A Year of Books in 2013: Part 2

This is part 2 of my 2013 Year in Books Review.  Part 1, which is fascinating and has been nominated for several blog awards, can be found here.

The following is based upon a survey that I stole from the internet.  

How many books read in 2013? 51

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?  1 non-fiction, 2 memoirs, 48 works of fiction.  

Male/female authors? 17/34

Favorite book read?  Harriet the Spy.  It was actually an audio book.  The kids and I started listening to books in the car, and it was life-changing.  We would drive somewhere, and they would be quiet.  Silent. And if someone would start to speak, he or she would receive a mighty shush.

I never read Harriet the Spy as a child. It was entertaining, funny, vivid, heartbreaking, and honest.  Caleb liked it so much I bought him the sequel and companion book, and he’s currently halfway through the sequel.

Caleb is in the middle of at least four books:  Harry Potter (the fourth one), Ender’s Game, The Long Secret (Harriet the Spy), and some baseball book.  It drives me crazy.  I just want him to finish a book, and then start the next.  He’s doing it all wrong.

Least favorite?  Breed by Chase Novak.  It was recommended by Stephen King.  I also read Under the Dome by Stephen King.  Neither was any good.  I am losing faith in Stephen King.

Oldest book read?  The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, 1937  

Newest:  I think The Goldfinch, October 2013

Longest book title? The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton; Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Shortest title? Feed by M.T. Anderson

How many re-reads?  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Most books read by one author this year: Susan Beth Pfeffer.  I binged and read all four books in her young adult series in three days.  

Any in translation?  I started The Infatuations by Javier Marias, but I got bored so I quit.  Because you can do that.

And how many of this year’s books were from the library? 21.  I think my overdue fees probably equal the amount of money I would have spent on books had I purchased instead of borrowing them.

Book You Were Excited About & Thought You Were Going To Love More But Didn’t? The Infatuations by Javier Marias, The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, Paris was the Place by Susan Conley

Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2013? The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

Book you read in 2013 that you recommended to people most in 2013? Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Most humorous?  May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

Best series you discovered in 2013?  I don’t generally read series, but I will (shamefully) admit to reading a young adult series by Susan Beth Pfeffer about what happens when an asteroid knocks the moon out of orbit.  It was scientifically preposterous, but I think she laced the prose with crack because I had to see how the thing ended.  

Favorite new author(s) you discovered in 2013? Rainbow Rowell, Leah Stewart, Graham Joyce

Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2013? Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Book You Read In 2013 That You Are Most Likely To Re-Read Next Year?  Fangirl.  I’ve already read it three times.  It’s short and enjoyable.

Most memorable character in 2013? Will Traynor in Me Before You, Levi in Fangirl, David Schickler in The Dark Path, Harriet in Harriet the Spy, Rose Baker in The Other Typist

Most beautifully written book read in 2013?  The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2013?  Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2013 to finally read? Harriet the Spy

Shortest and Longest Book You Read In 2013? Night by Elie Wiesel and Under the Dome by Stephen King

Genre You Read The Most From in 2013? Literary Fiction

Best 2013 debut you read?  The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell

Book That Was The Most Fun To Read in 2013?  Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Book That Made You Cry in 2013?  Me Before You by Jo Jo Moyes, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

One Book You Didn’t Get To In 2013 But Will Be Your Number 1 Priority in 2014? Middlemarch by George Eliot

A Year in Books 2013: Part I

Prologue

There is no brownie mix in my house.  I know, because I just tore my pantry apart looking for one.  In fact, the time I spent desperately searching for a brownie mix could have been spent making brownies from scratch.  I searched every deep, dark crevice of the pantry.  I found a mix for lemon bars,a Funfetti cake mix, two opened bags of chocolate chips, more elbow noodles than I will ever need, a dead moth, two Hot Wheels cars, and a lip gloss I'd been looking for.  Eventually I gave up, and now here I am, curled up on the couch writing this post, not enjoying the aroma of fresh brownies baking in the oven.

I was so sure I had a brownie mix.

           

Rogue Cheerio

My Other Dyson

Yesterday, while I was vacuuming, I came across a rogue Cheerio.  I went back and forth over it for a good minute before it eventually broke into pieces and was taken by my mighty Dyson.  I could have picked up that Cheerio and put it in the garbage at least eight times in that same period of time, but that would have meant letting the Cheerio win.  I don't let smug Cheerios win.  Hearing that sorry excuse for a circle break apart and get sucked into oblivion might have been the most satisfying part of my day.

The point is that I'm stubborn.  And so last year, when I told myself I was going to read at least four different books by C.S. Lewis, I was doomed before I even started.  Because I don't like people telling me what to do.  Even if it's myself.

I did not read any C.S. Lewis in 2013, and I don't really want to talk about it.  I did read other books, though.  51 in total, though I have included two kids chapter books and several young adult novels in my list.

Stats:

Books by male authors: 17
Books by female authors: 34
Pages read:  18,071

The Books; Part I 

This year, I'm going to focus on four books. I had no intention of reading four novels concerned with the aggressive integration of consumerism and public sharing in society, but it happened. These weren't even my favorite books, but they all fit together.  In fact, when looking back at all the books I read, it was eerie how well these four fit together.  If you read these books in a certain order, you can put together a bleak timeline of the future.

Part I of the year in books 2013 starts with with Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloane.  The novel has a more cheerful tone than the others; Robin Sloane is a self-professed techie, and so are the characters in his book.  I thought the novel was a little bogged down with technological detail, but the prose flows nicely and is full of humor.

The protagonist, Clay, has taken a job at a bookstore that is open 24 hours.  He soon discovers that books in a sealed-off section of the store hold a secret code, and he resolves to break it.  Never mind that a cult-like group of individuals has been trying to break the code for over 500 years!  He has a computer, and techno-savvy friends.  A childhood friend who became a millionaire by designing life-like boobs for video games funds his quest, and a girlfriend who works for Google makes it her mission to crack the code, using her bountiful technological resources. (When she's not helping Clay, the girlfriend is on a mission to document "old knowledge" so that everyone can have access to all information ever collected in the whole entire history of the world. This is the exact plot of the next book I am going to talk about!) If  you don't know what Google is capable of, you should probably not read this book.  I'm currently looking into ways to live "off the grid."  Unless "off the grid" is not near a Wegmans.  If that is the case, then I'll embrace the grid.

Robin Sloan embraces new technology while paying homage to classic literature. Clay carries his "ironic" first-generation Kindle around with him, but also loves those old-fashioned bound books with actual paper. There's a lot of talk, in at least in three of these novels, about the smell of books.  I pulled open my new copy of Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore and took a long whiff and smelled... not a whole lot.  Maybe it was too new. I think I'll store it in the basement for a couple of years, and then it will smell more authentic.  The book DOES have a glow-in-the-dark cover, however.  It's good for you to know this before you put it on your night stand so you don't wake up screaming in the wee hours of the morning, carrying on about aliens coming to get you. Apparently, this kind of behavior can be "unnerving" to your significant other.

