The Sunday Salon – Awesome people doing awesome things

Hello everyone. How are you all? I’m afraid I don’t have all that much to tell you today when it comes to books. The end of the semester is keeping my busy, and thanks to required reading, reading for fun has been going slowly.

And in case any of you noticed that I haven’t been commenting on other blogs as much as usual, there’s another reason for that: I’ve been having persistent wrist pains from using the computer so much. I was told that I could try painkillers, but if I numbed the pain and strained my wrist further, I’d risk a serious lesion. And considering all the work I have to do before the end of June, I really can’t afford that. So the solution is to take it easy, and perhaps to try and use the mouse with my left hand whenever possible. If I'm not around as much in the next few weeks, that's the reason why.

Before I move on to awesome people doing awesome things, there’s something else I wanted to tell you: I recently decided to join The Book Depository’s affiliates program. That means that if you click over to their site from my blog and buy a book, I’ll get 5%. I don’t expect it to make me much, but I’m a poor student and every bit helps.

Also, I want to support the awesomeness that is The Book Depository. I don’t care if this sounds a little weird, but they’ve actually made a huge difference in my life. Free shipping! Almost all the books I want to read! And did I mention free shipping? I live in a place where books aren’t always widely available, and if they are, they tend to be very expensive. So being able to order anything I want for affordable prices has made a very big difference. No more pining for books I'll never be able to find! Getting three books for the price I used to pay for one!

Anyway, I know it’s no big deal, and that several bloggers have joined affiliate programs before, but I wanted to let you know anyway.

Moving on:
1) I’ve mentioned this before, but in case you missed it, the very awesome Renay has put together a YA book tournament called Nerds Heart YA. The idea is to give YA books that for some reason didn’t get the attention they deserve some love. The tournament is happening this summer, and Becky announced the short list a few days ago. I’ll be –eep!—judging the finals along with Chris. I can’t wait to see what we’ll be reading.

You can follow Nerds Heart YA on Twitter for links to past and current reviews of the books on the tournament, as well as of books that didn't make the short list, peanut gallery links, info about the judges, etc. And if you’re not a Twitter user, you can also follow via RSS.

2) Amanda at the Zen Leaf is hosting the GLBT challenge, which goes from July to December. We have six months to read six books in any genre that deal with GLBT themes or that were written by GLBT authors. Exposure! Visibility! Discovering awesome new-to-me authors! Oscar Wilde in the button! How can I say no?

3) Susan at Black-Eyed Susan runs a library at a nonprofit organization, Alternatives for Girls, which helps homeless or at-risk teen girls and young women. She’s currently running a book drive, so if you can afford to give a little, or just help by spreading the word, it’d be great. Please visit Susan for more details.

That’s everything for today. I hope you all have a great week!

Read More......

Affinity by Sarah Waters

Set in London in the 1870s, Affinity is the story of Margaret Prior and Selina Dawes. Margaret Prior becomes a Lady Visitor at Millbank Prison: she visits female prisoners so that her attention and her example may help reform them – or so the official rationale goes. Selina Dawes is a prisoner she takes a special interest in—she was once a young rising start in the Spiritualism movement, until she fell in disgrace and was imprisoned for fraud and assault. But even at Millbank, Selina continues to say that she is regularly visited by her spirit friends.

As the story advances, we learn more about Margaret and her past—about her father’s death, about the nature of the “illness” she is recovering from, about her involvement with the woman who is now married to her brother (this is obvious from the beginning, so worry not, I’m not spoiling anything). The story is mostly told from her point of view, but there are little excerpts from what we presume to be Selina’s diary, and which slowly reveal the truth behind her imprisonment. As time passes, the two of them grow closer and closer, and the book moves towards its heartbreaking conclusion.

Because I’m sure someone is going to ask, I might as well tell you: no, Affinity was not quite up there with Fingersmith for me. All the same, it cemented Sarah Waters’ newfound place among my favourite authors. The main reason why I wouldn’t praise it as highly as Fingersmith is because it wasn’t as satisfying plot-wise. But like I’ve said before, I’m actually more of a character-oriented reader. Yet Fingersmith had everything, including a perfect plot. Affinity has excellent characterization, lovely atmospheric writing, and a good (if not perfect) plot.

