by many of the other characters as well is that of Empathy.

Poetry in the Foothills

2010-09-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

In the area of western North Carolina where I live, I declare that anyone who claims to be bored just isn't trying. I've never known of a place that offered so many cultural opportunities from folksy to highbrow. This weekend, I have a strong urge to drive to Bristol, TN/VA for the Rhythm and Roots Reunion, three days of all kinds of great music--but I also have Alabama-Duke football tickets.

Last weekend, I enjoyed a house concert up at Ticknock, listening to David Peterson and Charlie Cushman on the guitar and banjo with a roomful of other music lovers.

This week, though, my poetry-loving soul has been fed. I heard Antony Abbot and Jason Mott at Poetry Hickory at Taste Full Beans on Tuesday, and then last night I attended Lenoir-Rhyne's Visiting Writers Series, "An Evening of Poetry and Irish Music" with NC poet laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, Irish poet, Joan McBreen, and LRU's spring semester poet-in-resident Rhett Iseman Trull while listening to the Elf Tones' music.

From my own lit students, I recognize that so many people--even avid readers--are intimidated by poetry or simply dismiss it as "not for them." My own experience, though, indicates that like live music, live poetry, straight from the mouth of the poet, evokes a special response--whispered surprise, belly laughs, snickers, heads nodding in silent agreement. After hearing Cathy Smith Bowers' poem about her dog named for poet Seamus Heaney and her revelation that her dog had gotten custody of the pet, one of the women in the audience offered to help her get her dog back. (I don't suppose she simply planned to play a country song backwards.)

For now, I have some new volumes of poetry--a couple of full-sized books, a couple of chapbooks, kept nearby in the car. Instead of perusing the newspaper headlines at traffic lights or checking my text messages in waiting rooms, I think I'll have a poem or two.

Mathematics--Straight from God's Notebook

2010-09-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, I'll find myself recommending a book before I've even finished it. Sometimes the story line will make me think of a fellow reader for whom it is perfectly suited; at other times, I just love the characters so much that I want someone else to meet them, to read the book so I can talk about it.

This week I read The Housekeeper and the Professor, a simple novel by Yoko Ogawa, translated from Japanese. The premise of the book captured me: the narrator takes a job as housekeeper for a mathematics professor who was at the top of his field until a car accident resulting in brain damage that interrupted his memory every eighty minutes. He could remember his mathematical curiosity and genuis--predating the accident--but every morning, she had to introduce herself to him again (always answering his first two questions: What is your shoe size? What is your telephone number?)

Reminiscent of the main character of the film Memento, the professor pins notes to his clothes to remind him of things he doesn't want to risk forgetting--his eighty-minute memory, the housekeeper, and her son, whom he calls Root (because his haircut reminds him of the square root sign.) In fact, Root is present at the home at the professor's insistence that the child not be left at home alone while his mother worked.

Woven throughout the novel is the professor's fascination with numbers, prompting him to share his curiosity and knowledge first with his caretaker and then with her son. Not surprisingly, he also loves baseball (and all those statistics), although he doesn't realize his favorite pitcher has been long retired, information they keep from him.

I'll confess--I am not a math person, but neither was the housekeeper, a single mother and a high school drop out, but I loved the way the author wove numbers through the story, information the professor claimed not to have unlocked but to have transcribed from the notebook of God.

I had shared Blue Baillet's middle school novels, The Wright Three and Chasing Vermeer, with math teacher friends, along with The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime, all building stories around math in some way. This simple story, while nothing like these other three beyond the fascination with numbers, will be on my short list of recommendations for lots of my fellow readers, whether they are math people or not.

Books That Make Me Turn Back and Re-Read

2010-09-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, when I finish a book, I know I am not finished with the book. Sometimes I will finish a novel right before I go to sleep, and in the morning, I feel compelled to re-read the ending, to be sure what I think happened really happened. I did it with Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and with Charles Frasier's Cold Mountain. Sometimes the ending makes me turn back and read the beginning. At the end of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I suddenly remembered the beginning, set in a different place and time and realized just why it was there. I did the same with one of the most intriguing YA novels, Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese, a book that blew me away with its ending, forcing me to go back to find the clues, the foreshadowing I had missed.