We segue into Dave Eggers' novel The Circle, which is the name of a futuristic social networking site.  The Circle is Twitter and Google and Facebook and Instagram and everything else out there all rolled up into one huge powerful corporate entity.  Mae is our vapid and naive young protagonist who, through a college friend, lands a plum position at the world's largest Internet company.  The Circle's campus is probably modeled on Google's campus.  It is shiny and modern and clean and a little bit creepy.  The author hits us over the head with Orwellian themes: The Circle's motto is "SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT."   Employees at The Circle are encouraged to go "transparent."  Transparency means sharing your entire life online through the TruYou technology of The Circle.  Every time The Circle comes up with a new piece of technology that makes the world that much smaller, and therefore, that much more transparent, the community celebrates.

Holly:  So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.
John:  Wow, that's a great quote.  Who said that?  Thomas Paine?
Holly:  Queen Padme in the third Star Wars movie.  Right as the emperor was taking over.
John:  I've got nothing.

The Circle is my first Dave Eggers novel, and honestly, I thought a book by the author of a novel entitled "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" would blow me away with its profundities and deft prose. I was not blown away; the writing is simple and the characters one-dimensional, but the plot carried me along.

We journey into the more distant future.  Everything goes to crap in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.  America is in a deep depression, losing a war with Venezuela, practically owned by China, and worst of all, Staten Island has become the hip place to be in New York City.  Staten Island. Citizens of this cheerless America have become excessively shallow, materialistic, and obsessed with youth.  They are also nearly illiterate.  Books are no longer read, but scanned for pertinent information. (Lenny Abramov, our rather pathetic protagonist, is much maligned for having "smelly" books in his apartments.)  Texting is the dominant form of communication: actual talking to one another is termed "verballing."

Lenny works for an Indefinite Life Extension company, selling extended life spans to the exceedingly wealthy. Lenny, on the other hand, is in his late thirties, balding, and is very much in love with Eunice, a Korean girl 15 years his junior.  He has decided he wants to live forever, but cannot get his hands on the very technology he sells. (The love story is essentially a retelling of Graham Greene's The Quiet American.) The one thing he has going for him is his stellar credit score, which is easily shared with others via his apparat.  An apparat is an advanced piece of technology worn around the neck that constantly streams information to other apparat's, so that at any given moment, a person can view any and all information ever recorded about you.  

Super Sad True Love Story is pure satire, but although described as a "tragicomedy," I didn't smile throughout the entire thing.  Not once.  

We journey even farther into the future and come to the bleakest of the four books, the young adult novel Feed, by M.T. Anderson.  Let's cut right to the chase: in this story, the Internet is IN YOUR HEAD!  Which means that you can instant message and shop with your brain.  Any time you want.  And if you thought today's teenage lingo is hard to keep up with, it's much, much worse in the future.  Also, teens party on the moon.  Really.

In Feed, the world is dying.  Corporations own everything, even public schools.  Pollution has taken its toll: the sky is manufactured, and natural air is no longer safe to breathe.  People are developing horrific lesions on their skin, but rather than concern themselves with the decaying of their bodies, the commercial powers-that-be turn the sores into fashion statements.  The sores are a ham-fisted metaphor for a world that is decaying, not just physically, but socially. Here we have a world completely consumed by commercialism, propelled by technology, where everyone is online, all the time. But what happens if a hacker shuts down your feed?  

There's also a love story, but based on everything I have learned in these tales, love does not thrive in the future.

Reading these novels has made me slightly apprehensive about my complicity in the death of culture, but quite frankly, I'm more concerned about that giant volcano under Yellowstone.  These authors hold a very grim outlook of the future.  It's almost like they're trying to warn us of something.  They are very afraid someone is going to take away their books, or at the very least, won't let them smell their books any longer. However, these same authors would hate it if Apple came up with an app that makes you iPad smell like an old book.  

I'm going to go now.  I've just come up with a great idea for an app for Google.

Part II of "The Books" is coming shortly.

For further enjoyment:

Why Do We Like Dystopian Novels?

Ring of Power

That's a person named Eunice... In honor of Eunice from Super Sad True Love Story, here is a clip from the classic comedy "What's Up Doc,"  starring Barbara Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and the incomparable Madeline Kahn.

The Night John Outed me as an Oxfordian

I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

I believe we landed on the moon.  I believe that the attacks on 9/11 were committed by al Qaeda terrorists, and that the towers went down because airplanes crashed into them.  I vaccinate my children. I don't believe that adding flouride to the water supply is actually a way for the government to control our minds.  I believe that Elvis is dead, Paul McCartney is alive, President Barack Obama was born in the United States, and Paul from the Wonder Years is not, in fact, Marilyn Manson.

So I have this one thing.  Just one thing.

I kind of sort of think that maybe William Shakespeare never wrote all those plays.  And sonnets.  Shocking, I know, but as a skeptic, I am in good company.  Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stevens and conservative Supreme Court Justice Scalia agree on one thing: that the man from Stratford probably didn't write Shakespeare. Henry James, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Malcolm X,  Jeremy Irons, Kenneth Branagh, and Keanu Reeves were or are dubious about the true authorship of the Bard.

Keanu Reeves, people.  I don't know about you, but when I'm faced with a tough decision, I ask myself what Keanu Reeves would do.

I believe Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the probable author of the plays. I am an Oxfordian. There.  It's out.  However, it's not something I often bring up in conversation.  Stratfordians (those who believe Shakespeare to be the true author) are incredibly sensitive about the issue, and write scathing articles with titles like "Only Foolish Snobs Don't Believe in William Shakespeare."  It's pretty hurtful.

I'm not a expert in Shakespearean literature by any means, but I'm not completely ignorant about the subject, either.  I've taken several courses on the guy, and I've written several long and boring papers with titles like "A Winter's Tale and the Pastoral," and "'O sleep!'  The Somnabulent Shakespeare."  I own Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," which I've actually flipped through on an occasion or two. I've read at least eight Shakespeare biographies.  More like five, actually.  Okay, two.  I've read two.

The fact is, all the information we have about William Shakespeare can be neatly contained in a single paragraph.  There are many pages of information about  de Vere, however, and the evidence that suggests he wrote the plays is pretty compelling.  (A good de Vere primer can be found here.)

Which bring me to the events of last evening at John's annual firm Christmas party.  My husband is afflicted with a condition called extreme extroversion while I suffer from whatever the opposite of that is, so, as you can imagine, I find social events stressful. Not only that, but my only pair of black shoes are slightly too large for my feet, which makes mingling physically uncomfortable.  I was sitting at a table, lamenting my poor choice in footwear, when John introduced me to his attorney friend and his friend's wife, an English professor.  Who went to Harvard.  But whatever.  (Please note that she was not a Shakespeare specialist.)