And you know, I wouldn’t have been expecting a perfect plot to begin with if it hadn’t been for Fingersmith. It seems silly to speak of it, even, but I think this says something about just how good Sarah Waters is. I could more or less see the ending of Affinity coming. Not the details, but its general shape. But that didn’t at all lessen its emotional impact on me, and in the end that’s what I really care about.

I didn't want Affinity to end, but at the same time I was glad to turn the last page. All because Margaret’s despair was beginning to suffocate me. This is true all throughout the book, but the ending in particular…poor Margaret. My heart broke for her. She had my full sympathy. And more than that, Sarah Waters really made me imagine what it would have been like to be her. That's what was so difficult to take.

I often feel this way when I read about Victorian women, but Affinity conveys their complete suffocation particularly well. It must have been maddening, to be completely constrained and controlled: not only by social circumstances, but also by the threat of madness. Margaret is a highly intelligent woman. She is almost thirty, and she is unmarried. When the story begins, her younger sister Priscilla is about to get married, and Margaret knows she will be left alone in the house with a mother with whom she does not get along. Before her father, a renaissance scholar, passed away, she used to help him with his research. After his death—well, I won’t tell you everything that happened, but let us just say that her family still considers her “unstable”.

Imagine that – the label “spinster”, having intellectual interests which you are not allowed to pursue on your own, knowing you will be declared mad if you express emotions deemed inappropriate. And on top of that, imagine being gay—something that would be considered a symptom of madness, or worse, in itself. Imagine having to choke down everything that you feel. Imagine the weight of it all. Affinity gets that weight across perfectly.

Margaret’s powerlessness and entrapment are of course a result of her gender. It seems that I’ve been reading more and more books that deal with this lately, or maybe I’ve just been paying more attention. Anyway, Affinity is no doubt an emotionally heavy read. But despite its serious side, it’s still gripping and suspenseful, and, well, fun to read. I think the fact that it’s a Gothic novel helps. The heaviness goes very well with the atmosphere. It’s not that it dilutes it, but it makes it easier to bear somehow. And speaking of atmosphere, just look at this passage:

There have come fogs, too-yellow fogs and brown fogs, and fogs so black they might be liquid soot-fogs that seem to rise from the pavements as if brewed in the sewers in diabolical engines. They stain our clothes, they fill our lungs and make us cough, they press against out windows-if you watch, in a certain light, you may see them seeping into evening darkness now, at three or four o’clock, and when Vigers lights the lamps the flames are chocked, and burn quite dim.

I just love her writing. There’s a lot more I could say – about Selina Dawnes, about Victorian spiritualism, about life at Millbanks Prison – but hopefully I’ve said enough to intrigue you. Sarah Waters continues to impress me. I have a feeling that before the end of the year I’ll have read all her books. And then I’ll cry because she hasn’t written any more yet.

More memorable passages:

She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me—it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I’ve seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.

She had made her voice into a fierce, slow whisper. It sent the drug, that had been heavy in me, pulsing about my veins. I felt the tug of her, then. I felt the lure of her, the grasp of her, I felt myself drawn across the choir-thick air to her whispering mouth. I clutched at her cell wall—but the wall was smooth, and slippery with limewash—I stood against it, but felt it slide from me. I began to think I must be stretching, bulging—I thought my face was bulging from its collar, my fingers swelling in their gloves…

I am waiting, for her—but, waiting, I think, is too poor a word for it. I am engaged with the substance of the minutes as they pass. I feel the surface of my flesh stir—it is like the surface of the sea that knows the moon is drawing near it.

Reviewed at:
Stella Matutina
5-Squared
Out of the Blue
Experiments in Reading
A Work in Progress
Age 30+ ... A Lifetime of Books

(Did I miss yours?)

Read More......