I finished Adam Ross's novel Mr. Peanut this week, and after letting the story percolate in my brain awhile, I know I have to go back and read the last few chapters. The main thread of the story, the death of David Pepin's wife Alice, from what seems an allergic reaction to a peanut, is interwoven with the family stories of the two detectives investigating him--Hastrol, whose wife Hannah has taken to her bed and refuses to leave it, and Sam Shepard (yes, that Sam Shepard), working for the police department after being released from prison on charges of killing his wife.

Ross moves from the main story--the Pepins--to Hastrol and Shepard--in ways that make a reader forget the other stories exist--until he throws in a small detail that echoes what's happening in the other two story lines. To reinforce the circular nature of the story, he adds an antagonist who goes only my the name of Mr. Mobius, and he has the Pepins meeting in a college elective that studies Hitchcock films and marriage. The professor's explanation of the MacGuffin seems to be more than a minor detail, but perhaps a clue to the way his narrative plays out.

The added detail that Pepin is writing a novel (whose main characters are David Pepin and his wife Laura) add to the web that will probably require a second reading just to discover the undergirding of the story that was there all along as I moved through the plot.

Ross has pulled off quite a feat in his structure of the novel, pulling the reader into whichever story he tells at the time, shifting perspectives within the stories, then leaving the reader wondering what just happened. Wondering enough to want to go back and find out--and that is just what I intend to do.

Autumn Potluck

2010-08-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

My reading habits are as arbitrary as anything else in my life. I make a "to read" list, but then I hear a title mentioned on the radio or someone sends a "you've got to read this" email, and I'm off. in addition, my audio book fare depends entirely on supply, and I'm fast working my way through all my first choices at the public library and having to find other sources. I tried to download from audible.com (hearing their TV offer--two free books) but although the website promised I could burn them to CDs, I've ruined enough blank disks to buy at least one audiobook at retail. I find that when I listen, there are big blank spaces in the narrative when I move from one disk to the next. So far I have listened to a large percentages of Sherman Alexie's War Dances and part of Joshilyn Jackon's Backseat Saints. I just gave up until I can find the actual book.

I did listen to Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out, a short story collection, and then I found that one of her stories from that collection was included in the new edition of our literature anthology. I also somehow picked up Falling Apart in One Piece by Redbook editor Stacy Morrison, an account of the end of her marriage when her son was just a few months old. It wasn't the kind of book I intended to read, but I did glean a couple of good phrases from the book. She said at one point ,"I like to live life out loud." I understood that impulse completely. My favorite quote, though, was this: "Life is hard. Life is good. These two truths are in no way related."

Meanwhile, after reading high praise of author Charles Portis in Oxford American magazine, I rounded up a copy of True Grit. Since a remake is in the works (with Rooster Cogburn played by Jeff Bridges, I hear), I thought it was high time I read the real thing--told from Mattie's point of view.

I was also tickled to hear that Ron Koertge had written a follow-up novel-in-verse to Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, this one called Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs. This one follows Kevin Boland, a middle school boy who loves baseball but also keeps a secret poetry journal, which he finally begins to share a little. In the first book, Kevin is home sick with mono right after his mother's death from cancer. Now in this second book, his father has begun to date, something Kevin is not quite ready to accept. He also finds himself torn between his girlfriend Mia and Amy, a kindred spirit he meets at a poetry reading with his dad. I love the way he uses his journal to experiment with poetry forms as he writes about his day-to-day life. I first fell in love with Koertge's adult poetry, and then I heard him present at an English conference and discovered his YA lit as well.

Now I'm trying to keep up with school reading, while also balancing Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, an unlikely book club pick, and Adam Ross's Mr. Peanut, a recent Lemuria First Edition Club choice. I'll report back soon.