After a brief introduction, John, trying to form a connection between me and the professor, chose that inopportune moment to bring up my interest in the Shakespeare authorship question. He thinks it's a topic of common interest among literature buffs (it's not) and that he would make me sound erudite by bringing it up. (It didn't.)   The subject is controversial, and coming out as an Oxfordian is a decision an Oxfordian has to make for him or herself.  The husband should never out his wife as an Oxfordian, especially to an academic snob.

The not so smooth transition from introductions to Shakespeare went exactly like this:

John:  This is my wife, Holly.  Holly, this is the professor of English!  Holly believes the Earl of Oxford is really William Shakespeare!"

He might as well have said:  This is my wife, Holly, and she hates impoverished children! And she kicks puppies for fun!  Have at her!

English professors hate Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theorists.  This particular one raised her eyebrows and said, and I quote, "Oh, you're one of those crackpots, huh?"

This is the very first time I have ever been called a crackpot.  It wasn't pleasant.

I forced a grin.

"I am," I said.

"I think I did a little paper about the authorship issue in high school.  I made it pretty clear that Shakespeare was Shakespeare."

"A lot of compelling evidence has come forth in the last few years regarding de Vere," I said.

"Oh really?  Since 1997?"  she said.  I ignored her sarcasm.

"Yes," I said.

She didn't regard me for the rest of the evening, and I had good stuff to say about all of the Harry Pottery imagery in the latest Donna Tartt novel, not crackpot stuff at all.

We stayed at the party for a long time; my extreme extrovert likes to talk.  A lot.  I finally got him to head in the direction of the coat room.

"The crackpot is leaving the building!" I announced.  Then I tripped over my too-large shoes, which really cemented my crackpot image.  Then we went home.

So, now it's out there: that evening, the entire table heard my exchange with the professor and I'm sure the news is spreading.  I wanted to address it before you heard it from someone else.  I am an Oxfordian. I'm not ashamed.  Someday I may even get the courage to walk in the Oxfordian Pride parade.

(I am not a crackpot!)

The Year in Books: 2012

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green:  A YA book for adults.  The Fault in Our Stars is a quirky love story about teens with cancer in love.  Hazel is terminal; her lungs have been ravaged by her illness and will only last her a while more.  She walks around with an oxygen tank.  Hazel is depressed, for obvious reasons, and her mother forces her to join a cancer support group for teens where she meets and falls madly in love with Augustus, an amputee in remission.  The smaltzy love story with the “Love Story” ending is saved by its witty dialogue and original characters.   The dry, sardonic humor captures its dark undertones: this is a book about dying.  But it’s also really, really funny.  So long as you don’t dwell on the fact that you’ve never heard such quick, intelligent, droll conversation coming out of the mouths of anyone under 18, it’s a great read.  

The Breakdown: I read 40 books.  30 by women, 10 by men.

This was a mind-candy year for reading.  Many of the books aren’t worth mentioning, and some I’m a little embarrassed I read.  (Something Borrowed by Emily Griffin, anyone?)  And (I’m so ashamed) no classics... but for what it's worth, here's what I DID read (the good, the okay, and the ugly):  

Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare:  I bought this book solely based on its cover, which is a perfectly acceptable reason for choosing a novel, and am glad I stuck through the rather slow beginning.  Snowleg is a quiet mystery about Peter Hithersay, who learns his true father is not the man he grew up calling Dad.  He makes a journey to East Germany to track down his birth father and meets a girl and falls madly in love.  Things end badly, partly because she is a citizen of communist East Germany, and partly because Peter makes a terrible choice.  Years later, the Berlin wall falls.  Peter only knows the girl’s nickname- Snowleg.  As Snowleg’s identity slowly unravels, I couldn’t wait to see if Peter and she would be reunited.  A really lovely novel. 

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail byCheryl Strayed:  I will admit that I did not realize there was a Pacific Crest Trail until I read this book.  I knew of the Appalachian Trail, of course, duh, but a trail that runs from California up through Washington?  Who would walk that?  THERE’S NO WATER ON THAT TRAIL!  But Cheryl Strayed walks almost all of it, and who knew walking could be so fascinating.  Toenails fall off, strange characters are met, packages don’t arrive at their destinations: I was very nervous for her though obviously she made it out all right and wrote this bestselling memoir.  Strayed’s long hike was preceded by her mother’s death and subsequent divorce from her husband.  Strayed is terribly flawed, but I think she would be the first to admit that.  The long hike was a cathartic experience, and you have to give anyone credit for sticking with it.  Especially when they hiked alone.  In the desert.  With very very little funding.  A fun read that will make you want to get outdoors.

(Because I was on a read-about-hiking-long-trails kick, I also read the memoir AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller.  This was less introspective and more of a straightforward story about hiking the AT.  I loved it.  And it was self-published!)

Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce:  I heard Ms. Pierce read an excerpt of her novel, Amy Inspired, at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing.  Then I bought her book.  And when I got home I read it.  And I really, really liked it.  Christian fiction has always been more miss than hit with me: if it’s not a saccharine love story it’s a gag-worthy morality tale.  This was a novel with real people.  In fact, the most popular review on Amazon is a 2-star that complains the story is too “edgy.”  Because the bible was so tame, with all the adultery and spilling of guts.  Amy has boyfriend troubles, is a struggling writer, and has a dying mother.  I could very much relate to her, minus the boyfriend troubles and the dying mother.  Seriously- she was a likable character, the novel pulled you right along and the writing was quite lovely.  An enjoyable tale about a girl with faith.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett:  Marina’s colleague has gone to the Amazon to check on the research of their pharmaceutical company’s researcher, and Marina’s former mentor, Dr. Senger.  After receiving a rather alarming and terse report that the colleague has died, Marina descends into the jungle to find out what happened to him.  Part fantasy and part suspense, Patchett plops you in the middle of the sticky jungle for a while and you find you can’t leave- at least not until Marina does. 

Apparently medical personnel  hate this book because it is highly inaccurate.  I found the plot fantastical, almost magical surrealism.  It fit the setting and the plot and quite frankly I didn’t care that the characters chose a c-section over an external version for a delivery.  I understand that inaccuracies can drive professionals crazy: the rest of us didn’t notice and certainly aren’t going to look to the novel as a resource on obstetrics.  (Chill out, medical personnel!)

Worth Mentioning:

Little Bee by Christ Cleave:  An unsettling story about a Nigerian refugee and the English couple she met on the beach.  This book was given to me by my favorite blogger friend, Marsha of Life in A-Town.  I thought , based solely on the title and the fact that the cover of the novel is orange, that this would be a whimsical tale of friendship.  It is not.  It’s a tale of friendship within a horror story.   Cleave is an incredible writer who shifts effortlessly between the points of view of two very different women. 

However, the plot felt forced in places where it didn’t need to.  For instance, in the impoverished village from where Little Bee hails, there was a bible that’s pages were torn off after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the last words of their particular copy read : My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

A tad bit ham-fisted. 