Human Diastrophism by Gilbert Hernandez

In this sequel to Heartbreak Soup, we return to Palomar and to the lives of its inhabitants. While the first Palomar book was a collection of interconnected stories, Human Diastrophism is actually a full-length graphic novel. The main story, however, is preceded and followed by shorter stories in the style of the first book.

In Human Diastrophism, a serial killer is on the loose in Palomar. But this being Palomar, the story isn’t really about the serial killer – it’s about how a series of events affect the character’s lives. Luba’s ex-lover Khamo, the father of her daughters Doralis and Casimira, returns to Palomar. Luba’s oldest daughter, Maricela, falls in love with another girl. Tonantzin’s fierce idealism, and the ways in which she chooses to express it, worries her sister and her friends. And this is only the beginning of what this book covers. Like Heartbreak Soup, it spans several years, so we see a middle-aged Luba, some characters leaving Palomar, an earthquake affection the town, and even a beloved character meeting a tragic end.

Human Diastrophism is darker than the first Palomar book, but it’s just as intelligent, tender, human, sad, humorous, and emotionally satisfying. The characterization is, if possible, even more detailed and complex. And again, it’s the characters that really make this story. You cannot help but care about all of them.

Another thing that makes Human Diastrophism so interesting is the fact that we get to see the impact the outside world is beginning to have in Palomar. The town still doesn’t have a phone, and Luba’s small theatre receives movies years after the rest of the world has seen them. But as protective as sheriff Chelo is of the town, the outside world cannot be kept at bay forever. By the end of the book, several characters have settled in North America, and regularly come and go to Palomar.

As much as I love all of Hernandez characters, Luba just might be my favourite. So I was very happy that in this book we learn more about her past. I was also very excited when Fantagraphics Books announced a book collecting all the stories about her life outside Palomar. I suspect I’ll be getting my hands on it before long.


If you like great characterization, stories about small towns, or Latin American literature, then the Palomar stories are for you.


Other Opinions:
Grovel

(If I missed yours, let me know.)

Read More......

The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar

Walk Disney was by no means the first to disguise or eliminate sex, violence, and family conflict from the surface of the tales. Long before Disney transformed Snow White’s stepmother into an evil queen, the Grimms had seen to it that Snow White’s treacherous biological mother was replaced by a stepmother. (…) Wilhelm Grimm rewrote the tales so extensively and went so far in the direction of eliminating off-color episodes that he can be credited with sanitizing folktales and therefore paving the way for the process that made them acceptable children’s literature in all cultures.

In this study of the Brothers Grimm’s Nursery and Household Tales, Maria Tatar discredits the myth that the Grimms were mere collectors of “authentic” folk tales that came straight from the mouths of peasant storytellers and captured the true “German spirit”. Of course, the reasons why the Brothers saw themselves as such have to do with the cultural climate in which their work was developed, but in any case, they were rewriters as much as they were collectors, and they left a visible mark on the tales.

A few examples: did you know that most “wicked stepmothers” were in fact biological mothers until the Brothers Grimm changed the stories? And that while they didn’t have much of a problem with violence, they erased most references to pregnancy and sexuality from the stories? Or that they added moral judgements, either explicitly or through strategically placed adjectives like “proud”, “arrogant”, “merciful” or “compassionate”? Or that “The Girl Without Hands” was originally a story about an incestuous father—the role played by the devil in the better known versions of the story was originally played by the heroine’s father?

I hope I’m not making The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales sound like a condemnation of the work the Brothers Grimm did. It’s not: what it is is a history. And understanding the tales’ history can better our understanding of them. Also, it’s a great deal of fun.

The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales is an in-depth study of fairy tales, but it’s one that’s meant to be accessible to the general reading public. It’s interesting, clear, and very fun to read. I’ve been reading fairy tales and books about them for a few years now, and sometimes I actually forget how our culture tends to perceive them. According to most definitions, fairy tales all have happy endings; they're about idealized situations, and even if they have dark elements, all wrongs are righted in the end; they teach simplistic moral lessons; they allow no shades of grey; and so on. This book will show you that this is not the case, but it will also show you where these perceptions comes from.