Required Reading: The Instructor's Perspective

2010-08-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm survived a first week of classes and while I know this is the honeymoon period of the semester, I still feel optimistic and almost excited about classes. For the first time since I moved from high school to community college, I am teaching a British Lit class, so I am back with some of my old friends (Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Alfred the Great). All those boxes I had stored for so long in my garage as useful as I knew they would be as I pull out the materials I've horded over the years (Ah! Here's my King Lear file!)

I've also been skimming and scanning my bookshelves, trying not to overlook great resources. For example, at the English convention last fall, I bought a copy of Gareth Hinds Beowulf. It's an abridged account with exquisite artwork, something like a graphic novel--maybe just more graphic. I'm also locating John Gardner's Grendel and Seamus Heaney's lovely translation, which features the original Old English text on the left and his line-by-line translation on the right.

In my freshman lit class (Literature-Based Research), I am searching through the newest edition of our anthology, Michael Meyer's Introduction to Literature (Bedford), to see what fresh material I might select this time. The textbook is huge, and I realize that in a Tuesday/Thursday class with only an hour and fifteen minutes each time we meet, I can't begin to have them read all I wish I could. I have tried to take to heart, though, a common last year: "Mrs.Posey, are we ever going to read any happy stories." I am looking at the selections that have been added, the ones I have overlooked before, even the chapters that focus on humor, incorporating those into my syllabus. Why not? I know that I love humor in my own reading selections.

With that same idea, I am searching for writing models for my Expository Writing class, also looking for some with a humorous angle. Some of the most memorable pieces I've read will fit perfectly. I've found "The One-Eared Intellectual" in Bailey White's collection Mama Makes up Her Mind, and I have my eye out for a Woody Allen piece I remember from an old Literary Cavalcade magazine called "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists."

In the meantime, I'll keep reading for pure pleasure, dropping little hints to my students. "Let me tell you about this book I'm listening to on the way to school. . . ." Who knows? They might be interested too.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

2010-08-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

With school starting back Monday, I know that much of my autumn reading will consist of textbooks (At least I teach literature. Calculus books would be unbearable for me.) and student papers. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that while my school responsibilities may slow my pleasure reading, they never stop it altogether. What a hypocrite I would be to teach people the purpose and pleasure of reading and writing if I didn't do them myself.

One of my last books I read this summer was also one of the best. David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet came highly recommended by a reading friend who was only a hundred pages in and "already hooked." Mitchell's story is set on an Dutch-settled island separated from Nagasaki by a bridge at the turn of the nineteenth century. Jacob De Zoet has signed on for a five-year stint with the Dutch Indies company, hoping to make his fortune and to return to marry his beloved Anna.

Politics--not only between the Japanese and the Dutch but among the Dutch colleagues as well--continually frustrate his hopes and opportunities. He develops relationships with an aging doctor who teaches medicine and with an interpreter, and he becomes fascinated with a young Japanese woman, a doctor's daughter with a burn scar over half her face, ruining her chances for a good marriage.

From the beginning, DeZoet feels protected by the lucky family Psalter, a bullet still firmly wedged into its cover, that has passed to him from his uncle, a minister. Since any material of a Christian nature is strictly forbidden, he must keep it hidden. He finds protection from one or two people who choose to look the other way, particularly since he has in his possession other books of genuine interest, especially to his friend the interpreter.

Mitchell's book is set on the brink of change in the world. Japan is still clinging to isolation and tradition. The Dutch have passed their peak, much to the surprise of those who are stranded by the edge of Nagasaki, and the British and Americans are gaining power in the world.

This is no casual beach read or page-turner thriller (although I'll admit I read it on the beach.) At first, I found it difficult to distinguish the characters. This is the point where I would tell my students to make a list with notes. The attention required, however, is worth the mental effort. I loved the book, and I loved its protagonist, its hero, Jacob DeZoet.

Dropping the Y

2010-08-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

No, I am not weighing in on the controversial decision of the YMCA to drop their other letters in their ads and signage. I'll let the Village People handle that. I have just been thinking about the arbitrary division between Adult Fiction and Young Adult Fiction.