A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans:  In the spirit of A.J. Jacobs’ hilarious memoir, A Year of Biblical Living, Evans decides to attempt to achieve “biblical womanhood” within the confines of a year.  To live as a woman biblically, Evans followed Proverbs 31 and some other verses from the bible that instruct women on how to conduct their lives.  Her point was to prove that “biblical womanhood,” as it is touted among conservative Christians (and conservative Jews), is an impossible feat.  The book has some amusing anecdotes, and Evans never comes across as condescending or mean.  However, overall, it was not as funny as I’d hoped and was maybe even a little forgettable?  (Rachel Held Evans has one of the most popular Christian living blogs on the web, so my expectations were high.  But what do I know?  I’m small potatoes.)

Gillian Welch:  I took a turn toward the dark side of fiction and started reading Gillian Welch’s sinister crime novels: Gone Girl, which remains on the NY Times bestseller list, and also Sharp Objects and Dark Places.  Gone Girl was black comedic fun:  Sharp Objects and Dark Places were brooding and disturbing.  But addicting.  Like carbohydrates.  I tore through them in a day. 

Big disappointments included Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann, which was almost unreadable, and the immensely popular Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was gimmicky and manipulative and had a ridiculous plot.  And he used a kid to do it.  A kid!  Did you like this book?  Did you like the movie?  I refuse to watch the movie.  I miss the days when Tom Hanks did movies like The ‘Burbs.  Did you see the film he did with Julia Roberts?  Uck.  Uck, I tell you.

Other books worth mentioning include The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger (takes place in Rochester!); The Lessons by Naomi Alderman (Alderman’s mentor is Margaret Atwood); The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (this is the third time I’ve read it); The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (brings biblical times into sharp focus, however sacrilegious it may be); and The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (an alternative “Left Behind” novel.)

Yes, it has occurred to me that I use parentheses too much.

I’ve thought about it, and in 2013 I’m going to steal my Dad’s idea and choose an “author of the year.”  The author?  Wait for it…

C.S. Lewis! 

I’m going to start reading the Narnia books to Ben and am personally going to tackle:  Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, and either The Screwtape Letters or The Four Loves.    

I’m proud of my choice because:  1)  These books are mainly non-fiction and 2) C.S. Lewis is not a female.  I tend to read female authors.  I don’t know why.

Your favorite books read in 2012?  Books you are looking forward to reading in 2013?  You loved Incredible Close and Extremely Dangerous or whatever it was called and feel like arguing with me?  Please.  Let me know.

An Examination of the Home Library

I’m working on a “summer reading” post. This is a pre-summer reading post examination of home libraries. It’s adapted from a post I wrote a while ago for Scribophile.com. No, it’s an interesting post. Please don’t go.


The Wonder Dog has ruined the carpet in the “library,” which means we will soon be tearing up the carpet and replacing it with something more dog-friendly. And child-friendly. And John-friendly. Packing up the books and the bookshelves is going to be a pain- I will have to choose what to put aside and what to stow away in the basement. Who knows what I might feel compelled to read? It’s summer! Time for reading in the sunshine and screaming at your kids not to splash you as they jump into the kiddie pool! (Which is just one of the reasons I don’t frequent the library that often.) I am a firm believer in the “whoever dies with the most books wins” mantra. Unfortunately my husband is, too. I think we’re “collectors.” Others call us “hoarders.”

As I was deciding what to pull from the shelf, I was astonished how many of the books I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. I wanted to read at least 50 books this year. I believe I am up to 13. If I don’t step up my game this summer, I’ll feel sheepish. In other words, my home library, as expansive as it is, is not an actual representation of all the books I’ve read.

A couple of years ago, we went with friends to the enormous book sale in Ithaca. While perusing the kids’ books, I overheard a college student say the following to his friends:

“Guys. You don’t know how important this is. We’re going to graduate soon. This is the time we need to really start thinking about our home libraries. Did you know you can walk into someone’s house and learn more about them by looking at their library than by talking with them?”

I bet he was a Cornell student.

While I suppose there’s some truth behind this statement, I would submit that it’s mostly malarkey. Here’s are some misconceptions and potential truths that hide behind a person’s library (or lack of a library):

1) This person has a lot of classic literature. He or she must be really smart. Very possibly. Or this person buys up classic literature and displays it on his bookshelf to appear smart or just because he’s an especially pretentious human being. He has, however, read the first two paragraphs of Decameron, Middlemarch, and The Art of War.

2) This person has a lot of romance novels. A person who reads such garbage must be really stupid. These women would beg to differ.

3) This person has no books in his house. He hates to read. Or he takes advantage of his local library. Or, he listens to books on tape in his car during his long commute to work. Or, he buys books and immediately gives them away. Not everyone believes that “whoever dies with the most books wins” mantra. Some believe that you can’t take them with you.

4) This person has so many books! She must read all the time! It is more than likely that this person has a book-buying compulsion that she has a hard time curbing, and that she buys a lot of books because she thinks “the covers are pretty!” This person is NOT me. Nope. Not me.

If I had the chance to take this kid aside, I might have suggested to him that perhaps he should keep trying to talk to people rather than just looking at their collection of books. And I mean really talking and not just gazing into the distance until the conversation drifts back to the subject that interests him the most- himself.

What does your library say (or not say) about you?

Holly Attends a Writing Conference!

The Festival of Faith and Writing is held every two years at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For those three days, “faith” encompasses pretty much anyone who believes there is a world “beyond the veil”: spiritualists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.- basically all the people Richard Dawkins makes fun of. We share that thin but strong thread that ties us to one another – belief.


The entire time I was there, I had Cee Lo Green’s infamous song stuck in my head- albeit the PG version. I think I heard it playing in Wendy’s.

I didn’t take as many notes as I meant to. I’m a terrible note taker. My spiral pages are full of names of authors mentioned and short statements like, “Fiction is the art of lying! Huzzah!” and “I am trapped in the prison of my own dignity.” There are some pithy quotes: “Story is a country where you can both stand for a while,” and “Violence is a failure of the imagination.” And then, in flamboyant, swirly letters, I wrote the words of the great poet Cee Lo: “Yeah I’m sorry I can’t afford a Ferrari.”

I went to get inspired, or rather, like Billy Crystal in City Slickers, to “find my smile.” The love of my life all but pushed me out the door with the hopes that getting away would be just the thing I needed. So I left him with heaps of laundry and a teary goodbye and two brand new gel pens to listen to the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Kevin Brockmeier, and Marilynne Robinson discuss the writing process, the realm of imagination, and how, exactly, they become “inspired.” Inspiration, I’ve found, is a tricky business. It’s one of those nebulous things that I’m sure there must be some secret, probably discovered by Oprah, to attaining.

There isn’t, or if there is, it’s different for everyone.

One novelist shared that she writes early in the morning and late at night because that’s when she’s closest to dreaming.

Ann Voskamp’s husband built her a cabin at the edge of their corn field for inspiration. Good grief.

Kevin Brockmeier printed us a list of his 100 favorite books, his top ten favorites highlighted, that inspire him.