Also, I think I mentioned the other day that reading this book gave me a bit of a brain crush on Maria Tatar. Let me how you how it began:

Ernest Jones’s essay on psychoanalysis and folklore exemplifies the extent to which the efforts of critics can be misguided by excessive emphasis on sexual symbolism. Taking off a bride’s shoe, Jones asserts, has ‘the same defloration significant as to tear through the bridal wreath or to loosen [a] girdle.’ (…) One can scarcely help wonder how Jones would have interpreted the tale of Thousandfurs, who flees her father’s castle with a golden ring, a spinning wheel, and a bobbin, and then hides in the hollow of a tree, conceals her clothing in a nutshell, and prepares a tureen of soup with a ring at its bottom for the king who marries her in the end. The possibilities become too dizzying to contemplate.

She then adds: “That psychoanalytic critics rarely agree on the symbolic meaning of an object or figure in a tale is also not designed to inspire confidence in their methods,” and can you argue with that? As much as I object to how sexist and rigid psychoanalytic interpretations of fairy tales can be (and believe me, I object a lot), my main problems with them really are methodological at their core.

The book also addresses the fact that one of the many reasons why fairy tales are often dismissed is their predictability, the fact that they have a structure, recurrent plot elements, and typified characters. I couldn’t agree more with what Maria Tatar has to say about this (and which actually reminded me of what Tolkien says on his wonderful essay “On Fairy Stories”):

A stable plot still leaves much room for variation. Skillful raconteurs can take the same story line and give it unique twists and turns. The tone may vary from one tale to the next, and the hero may be presented in different lights.

My favourite chapter was probably “Taming the Beast”, in which Maria Tatar deals at length with a question I have mused over several times: what kind of collective madness could possess generation of retellers and critics to see “Bluebeard” as a cautionary tale about female misconduct? (Actually, the answer isn't all that difficult to guess.)

What Bettelheim and others do with few hesitations, reservations, or second thoughts, is to turn a tale depicting the most brutal kind of serial murders into a story about idle female curiosity and duplicity. These critics invite us to see the heroine’s quite legitimate curiosity as a perversion (or at least as a serious peccadillo), one that brings in its wake “serious regrets”. The genuinely murderous rage of Bluebeard and his folkloric cousins would presumably never have been aroused has it not been for the (symbolic) infidelity of his wives. As horrifying has those multiple crimes may be, they still do not success in deflating attention from the heroine’s single transgression.

…and my brain crush grows. Maria Tatar is wise, insightful, clear, and occasionally deliciously ironic. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a book no fairy tale lover should miss.

A few more interesting passages:

Since traditionally folktales were related at adult gatherings after the children had been put to bed for the night, peasant raconteurs cold take certain liberties with their diction and give free play to their penchant for sexual innuendo or off-color allusions. In eighteen-century French versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, the heroine unwittingly eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother, is called a slut by her grandmother’s cat, and performs a slow strip-tease for the wolf. An Italian version has the wolf kill the mother, make a latch cord of her tendons, a meat pie of her flesh, and wine from her blood. The heroine pulls the latch, eats the meat pie, and drinks the blood. Even this folktale, which in its later-day version appears to be the most explicitly didactic of all, evidently started out as a bawdy tale for adults hardly suitable for children. As much as some readers may be shocked by the cruelty and violence of the Grimms’ tales, they would find many of their versions tame in comparison with their corresponding peasant variations.

A comparison of Perrault’s “Donkey-Skin” (the French counterpart of “Thousandfurs”) with Perrault’s “Cinderella” offers a typical contrast. In “Donkey-Skin”, the king’s unrestrained passion for his daughter is explained as nothing more than a temporary aberration caused by excessive grief over the loss of his wife. The king becomes confused, imagines himself a young man, and labors under the delusion that his daughter is “the maiden he had once wooed to be his wife.” Perrault is clearly at pains to frame excuses for the advances the king makes to his daughter. In “Cinderella”, by contrast, he strains his verbal resources to summon up negative terms (“haughty”, “proud”, “mean”, and so on) to describe Cinderella’s stepmother. Even when they violate basic codes of morality and decency, fathers remain noble figures who rarely commit premeditated acts of evil. Stepmothers, however, are unreconstructed villains, malicious by nature and disposition.