As much trouble as I have organizing my own book shelves, creating something that borrows from but does not emulate either the Library of Congress method or the Dewey Decimal System, I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for publishers to decide how to market books and for book store owners to decide how to shelve them. In the "Young Adult Fiction" category, tracing back to S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, some books seem to fit neatly....My Darling, My Hamburger, for example. At other times, though, books seem to be slotted there at the risk of being missed by a large portion of the reading population.

When I was a young adult myself, I fear I might have snubbed anything categorized thus. Back them, I wanted books with heft and substance. What I recognize now is that many YA books have just that.

One of my favorite "YA" books The Book Thief had so much to appeal to mature readers. In fact, its sheer length might be a turn off to YA's, whose selection criteria often begins with "How long is it?" The seriousness of its subject matter, the unique point of view (Death as narrator) all touched my peers who read it. As far as I can tell, it was slotted as YA lit because (1. the protagonist was young and (2. the book had nothing vulgar or sexually explicit. (Why, after all, do we describe profanity as "adult language"?)

Last week, I got around to listening to a young adult novel recommended by lots of high school students I've taught, Edward Bloor's Tangerine. I recognized it at the library, where I am always scouting for a good audio book I haven't check out yet, and gave it a try.

Nothing about the book, on the surface, seems to indicate it as a choice for me: the protagonist is a seventh grade boy. The novel, though, was compelling enough that I found myself listening in the garage or in parking lots, long after it was time to get out of the car. The novel dealt with family secrets and favoritism, sibling rivalry, visual handicaps, soccer, football, class conflicts, and loyalty. Paul Fisher, the main character, was endearing but flawed. The parents were flawed but human. At the center of the story, Paul has lived in the shadow of "the Eric Fisher football dream," since his older brother has the potential for athletic greatness as a kicker, but absolutely no moral character.

When a sinkhole damages the excessive number of portable classrooms at his middle school, Paul opts to transfer to the more ethnically representative Tangerine Middle School, instead of going to the late shift at his own upper class school during construction. Here he earns the friendship and even respect of the coed soccer team on which many of the players' families are citrus growers. They face precarious weather and prejudice, but they accept Paul, grudgingly at first, and play a huge role in his maturity.

This weekend, I was talking to a group of high school students preparing to return to school this month. That preparation for most of them involves summer reading assignments. I recognized all of the titles and had read most--Of Mice and Men, The Count of Monte Cristo, Cyrano de Bergerac, In the Time of Butterflies, and more. The English teacher in me wanted to say, "Come on! Get excited! These are great books!" Instead, I just asked, "Have any of you read Tangerine?" And they were off!

Slow Read/Fast Read

2010-07-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

Not often do I read a book in parts, while interrupting to read something different altogether, but early in the summer, I started reading Edward Dolnick's book The Forger Spell on my eBook. I kept it handy when I did my time on the exercise bike (one of the best ways, I am convinced, to use e-Readers), but the nature of the book--highly researched and factual--didn't keep me reading just to see what happened next.

The book is the story of Van Meergen, a Dutch forgerwho successful fooled many buyers, art critics, and museums during WWII with his forgeries of works of DeHooch and especially Jan Vermeer. Among his victims was the Nazi Herman Goering. Failing to receive acclaim in his own rights, Van Meergen discovered a number of clever tricks to produce paintings that not only passed for the work of better known painters, but even found ways to simulate aging of the canvas and paints.

Heavily researched, the author took readers in a number of directions, but for me the best part came in the last section in which he described the hunt for art and artifacts after the war and the trial of Van Meergen after his discovery. Interestingly, the forger actually confessed to forgery to avoid a far worse crime at the time, collaboration with the Nazis. Many of those he duped were unwilling or at least reluctant to believe his confession, so his trial became something of a media circus.

The book has so much material of interest in the fields of art, history, and psychology. It just didn't have the page-turning quality that I seek in fiction--and that was fine. I've long been a fan of Vermeer (trendy now, I suppose, because of the fairly recent novels, The Girl in the Pearl Earring and The Girl in Hyacinth Blue), so I can imagine how the art world would have swooned over the possibility of adding to his small body of works.