As for the sessions themselves, some writers give brilliant speeches; some do not. The lovable and brilliant Brian Doyle spoke passionately and fluently yet his hands shook the entire time. The session ended and I just wanted to give him a hug and say thank you.


Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novel Incredibly Dangerous and Extremely Smelly (or something like that) I didn’t particularly love, was a brilliant speaker. Tall, dark, handsome, funny, and handsome and tall.

Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer for her novel Gilead, ended at least half of her spoken sentences with, “Ya know?” Alas, she didn’t tell a story, but gave a rather vague talk about politics and fear and how certain news conglomerates seems to despise liberal college professors, ya know? I later read that her most recent book, a series of essays, is based on speeches she has given to conservative groups. She seems to blame Fox News for the fact that people carry guns. She did not once mention the creators of that show The Walking Dead, which would give anyone reason to want to own a gun, or at least a crossbow.

Adam Schutema, author of the short story collection Freshwater Boys, gave an informational talk about fiction and place. A lot of what he said resonated with me: he compared writing without giving your fiction a strong sense of place to watching actors talk in front of a plain white screen. Thankfully, if there’s one truly good thing I carried home with me from this conference, it’s that it’s okay to scribble out a story and then go back and fill in the trees and busses in the background and birds tweeting outside the window. Everyone has their own process.

Other highlights from the festival: Jana Riess’s controversial memoir session, where she insisted that our children’s stories are not our stories to tell, and that we should leave them out of our memoirs. Or our blogs. Or our Christmas letters. A later session had three other memoir writers defending their reasons for writing about their children. I asked Caleb what he thought, and he said, “You write about me? Where? Is it embarrassing?”

Gary Schmidt, who won the Newbury twice, read letters from his incorrigible young fans. He was the festival’s first, and perhaps most poignant, plenary speaker.

Bethany Pierce, whose novel I purchased at the festival, reduced all plots to six biblical stories:

• Satan falling

• Paul on the road to Damascus

• Exodus

• The first and second coming of Christ

• David and Goliath

She challenged us to think of another plot line, and I couldn’t.

The most discouraging discussion was the one on building a writer’s platform, which entails building Twitter followers and getting speaking engagements BEFORE you get your novel published. I swear, I felt the whole room participate in a collective sigh.

I came home to sleet and rain and snow and wind. Any hopes of retaining a modicum of inspiration were dashed when I stood, this morning, in the freezing rain, encouraging Kiah to not play “chase me around the yard, you human fool!” I had a smile, but perhaps I left it in that McDonald’s outside of St. Catherine’s. I’m sure it will catch up to me.

In the meantime, I am still processing what it was like to spend so many days with people who are far more creative and accomplished I will ever be. My favorite moments of the festival were when I was read to: whether it was from a novel, a group of poems, a memoir, or a short story. Scrawled in one corner of my spiral notebook is the question: Do you like sentences? I do. I like sentences. I like stories. I like being read to, because it’s true, a story really is a country where I can stand with people I don’t know, will possibly never see again, for a while.

It’s a beautiful while.

Daniel's Being a Worm, (and I don't mean that in a good sense.)

I was gone at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin college in Grand Rapids, Michigan from Wednesday to last evening.  I'll write about it in more detail later- today, my goal is to get the poem(s) I promised for Mondays out, and to share what's going on in my life at this very moment, which is that... 

Daniel is being so, so, so mean to me. 

So far, he has told me the following:

"Go back to Michigan so Joyce (his beloved aunt) will come over again."

"You're still here?  I thought you were going back to Michigan."

"Maybe you should just live in Michigan."

"Why do you always put my stuff away where I can't find it?  I hate that."

"Joyce makes peanut-butter-and-jellies better than you."

"Here are the people I love:  Dad and Ben and my teachers and my blue doggy and Joyce and Grandma and Grandpa and THEN you."

"Where's Michigan, anyway?" 

I'm trying to be stoic and not dissolve into a puddle of self-pity and hurt feelings. 

On the first day of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing Aaron Belz, and I can't quite find the words to describe him.  His deadpan performance was as enjoyable as his bizarre images.  Here are two of the poems he read:

Worms

Cyclists, as a rule, think bikers are cheating,
because they have engines. Pedestrians, in turn,
think cyclists are cheating; they use wheels.
People in wheelchairs think pedestrians
have a leg up, for obvious reasons,
but pedestrians think the same thing
about people in wheelchairs; they use wheels.
What makes people in wheelchairs unique
is that they also think cyclists and bikers
are cheating. Their disdain is uniform.
The wheelchairists' hypocrisy lies,
however, in their use of automobiles.
Everyone uses automobiles except worms.
Worms think they're better than everyone.
Worms think they're more authentic than everyone.
This is why people say worms are self-righteous.
To worms' credit, however, they aren't hypocritical,
except the ones that glide down the sidewalk
on hundreds of tiny legs, blithely ignoring
their wilted, sun-blackened comrades.
Those worms are called millipedes.
Those worms are really bad apples.


--Aaron Belz


The One About the Ectoplasm and the Osteoblast


Aaron Belz

Some ectoplasm sits next to an osteoblast
at a bar. The ectoplasm asks the osteoblast,
“Why do you form bones?” And the osteoblast
responds, “Why are you the outer relatively
rigid granule-free layer of the cytoplasm usually
held to be a gel reversibly convertible to a sol?”
And the ectoplasm is like, “Wow, that is such
an awkward question.” And so the osteoblast
goes, “Seriously, why are you? I form bones
for the same reason.” The bartender, an osteoclast,
asks them what they want to drink. The ectoplasm
asks him what he recommends that’s on draft,
and he says the Dead Guy Ale, it’s a fresh keg.
They both break into fits of laughter. “Oh my gosh!”
says the osteoblast, “Dead Guy is a German-style
Maibock that’s deep honey in color with a malty
aroma, rich hearty flavor and a well balanced finish.
Now does that sound like the kind of beer we drink?”

Longing and Hope in "A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country."

Today, I have the privilege of bringing to your attention a small book of exquisite poetry by Daniel Bowman Jr, a graduate of my alma mater, Roberts Wesleyan College.  Dan is currently a professor of English at Taylor University in Indiana, where he lives with his beautiful wife (whose own writing talent ought to be mentioned) and two children.  I also happen to know that Dan has a lovely singing voice.

I am not a poetry critic nor do I pretend to be.  I do not often sit down with a book of poetry and just read; I read fiction for the story- I turn to poetry when I want to revel in the beauty of language.  Nonetheless, here are my humble and completely unbiased thoughts on “A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking County.”

Dan’s poetry is accessible in its simplicity yet full of mystery, depth, and a feeling of longing.  The poems have an especially strong sense of place, whether they transport the reader to middle America or the pastoral countryside, or gritty realities of big city life. 

He speaks of Rochester:

This place is a longing,
Downtown its lonely form,
The great lake my only body.