If there is a secret message planted in fairy tales, it is inscribed in plain sight, right on the surface of each tale’s events. Reading fairy tales requires us to set aside our preconceptions about the “lessons” imparted by specific tales. More often than not, these explicit lessons come from the pens of experts in the art of bowdlerizing fairy tales. Perrault, as we have seen, found Bluebeard’s murders of less consequence than the curiosity of Bluebeard’s wife about a forbidden chamber. He was perfectly prepared to read “Bluebeard” as a cautionary tale about warning women against excessive curiosity. Those who trust the tale rather than its teller will quickly understand why Perrault and others were so anxious to single out curiosity as the principal subject of “Bluebeard”. By highlighting the centrality of curiosity, Perrault succeeded in obscuring the connection between forbidden chambers and crimes of passion.

(Have you posted about this book too? If so, let me know and I'll be happy to add your link here.)

Read More......

How to be Good by Nick Hornby

Katie Carr, doctor and mother of two, has been married to David for nearly two decades. David is a cynical, bitter, sarcastic man, who writes a column called The Angriest Man in Holloway– a title he does his best to live up to. Katie has recently become involved with another man, Stephan, but her affair is more a symptom than a cause of crisis in their marriage. One day, David decides to see a faith healer by the name of DJ GoodNews about his back pain, his main reason being that this will certainly annoy Katie. But after meeting him a few times, not only does his pain heal, but he becomes a new man. David becomes…good. Piously, righteously, save-the-homeless and end-world-hunger good. And Katie discovers that this new David is not necessarily easier to live with than the old one.

I was so relieved to love How to be Good. I can think of more than one person whose taste is normally similar to mine who strongly disliked it, and of quite a few who found it unmemorable at best. By now my brain crush on Nick Hornby is no secret, but I don’t want you to think that this predisposed me to love this book. If anything, my expectations were higher. But to my delight, they were more than met.

This being Nick Hornby, there are several laugh out loud funny moments. But don’t let that and the slightly absurd plot summary fool you: How to be Good deals with serious topics, and there are quite a few moving moments as well. The story is about relationships and anger and disappointment, about quiet everyday despair, about how people can fail to communicate, about how life can simply bring us down.

And it’s also about…how we choose to live our lives, basically. I think one of the reasons why I connected with this book so strongly is because the kind of sensibility behind it is quite close to my own. Some of the questions Katie struggles with after David’s transformation are questions I’ve asked myself. Katie has always thought of herself as a Good Person – it’s one of the reasons why she became a doctor, actually – but her husband’s sudden urge to convince their neighbours to adopt homeless kids forces her to confront herself: she cares about homelessness, but how far is she willing to go? How can this abstract concern be translated into everyday actions that are practical and doable, and that she can fit into her life? How willing is she to change her life for the sake of others? How guilty should she feel for the comfort she enjoys while others suffer? How much time and energy can she afford to devote to the world’s problems, and how much to her own and her family’s?

And then there’s the ending, which was just perfect. Katie has no big epiphany – you can tell all along that this isn’t that kind of book – but she does come to a realization (and this is not a spoiler, worry not):

And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children to find out precisely how Vanessa Bell’s life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Janet’s bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bugger than that. And when I’ve finished it I’ll start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can’t find me... And it’s not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children’s TV programmes and my husband’s pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. It’s no miracle, it won’t fix a broken marriage or the world’s problems, but the, ah, the emotional nourishment we get from books and music and art in general can make such a big difference in our lives. This is why I read. And I strongly believe that if we have access to other experiences through literature, we are far less likely to become dissatisfied with our lives.