The other novel I finished recently, Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, was more disconcerting. I am a huge fan of his novel The Life of Pi. In fact, it was one of the optional books I assigned a few years ago with a group of AP students eager to read more. This latest book, though, is dark and baffling. It is about the Holocaust and it is not. He actually builds a story-within-a-story when the protagonist, with one successful and one failed novel, is contacted by a taxidermist--and an odd one at that--who is writing a play about a howler monkey and a donkey, Virgil and Beatrice. Something about that part of the story reminds me of Waiting for Godot. The book, I feel sure, is intended to be unsettling. I'm not sure how to recommend the book. It's certainly not a feel-good beach book. The underlying theme seems to deal with how to be able to find words to talk about something as horrific as the Holocaust.

Most haunting are a series of questions posed at the end of the novel, in the guise of a game. I look forward to finding someone else who has read Martel's latest book because I certainly need to talk it through.

Nonfiction Update

2010-07-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

I finished listening to Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and I'm not quite sure how to describe it. Is it a book about how to live or how to write--or both? His framework centers on his working with two other filmmakers to turn his memoir into a movie, as he learns more about what comprises a good story.

He points out that if we saw a movie about a guy who really wanted a Volvo and at the end of the movie, he gets a Volvo, no one would leave the theater wiping away tears. That is not a good story. He repeatedly points out that just as one selects details to write a story--whether fictional or not--that people also have some choice in writing our own stories.

Along the way, while describing how to live a life would living--and sharing--he has a lot to say about story. The author reads his own book, which works most of the time, but someone needs to help him pronounce Proust. Publisher Thomas Nelson also needs someone to edit out the pronoun case errors. Me and I are used interchangeably only in country songs to achieve rhyme. Even then, the error makes my ears bleed.

The second book I mentioned earlier is Carr's The Shallows: This Is Your Brain Online. I am reading it during a week when I have consciously committed to turning off Facebook. He gives an explanation of the way our brain works that ordinary laymen can understand. The history of technology and how it has changed our lives starts far before computers. I had never thought of the impact of the map or the clock, although I certainly am aware of the impact of the printing press and the book on lives other than my own.

The chapter on Google--a big force in our community now--is especially enlightening and, in a way, disturbing. He doesn't reveal anything sinister so much as he sheds light on wha one of his sources called Google's belief in "its own goodness."

I am encouraged by what he reveals about the "plasticity" of the adult brain. I am relieved to know that you perhaps can teach an old dog new tricks--or new ways to do old ones. I certainly won't turn Luddite and abandon my laptop, my eBook, my Facebook friends, but I will try harder to be contemplative, to avoid the pressure to think of multi-tasking as a virtue rather than a hindrance.

I will also feel less guilty when I get lost in a good book. I am just nourishing those synapses in my plastic brain.

The Sound of Summer Running

2010-07-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite instrumental recordings, the first track of an Allison Brown CD, is called, "The Sound of Summer Running," a title taken from or at least shared by a Ray Bradbury short story. What struck me when I heard it first was how that melody sounded just like what the title implied.

As a teacher working on a nine-month contrast, I enjoy the luxury afforded few other professions, the chance to live my life on a permanent schoolchild's schedule, a year that begins not in January but in August. I know better than to take those three months for granted either. Although I may not be teaching during that time, I am renewing, refreshing, and preparing for the classes that will greet me each fall when I return. Fortunately for me, as an English teacher much of that preparation includes reading, one of the things I like to do best. By mid-July then I begin to hear what the poet called "time's winged chariot" right over my shoulder--or at least the sound of summer running.

I easily read twice as many books in the summer months as I read in the other months of the year, but I don't begin to check off all the ones I intended. I start with my "to read" list, but I encounter other readers or reviews and the list changes. Or I finish one book and the one I intended to read next doesn't feel right. I am a tedious list maker, though, so I record each book I finish on my wall calendar in the laundry room, transferring the list to a book in January.