And baseball:

The Yankees lost but it’s only July and we’re thirsty, we flee the Bronx, switch trains at midtown, take the Q all the way to Sheepshead Bay, wander into the bar closest to the stop which seems to be some kind of cosmic tennis club for models who speak only Russian. 

And the Mohawk region of New York:

Ashes bring hard faith:
In my vision, only the late nigrescence
The symphony at Stanqix,
And always the open field.

And waiting:

November straddles plum-black fields.
November waits for me,
Its shadows like dreams in the dry stubble. 

English majors at Roberts Wesleyan College were fortunate to take classes from two fantastic professors: Judd Decker and Dr. Harold Hurley.  Whether you liked Hemingway or not, you could not help but become excited by Dr. Hurley’s love of Papa’s sparse language and baseball imagery. Jud Decker, whose voice was sleepy yet droll, was in love with two Tess’s- Tess Gallagher, noted poet and fiction writer, and of course, Tess of the D’urbervilles, Hardy’s most tragic literary figure.  Professor Decker opened his students’ eyes to beauty of language:  from Emily Bronte’s depictions of foggy English moors in England to Anne Tyler’s quirky characters and haunting prose in “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”  Every single class, Professor Decker was drunk on words, and those of us just beginning to understand that books would become an important facet of our own histories felt privileged to view literature through his lovesick eyes. 

I see Wuthering Heights and Anne Tyler and Thomas Hardy in Dan’s poetry.  I see Tennyson and Frederick Buechner and Emily Dickinson.  Thumbing through a copy of Buechner’s “A Room Called Remember,” a collection of essays assigned in Professor Decker’s “Contemporary Lit” class, I noticed I’d underlined one sentence in the entire book.  Just one!  I don’t know why.  Anyway, it reads: These are the moments that in the depths of whatever our dimness and sadness and lostness are, give us an echo of a wild and bidding voice that calls us from deeper still.

These words capture the essence of Dan’s poems:  while there’s an underlying feeling of longing, sadness, and fogginess, beyond the dreamlike nature of each verse hope resounds.

If you’ve never been into poetry, this slim volume of wonder is an excellent place to start.

April Poem
by Daniel Bowman, Jr.

Every year about this time
I bury my mother’s bones
And in May
They spring up as lilacs
And in June they float softly

On the Irondequoit Creek
And in July they march down
Columbia Street
And end with smoke.
In August they become

Poison Ivy creeping
Along the trail where I walk
With my daughter.
Soon they’ll be hidden
Under dead leaves and snow.

The thaw will have its say
Again next year
And I’ll reach for the shovel,
Happy for moonlight
And a grasshopper’s song.

Monday Hodgepodge With a Poem

1. I April fooled my kids. I told them I wasn’t making their traditional Sunday evening pancake dinner, but would be serving liver and onions instead. There were some tears. April Fools! I shouted. They were nonplussed. I would say that overall it was not a successful April Fools joke.

2. It’s National Poetry Month! It’s also International Guitar Month, National Frog Month, and Stress Awareness Month, which of course means that all of my posts will be written in syllabic verse from the perspective of a guitar-playing frog under a lot of stress. He wears a sombrero and his name is Bruce.

(I will be substituting Monday songs for poems, just for the month of April. Please look for next week’s review of my friend Daniel Bowman’s Jr.’s book of poetry A Plum in Leatherstocking Country, published this past January.)

Some thoughts on poetry:

“A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Salman Rushdie.

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision- a faith, to use an old fashioned term. Yes indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.” Mary Oliver.

“A Poem begins with a lump in the throat.” Robert Frost.

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” W.H. Auden.

“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.” W.H. Auden.

I’m a little bit in love with Auden. If he was alive, not gay, and I was unmarried, I would totally pursue him, even though (and these were also his words) he has a face that looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

Unfortunately, these are not minor obstacles.

3. Sometimes you have to dig a grave and bury your dreams. My dream of being a lounge singer is dead. I realize this is a strange dream, but I’ve always wanted to be the one wearing a slinky dress singing smoke songs in a non-smoky establishment where the tinkling of martini glasses and sporadic laughter is the back-up band to my back-up band. Alas, it is not meant to be.

I blame my father entirely.

If YOU had a dad who played the piano ten times better than you can sing, but who says he doesn’t FEEL like playing at events or weddings anymore because he’s getting OLDER, wouldn’t you blame him too? I don’t have time to find a piano player, a bass player, and a drummer! I’m a 34-year old mother of four! What would you do if your dad would rather play Bach than Gershwin?

Am I singing “Embraceable You” right now? Yes, yes I am.

4. It’s also National Humor Month! See, there’s some sort of a theme to this post? Except for the awful sadness of the death of my lounge-singing dream. Of course.

And so I'm adding one more Auden quote for good measure: “Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” (This is why I keep Ella around, actually.)

Your Laughter

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Pablo Neruda

Fire in the Hole! (Or New Year's Resolutions)

This is not my oven.  I did not, in the middle of a slight emergency, take the time to find my camera and take a picture.  This is a picture from the internet I'm using for illustrative purposes because, according to blogging experts, blog posts should come with at least one picture. 

One seemingly calm evening in early fall, I baked something, which happens every full moon during leap years. I bake in the oven that came with the house and hasn’t been cleaned since we moved into said house. There are bits of charcoal that have gathered on the bottom of the oven which I think lend the foods a nice, smoky flavor, appreciated when baking pizzas but not so much when baking, say, banana bread.

I was baking macaroni and cheese when the fire alarm went off. I opened the oven to find that my charcoal collection had caught on fire, which was an inevitable development, I suppose, but I panicked nonetheless. Here is Caleb’s account of what happened:

“Yeah, my mom screamed really loud and then threw water on it and the next day she went out and bought a fire extinguisher.”

This account was relayed to my babysitter, who had to contend with her own charcoal fire when making frozen pizzas for the kids last week.

“Why didn’t she just clean the oven?” the babysitter asked.

Why didn’t she, indeed. (Fires in the kitchen are actually a somewhat common occurrence in the Jennings’ household.)

This event is indicative of the level of chaos my kids have come to expect in our household.

All this to say that my new year’s resolution is to get my sh@# together. Because setting your house on fire is not being a good parent.

I’m on a new cocktail of meds that will supposedly help to keep me out of the mental ward (ha ha!), but they make me dizzy and forgetful. So, the next month will be about playing around with dosages, etc. Sometimes the cure is worse than the malady, but I guess I’d rather be forgetful than, you know, an inert weirdo.

(Which sounds better?)

Babysitter: So why didn’t your mom just clean the oven?

Caleb: Because she’s an inert weirdo, of course.

OR:

Babysitter:  So why didn't your mom just clean the oven?

Caleb:  She just forgot.  No biggie.  Everyone's okay.

(I thought so.)

New year’s resolutions:

• Don’t obsess over little things

• Hug my kids every day

• Respond with kindness, not impatience and anger

• Let go of those things I have no control over

• Take hold of the things I do have control over

• Be the more loving one

The More Loving One by WH Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

The Year in Books: 2011

I read 28 books this year: one book fewer than last year. In my defense, I read longer books in 2011 and I did more writing than, well, ever. Not on my blog, per se, but there was other, more boring types of writing.