Of course, it’s not at all surprising to come across this way of thinking in a Nick Hornby book. And it’s not surprising that I loved it. This reminds me that I have to get myself a copy of John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts?, which he recommended in one of his Stuff I’ve Been Reading columns.

More memorable bits:

We said nothing for a while. He was in a North London kitchen saying nothing, and I was in a car park in Leeds saying nothing, and I was suddenly sickeningly struck by how well I knew this silence, the shape and feel of it, all of its spiky little corners. (And of course, it’s not really silence at all. You can hear the expletive-ridden chatter of your own anger, the blood that pounds in your ears, and on this occasion, the sound of a Fiat Uno reversing into a parking space next to yours. )

I suddenly have a very deep yearning to go and see a Chinese film at the Screen of the Green – the more Chinese it is, in fact, the better I would like it. That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electric activity—the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don’t attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.

You see, what I really want, and what I’m getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David’s picture of me is complete now, and I’m pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn’t even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so it’s beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favourite book is Middlemarch, and I just want that feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

Other Opinions:
The Hidden Side of a Leaf
Out of the Blue
Naked Without Books

(Did I miss yours? Let me know.)

Read More......

The Sunday Salon - ...and Songish Books

After last week's Sunday Salon post, about songs inspired by or about books, I thought I'd continue to explore the intersection of my two favourite arts by putting together a list of books in which music plays a significant role. It always makes me smile to find a reference to a song or band I love in a book. The first two books in the list are ones I've read and highly recommend; the rest are all ones I'm coveting.

• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby - I couldn't leave it out, could I? Rob Fleming is obsessed with music and with making top five lists, and his story just might be the ultimate songish book.
  


• Too Much Too Late by Mark Spitz -The story of The Jane Ashers, a fictional band that becomes successful only after their members had more or less given up hope. This book is funny, bittersweet, and hard to put down. Also, it's full of references to musicians and bands such as Liz Phair, The Pixies, Pavement, Cat Power, etc. You can read my full thoughts here if you're curious.
  


• How Soon is Never by Mark Spitz -The story of Joe Green, who is obsessed with The Smiths and comes up with a plan to get them to reunite. How could this book be anything but awesome? Considering how much I love a) The Smiths and b) Mark Spitz' writing, it's a wonder I haven't read it yet. In fact, I think I just need to quit depriving myself so and order it today. (See, book coveting posts are dangerous even when you're the one writing them.)
  


• The Ground Beneath her Feet by Salman Rushdie - A rock & roll retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Need I say more?
  

• Miss Misery by Andy Greenwald - Full of references to bands like The Cure, Death Cab for Cutie, Rilo Kiley, Interpol, The Smiths, Ryan Adams, The Decemberists, and of course Eliott Smith, this is the story of Dave Gould, a writer in this twenties who's working on a book about online journals and ends up becoming obsessed with one. Must.not.order.more.books.
  
  
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan - No danger here, as this doesn't come out until April 2010. But if I could order it right now, I would. John Green has mentioned several times that Neutral Milk Hotel, one of my favourite bands, play a big role in this book. The thought alone almost makes my head explode, and that's only one of several reasons to be pining for it.
  


• The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns - The story of a young man who goes to London to become a music reviewer and ends up falling in love with Mina, a modern day torch singer. It has several references to British 80's music, which sounds very good to me.
  


• Rock Star Superstar by Blake Nelson - a YA novel about Pete, who plays bass in his high school rock band and one gets a recording contract and finds himself entering the music business.
  


• King Dork by Frank Portman - Tom Henderson, the narrator, is a fourteen-year old aspiring songwriter who finds his deceased father's copy of The Catcher in the Rye and becomes obsessed with it. Music and Salinger? What's not to love?
  

• Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block - A collection of short stories about girls, some of whom love music, write zines, and look up to female musicians like Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Joni Mitchell. Sounds just like my kind of book.
  


• I want to be Your Joey Ramnone by Stephanie Kuehnert - I discovering this one recently via Marineko. Named after a Sleater-Kinney song, it's about a group of teen girls who form a punk band.
  