Over the last week, I've realized that my reading list doesn't necessarily look like what I expected. I did finish the audiobook The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (read by Timothy Dalton, with whom I fell in love in the ninth grade when he played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights). The second in my swan reading phase (see previous post), this one was an interesting tale set in Ireland, something of a murder mystery.

Meanwhile, though, I've also read a book passed along by my youngest sister and recommended by her daughter, a rising sixth grader, Irene Latham's Leaving Gee's Bend, a story set in Alabama of a young sharecropper's daughter who takes risk to try to bring a doctor to help her mother. The girl loves quilting, and the story was inspired by the Gee's Bend quilts that hand in the Whitney Museum. Although I'm not sure when or where, I believe I have seen some of the quilts. I started reading the book about 2 a.m. this past week, during a phase of sleeplessness, and I read it straight through.

I've also picked up Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: This Is Your Brain Online. Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" appeared no long ago in the Atlantic Monthly, and this book follows the brain study he began there. This was another recommendation by NCTE president Carol Jago, and it motivated me to take a week off from Facebook. Carr shows that internet has not just changed what we know, but how we know it--and indeed how we think and act.

I have long realized that my tendency to multitask may be as much a vice as a virtue. Carr is reinforcing the idea and explaining how and why. I'm actually pleased that I am as engrossed in the book as I am, not usually a big reader of nonfiction, but I find that especially with the computer turned off and in a different room from the television, I want to keep reading. One most interesting part for me has been his discussion of how print text had such a tremendous impact on human beings. This is a book I want to pass along, but perhaps to a different set from those to whom I sometimes recommend titles.

I'm also listening to Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I have another of his books, Blue Like Jazz, which I haven't actually read, though it was highly recommended by one reader I trust--my daughter. This book, nonfiction, his usual genre, looks at his life--everyone's life--as a story being written. The book has implications for how to live or how to write. The book would be shelved in the Christian reading section, but it's subtle with no attempt to proselytize.

The other nonfiction book I've finished this month, which I mentioned earlier, was Mary McDonagh Murphy's Scout, Atticus, and Boo, her reflection on To Kill a Mockingbird as it reaches its fiftieth anniversary, along with those of many different people she interviewed--Mary Badley, who played Scout in the movie, Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, James McBride, Rosanne Cash, Wally Lamb, Rick Bragg, and many others.

To say I have a minor obsession with the book is hardly an overstatement. I am ready to read it again, this time as a "family book club." I've been reading Scout, Atticus and Boo by Mary McDonagh Murphy. She not only writes about her own response to the book but also interviews a variety of people--authors Wally Lamb and Anna Quindlen, singer Rosanne Cash, journalist Tom Brokaw, and even Mary Baddley, who played Scout in the film. She said she wondered whether the many different people she interviewed would have something new to say. They did. Most discuss why Nelle Harper Lee never wrote another boo and mention with which character they most identify. The issue of racism in the book is also almost always discussed. Other than that, everyone has a different take, a different memory of reading the book, a different attachment to the novel.

Tonight I'll meet with my book club to discuss Anna Quindlen's Every Last One, a book that affected me so that I can't wait to talk about it but which I am reluctant to discuss in depth here because I don't want to be a spoiler. As always, we'll decide what to read together next. Almost always, we come away deciding to read something I hadn't anticipated. That's what happens to my summer reading list too. Meanwhile, over my shoulder I hear it--the sound of summer running.

A Lamentation of Swans

2010-07-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's a strange coincidence that I ended up reading two books at once with swans in the title--The Silver Swan and The Swan Thieves. In an act of diversion, I looked up the official name for a group of swans and found no consensus. They are called a "wedge" when flying in formation (but I've never seen such), but on ground or in water, I see the options as "gaggle," "bevy," or--my favorite--a "lamentation" of swans.