Breaking it Down

I read 12 by male authors and 16 by female. There were 5 memoirs, 2 non-fiction books, and 3 classics. This year, I thought I’d focus on my favorite ten of 2012. They are ordered by time period; Great Expectations was read at the beginning of 2011, The Lonely Polygamist I finished a couple of days ago.

1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens



I begin with one of the great works of classic literature- Charles Dickens' tome, Great Expectations. I personally love the novel's gothic allure (Bleak House has a similar tone) as well as the romance and the rags-to-riches tale. Plus, I think Joe Gargery is one of my favorite all-time literary characters.

Great Expectations is published with Dickens' revised ending. Originally, the novel had a much less hopeful conclusion, but novelist Wilkie Collins encouraged Dickens to give his work a more conventional happy ending. Some criticized Dickens for changing his original conclusion. George Bernard Shaw said that Great Expectations "is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it."

I believe the ending is ambiguous enough not to be considered flagrantly sappy or happy, but what do I know? I was angry when Charlotte Bronte blinded poor bigamy-minded Mr. Rochester.

I love gothic novels.

This year, I also read Jane Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey. Generally, I adore Ms. Austen, but I also adore a good gothic romance, so her mockery of the genre didn't do it for me. When the lead protagonist's imaginations of macabre goings on in the abbey fell flat, so did my hopes for an interesting novel. Blah.

If you haven't read Great Expectations since high school, I highly suggest you try it again. You can download it for free off of Amazon.

2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen



There's a fabulous scene in the television show Parks and Recreation where Leslie, the optimistic and ambitious deputy director of the parks department, is handing over research documents and a copy of the novel Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, to her best friend, Ann. Ann is supposed to use the documents to study for an interview for a job Leslie desperately wants her to get.

Ann looks at Freedom and asks, "And why am I reading this?"

"Because I'm almost done with it and I wanna talk to you about Patty!"

I keep waiting for someone I know to finish Freedom so we can talk about Patty. Alas, no one has pulled through for me yet. Maybe now that it's out in paperback...

3. The Waiting Place by Eileen Button




Read this exquisite book of essays in 2012. And buy a copy for a friend. You can read a longer review of the book here. I stole the above picture from this blogger, who also wrote a lovely review. Oh yeah- did I mention I'm going to hang with Eileen at the Calvin Faith and Writing Conference this April? I'm a lucky duck.

4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel




This is a terrific book. It's fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore. And no, I didn't steal this quote from Margaret Atwood. Why do you ask?

I'd had this book on my shelf for a few years and, on a whim, picked it up and couldn't set it down. Life of Pi is a breathtaking allegorical tale that's part fairy-tale, part family saga, part fable. I've never read anything like it.

5. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl




The prose is flowery and pretentious. After the first chapter, you want to kick the protagonist in the head. Her father, too. They are irritating and smug and wow... I thought Ms. Pessl was the most ostentatious, snobby author I had possibly ever come across. I mean, the protagonist’s name is BLUE. I think there was some literary reason for this, but I forget what it was. We’re talking that kind of pretension.

But the story was good. It drew me in. It became clear that in spite of the protagonists’ supposed vast intelligence, even she could never imagine the twists and turns her story would take. This is such a weird, wonderful, fun story. If you enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is probably right up your alley.

“Hurry up and read it ‘cause I wanna talk about BLUE!!!”

6. Digging to America by Anne Tyler



Two families adopt two little girls from Korea. The girls arrive on the same day. The story begins pre 9/11, and families are gathered at the terminal to greet the newest members of their respective families. The first family is a large, gregarious, quintessential American family. The second, a small Iranian family that consists of a husband, wife, and the husband’s mother. The two families forge a tangled yet strong bond and the novel follows their wobbly but important relationship as their sweet adopted daughters grow up as friends.

Ms. Tyler’s novels almost always take place in Baltimore. They are always relationship-driven, and they are among the most perfectly written pieces of work I’ve ever read. This is a gorgeous book. Read it.

7. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach





The Art of Fielding is supposedly one of this year’s great novels. The husband actually read it first and then made me read it before it was due back to the library. Of my ten listed, this is the one I vacillated upon including. I can’t pinpoint exactly what bothered me about it. I suppose some of the storylines seemed a bit trite and everything concluded a little too neatly. In other words, Shaw would not have been all that impressed.

On the other hand, this is a spectacular debut that tells a compelling story and, if I may draw upon the words of Harbach’s enthused fans, is:

“Intensely readable!”

AND ALSO:

“Harbach (has a) knowledge of baseball that is encyclopedic but never ponderous…”

The NY Times states:

“Detractors went looking for entertainment, and found art instead.”

I agree with above said statements.

The book is about college life and friendship and a tangled romance and forbidden love and baseball and more baseball and Moby Dick. And that pretty much sums it up. Also, it’s intensely readable.

8. Rush Home Road by Lori Lansens



Lori Lansens is fast becoming one of my favorite contemporary female authors. A while back, I read The Girls, a novel about a pair of conjoined twins. Rush Home Road was completely different in tone, voice, and everything else that distinguishes a novel.

Sharla, who had been living in a trailer park with her mother, is left under the care of “Mum Addy,” an elderly black woman who tries her hardest to give the little girl a safe, normal life with birthdays, clean sheets on the bed and all of those things our own kids take for granted. However, Addy soon realizes she cannot keep up with a troubled child and begins to worry about what will become of Sharla when she is gone. As she grows to love Sharla, we are privy to Addy’s memories, mostly painful, many beautiful. Lansens ties her modern-day tale with Addy’s past perfectly.

This was the “I can’t put this book down” of the year. Vivid, haunting, sentimental but not sappy, and ultimately, satisfying. I couldn’t recommend a book more highly.

9. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides



Another big novel in 2011! Still on the bestseller’s list, I believe. Eugenides wrote the wildly well-received novel, Middlesex- the most intriguing story about a hermaphrodite you’ll ever read.

The Marriage Plot follows Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard as they try and make their way in the world after college.

Madeleine is beautiful and intelligent, though not as intelligent as Leonard, her brilliant, bi-polar boyfriend. Mitchell is in love with Maddy, and kind of has a chip on his shoulder about it. He runs off to Greece (where else?) and other parts of Europe to forget about her. Mitchell finds God, but can’t forget Maddy. (Of course he can’t.)

The title The Marriage Plot refers to Madeleine’s college thesis, which is an examination of 19th-century marriage through a postmodern lens.

Eugenides is a great writer, a compelling storyteller, and the concept of The Marriage Plot would invoke great discussion about what marriage means in an age of rampant divorce, pre-nups, and religious apathy.

So hurry up and read it! I wanna talk about Mitchell.

10. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall




Four wives, 28 kids, and the guy’s… lonely? And is on the verge of having an affair with his boss’s wife? And he has gum stuck in his pubic hair and he has no idea how it got there?