There. What about you? Any songish books you've been coveting or that you recommend? Have you read any of the ones I listed? What did you think?

Read More......

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

Aislinn can see faeries. Like her grandmother and mother before her, she has been able to see them all her life. And these faeries and not nice, tiny, glittery creatures. No, these faeries are powerful and dangerous, and Aislinn knows that the last thing any mortal would want is to draw their attention. But when one of them speaks to her, Aislinn realizes that all the rules she so carefully followed are not enough to keep her safe. Now that Keenan has noticed her, it will take Aislinn all her willpower to keep her freedom, her life, and her best friend Seth.

Where to begin? Wicked Lovely has been getting a lot of attention, and I can see why. It’s fresh, it’s difficult to put down, it’s dark but not too dark, it’s full of very captivating characters. Wicked Lovely is set in a city and has a very modern feel, but at the same time Melissa Marr really kept the mood of old faerie folklore alive.

That mood was one of my favourite things about this book. Each chapter opens with a quote from a book on faerie lore, and it was exciting to see so many familiar names: Lady Gregory, Lady Wilde, Yeats, Robert Kirk and Andrew Lang, Evans-Wentz, and so on. Some of these I’ve read, others I’ve been meaning to read for ages.

As for the characters, as much as I liked Aislinn herself, I liked some of the secondary characters even better. Especially her grandmother, who raised her granddaughter not to see female sexuality as something shameful or grotesque. Oh, how I loved Aislinn’s grandmother. I wish there had been more scenes with her.

The scenes with Aislinn and Seth, for whom it's obvious from the start she has feelings, were very well written. The tension between them was nearly palpable, and Marr did a great job writing scenes that are both subtle and very erotically charged. The book is by no means explicit, but it portrays teen sexuality very realistically.

There’s a lot to this story – a lot of themes, and several secondary characters and subplots. What stood out the most for me was how the book deals with feeling entrapped, with being snared by other people’s decisions and wanting to do something about it; wanting to make your own decisions and choices and to take control. This is true of Aislinn, of Keenan, of Donia. My edition of the book has an interview with Melissa Marr at the end, and here’s how she answers the question “what is the message, if any, in Wicked Lovely?”

There are always choices. As long as we’re still breathing, we can keep making choices and keep striving for our objectives. The choices aren’t always ones we like, but I honestly believe that if we keep choosing, we can often get to where we need to be. If we stop choosing, we have no chance.

I like that a lot. Wicked Lovely has a satisfying ending, but there were some loose ends left to tie. As this is the first book in a series, that’s only to be expected. I hear that Ink Exchange focuses on different characters, but hopefully some of those lingering questions will be answered.

Reviewed at:
Medieval Bookworm
Bart’s Bookshelf
Gimme More Books
A High and Hidden Place
Melissa’s Bookshelf
Beth Fish Reads
Books & Other Thoughts
The Bibliophile and Movieholic’s Blog
The Book Zombie
Libri Touches
Stella Matutina
Mari Reads
A Striped Armchair
Once Upon a Bookshelf
Wands and Words
The Written World
Em’s Bookshelf
Literary Escapism
Books and Needlepoint
Ink and Paper
Life in the Thumb
Dreaming Out Loud
Stephanie's Confessions of a Book-a-holic
Fyrefly's Book Blog
The Zen Leaf

(I’m sure I missed a ton – if yours is one of them, let me know and I’ll be happy to add it.)

Read More......

Feeling Like a Kid by Jerry Griswold

In Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, Jerry Griswold argues that the reason why some children’s books are so successful is because they really capture that it feels like to be a child.

And what does it feel like to be a child? Griswold identifies five areas that are essential parts of children’s experiences, and devotes a chapter to each: snugness (children’s fondness for small, cosy places), scariness, smallness (not only how a child’s size influences his or her perception of the world, but also children’s attraction to miniature things), lightness (children’s frequent dreams of flying, levitating, etc) and aliveness (young children’s conviction that everything in the universe is alive and self-aware).