My favorite swan story was passed along in a folklore class taught by Dr. Bill Foster at the University of North Alabama years ago. Around the time some of us were driving to Montgomery to attend a performance of one of the comedies at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the gorgeous theater complex financed by Winton Blount. Not only is the theater itself quite beautiful, but the grounds are ideal. There are bronze statues of children running and--if I recall correctly--of Puck playing a pipe. Sheep graze in grassy fields. When planning the site, someone decided they needed to order two pair of swans, one black and one white, from Stratford-upon-Avon. What could be more authentic? After flying the swans almost halfway around the world, though, they learned that the Stratford folks ordered their swans from a little farm about thirty miles from Montgomery, Alabama.

Now, I am not about to check with Snopes for the authenticity of the story. It's just too good. It has absolutely nothing, though, to do with either of the books under discussion.

This past weekend, I finished reading The Swan Thieves, a second novel by Elizabeth Kostova, whose first novel The Historian--a tale involving Vlad the Impaler--garnered lots of acclaim even before vampires were so cool. The premise of this latest novel appealed to me. It opens with an artist being arrested and eventually institutionalized for treatment after he was caught trying to attack a painting of Leda and the Swan in the National Gallery in D.C. The doctor who treats him is also an amateur painter (or frustrated artist); he provides art supplies for his patient, but while he endlessly paints (the same dark, curly-haired woman), he refuses to talk.

Since I tend to love novels with an art angle, I expected to love this book. It did have an engaging story, but while I am usually the more agreeable participant in the "willing suspension of disbelief," I couldn't go all the way with this book. For example, the patient speaks the first day, long enough to give his doctor permission to "talk to anyone--even Mary" then goes silent. Convenient, eh? But he also turns over a packet of letters in French written in the late nineteenth century, which the doctor sends to a friend for translation. The letters (and little narratives about the people between whom the letters are written) are interspersed throughout the novel, but Marlow, the protagonist never responds to them, until they conveniently tie everything together in the end.

The haste to resolution and denouement in the end were also a little too tidy for me, and when I went back to re- read the prologue, I also felt the author had depended far too much on coincidence.

Am I glad I read the book? Sure, but I don't know how readily I'll recommend it to anyone who asks for the titles of the best books I've read lately. Meanwhile, as I'm listening to The Silver Swan on audio, I'll hope it will be less disappointing, so I won't suffer a true "lamentation of swans."

Happy Anniversary to Atticus and the Kids!

2010-07-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

This week is traditionally vacation week around this part of North Carolina. Lots of plants close for the week of the Fourth of July, so everyone seems to head to the beach. This year, though, my grandchildren are here for a few days and then we are heading to Alabama for reunions with several generations of both sides of the family and with friends from the late sixties and early seventies.

If I didn't have a week planned out for me, I would have wanted to head to Monroeville, Alabama, for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of what I (and many others) consider one of the best books ever written, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. From what I know of her reputation, Lee (Nelle, not Harper, to those who really know her) would prefer to let the date pass without hoopla, but I've been pleased to read articles in Smithsonian magazine, Garden and Gun, Southern Living and more acknowledging the importance of the novel on this anniversary.

For those of us who can't get enough, Mary McDonagh Murphy has published Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird, including material from interviews with other authors and public figures about the impact of the novel on their lives. While most of us would love to be able to lay claim to discovering just such a masterpiece, to be the first in our circle to have read it, there is a much stronger urge to share the experience.

In a book I'm reading now, Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves, one of the narrators mentions loving the work of Monet, even when it has become so commonplace, the images on wall calendars and thank you notes. Maybe visual masterpieces run that risk, but great literature never does, in my opinion. Atticus's advice about walking in someone else's shoes is timelessly true. Scout and Jem and even Boo and Dill will always remain real to me, even when I know the rest of the reading world feels much the same.

I'd love to go to Monroeville. It would be a pilgrimage for me. Several years ago, I struck up a friendship through correspondence with a local teacher there who shared images from the 1930s of the town that became the model for Maycomb. Honestly, though, the town is planted in my consciousness as firmly as Andy Griffith's Mayberry. I've been there many times, and I always love to make that journey back.