This is an interesting story.

Polygamy fascinates me. I’m not alone. When asked why polygamy fascinates so many, Udall answered:

Why the obsession? It has to do with sex, of course. Everything we are obsessed about has something to do with sex, and polygamy is no exception. But I think there may be more to it than that.

Fine, I am definitely interested in the sex aspect of polygamy. I said it. I’m not ashamed. As for the “more to it than that”:

I find polygamy intensely depressing. I watched some of the first season of Big Love and had to stop after the Bill Paxton character began having an affair with… his first wife. His legal wife. The wife who began to regret agreeing to live “the principle.” It was just so sad.

Udall doesn’t write to condemn Mormon fundamentalism, but rather to examine the concept of a family. The story is told from the vantage point of the tall, bumbling, rather incompetent patriarch ironically named “Golden,” his maligned 11-year old son, Rusty, and his beautiful, young, and lonely fourth wife, Trish. The novel embraces the universal joys and pains of any American family: grief, jealousy, the hardship of raising multiple children, and of course, how to deal with the rogue ostrich that lives next door.

So, how does a man juggle four wives? The answer: he doesn’t. Each wife in the novel eventually divulges that she hasn’t been touched in months and months. Although, cut Golden some slack. The poor guy has gum in his pubic hair.

In Conclusion:

I didn’t read one book I “hated” this year because I have discovered something incredible. If I begin a book, and I don’t like it, I don’t have to finish it. The world will not end. No one will find me and beat me. The characters will not jump out of the book and chastise me for my lack of commitment.

I can’t tell you what a relief this discovery is. It’s also remarkable it’s taken me 34 years to discover this.

I would love to hear your favorite books read in 2011. Recommendations are a beautiful thing.

Why Reading To Kill a Mockingbird Will Help When it Comes Time to Read Conceptual Physics

Part 1

This morning, I came downstairs to spy the husband sitting in our dilapidated rocking chair in front of the television wearing a headset in order to talk to strangers online.

I cannot express how disturbed I am by this development.

Yesterday, John bought a wireless router so we could access Netflix through his Xbox. Unfortunately, this means subscribing to Xbox Live. If you have Xbox Live, you can play arcade games with other people live over the internet- through the television. If he starts playing Warcraft, I am going run off and become a lounge singer on a cruise ship. He wasn’t even excited about all the Gregory Peck movies we could watch right in a row! Or the karaoke features! He just wants to play hockey with 12-year olds who swear at him if he fails to prevent the opposing forwards from screening his goalie.

In my next life, I am going to marry someone whose idea of gaming is playing Scrabble on a Friday night. Good grief.

In other horrible news, we moved the television from the basement up into the playroom, which means we have two TVs on the first floor. The Wii is in the playroom, and the Xbox is in the living room, which means when I came downstairs, everyone in the house was playing video games.

Video games, of course, are not inherently bad in themselves, and I guess have some “benefits,” like in that 80s movie where the boy’s impressive gaming skills get him recruited to battle in an intergalactic war.

Of course, as a mom, I am naturally concerned that TV, video games, and other forms of technology are turning my kids’ brains into the consistency of the gruel served to Oliver Twist in Dickens’ classic.

“What’s gruel?” asks Ben.

“Kind of like porridge.”

“What’s porridge?”

“What the three bears ate.”

“Oh, yeah! That stuff is good!”

(I assume he decided that based on contextual evidence.)

Part 2

While some argue that the reading and writing kids do online “counts,” I am suspicious. And here’s why: reading a friend’s poorly conceived e-mail or participating in online forums or threads on Facebook does not develop the critical reading skills kids need to succeed.

I’m a huge fan of fiction: it’s fun, it allows kids to learn to sit in one place and read for an extended period of time, improves analytical thinking, expands vocabulary, improves memory, and helps kids become better writers. However, other types of literature, including comic books, magazines, and non-fiction books achieve these same goals.

Online reading doesn’t generally improve critical thinking skills. Since most kids aren’t logging on to The Atlantic or online literary journals, they are susceptible to the strategies websites use to get readers on to their website. Strategies include writing short paragraphs that are written around “keywords,” lists, emboldened headings, low-level vocabulary, and water-downed pieces of information people can scan to get the gist of the message. And then, there are the built-in links that drive online users from one page to the next, where eventually they become lost in cyberspace. There is no discernable ending when reading online, and time is literally sucked up into a vacuum as we aimlessly wander through a virtual world of our own creation.

Yes, digital literacy is a valuable asset in today’s technology-driven world, but are kids really gleaning valuable, factual information while web-surfing on their own? Outside of the classroom, kids troll YouTube, Facebook, celebrity sites, and personal blogs. Sure, you can find an answer to a question a lot faster on the internet than by visiting the library, but how do kids know if that source is reliable? I love this quote from a NY Times article:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Extensive web-surfing fosters extremely short attention spans. The average time a person spends on a web page? 27 seconds. In a rush, we search for the answer to our question, then click on an advertisement that proclaims to have pictures of Ashton Kutcher’s latest tryst. (The pictures were questionable, by the way.)

If kids don’t grow up reading books, they miss out on developing critical thinking skills. When they get to college and a professor gives them a reading assignment, a lot of freshman can’t do it. They don’t know how. If they can’t sit still and read the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, how are they going to read two pages of Conceptual Physics? How are they going to be able to dissect and respond to case studies, poetry, historical documents, and political science articles?

In short, if the future of mankind places extreme value in virtual hockey playing, intergalactic starfighting, finding songs on YouTube in less than 10 seconds, and cyber-bullying, by all means, let’s allow our kids to spend unprecedented amounts of time gaming, web-surfing, and texting. However, if the future still calls for doctors, physicists, engineers, novelists, poets, teachers, and lawyers, we should temper gaming and surfing with reading. (Maybe not the lawyers.  Unless they are like Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.)

Part 3

The best way to foster a love of books in your kids is to:

1. Read to them.
2. Read in front of them.
3. Provide them with interesting reading materials.

(In the husband’s defense, his nose is in a book as often as or perhaps more often than he’s in front of the Xbox.)

I’ve been reading the boys A Christmas Carol, because of the holiday season and also because of a possibly premature and over-zealous desire to introduce them to Dickens. We stop a lot because they want to know what words mean.

“What does frigid mean?” asks Ben.

“Let’s see if you can figure it out. I’m so frigid! Brrrr!”

(A snicker comes from a corner of the room.)

“NO COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY!”

The boys are really enjoying the book, even though it’s a bit beyond a first and third-grade reading level.

“It’s like that movie, Monster House!” says Ben.

“I would never wear tights. Even if I lived back then,” says Caleb.

The other night, we unwittingly allowed Caleb to stay up past 11:00 on a school night. He was reading Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen.

I’ve never been so proud.



Fun articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/07/children-who-dont-read-grow-up-bad.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/aug/23/survey-children-reading-habits