In each of the chapters, he illustrates his point with examples from children’s classics such as The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, or the works of Beatrix Potter, and also from more recent works like Harry Potter.

I think my favourite chapter was the one on scariness. This is how it begins:

Adults, in my experience, don’t like to have pointed out to them that childhood is a very scary time and the world of Children’s Literature a very scary place. Forgetting their own childhoods, many grown-ups prefer a sentimental notion of childhood, where happy youngsters inhabit a trouble-free country and the sun is always shining. In a similar way, adults often have a saccharine notion of Children’s Literature as sweet and cute, but to maintain that illusion they have to seize on happy and upbeat moments and race over events of the other kinds.

I think this is absolutely true. In my experience, adults are sometimes not the best judges of what children will find too scary, too upsetting, or disturbing. Each child has their own limits, of course, but a little scariness can be stimulating, both intellectually and emotionally.

A few pages ahead he mentions the poem “Children Selecting Books in a Library” by Randall Jarrell, which I read online and fell in love with. I especially love the ending:

What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, an trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to -- to -- somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own ...
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.

One of my favourite things about Feeling Like a Kid (and the reason why I picked it up to begin with, I have to say) is the fact that it’s full of illustrations from children’s books. What can I say, I just can’t resist eye candy. The lovely imagine on the cover is an illustration by Flora White for a 1914 edition of Peter Pan. I wasn’t familiar with this artist before, and I really love this image.

The one thing that kept me from really loving Feeling Like a Kid is the fact that it’s a short book, and is therefore not exactly very in-depth. Reading it I kept thinking, “yes, that’s a good observation” or, “yes, true enough”, but in the end I didn’t feel like I had been presented with any ideas I hadn’t thought of or come across before. To be fair, though, I’m someone who reads and thinks about children’s literature a lot, and who has read books on this topic before. If this were my first book on children’s literature, I’m sure I would have felt differently.

Still, I enjoyed it a lot, most of all because of the deep respect the author clearly has for children and the way they experience the world: he takes them seriously, and he’s not for a moment patronizing or dismissive.

I leave you with two more passages:

The small worlds of Children’s Literature, in other words, presents alternatives to consensual notions of dimension and, consequently, adult notions of importance. That is no small thing. Indeed, encountering a Miniland in children’s literature, we might repeat Jan Morris’s admiring comment about the country of Wales: “Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.”

“Too scary for children” was, in fact, the criticism made by some experts on child raising when Sendak’ Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963. Later, when the book won the prestigious Caldecott Medal, Sendak directly faced his critics in his acceptance speech. First of all, he challenged their sentimental notion of childhood as a trouble-free time: “What is too often overlooked is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can.” Then, mounting the argument for mastery and justifying his own book in terms of facing and conquering fears, Sendak observed: “It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming the Wild Things.”

Yes! Sendak is so right. I really hope the upcoming movie is scary.

Other Opinions:
Maggie Reads
Jenny's Books

(Did I miss yours?)

Read More......

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall by Bill Willingham, et al

Finally! A Fables book I can talk about with no fear of spoilers! And the reason why I can is because 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a prequel: it collects ten stories that take place long before the events in the series. This is how the stories are framed: In the early days of Fabletown, Snow White is sent as an envoy to see the Sultan of the Arabian fables. However, the Sultan isn’t pleased that the envoy is a woman, and he holds her hostage. Like Scheherazade in the original One Thousand and One Nights, Snow saves herself by telling the Sultan stories – stories that make him spare her life so that he may find out how they end.

The stories she tells feature most of the series’ most popular characters. There’s one about the early days of her marriage to Prince Charming, “The Fencing Lessons”, whose implications are chilling. Our Snow has gone through much worse things than we could have imagined in her youth, and they have nothing to do with the feckless Prince. It also suggests another possible reason for the end of their marriage. I think I’ve said this before, but I really like how Prince Charming developed throughout the series. He never ceases to be a jerk, but he turns out to be a much more interesting jerk than he seemed to at first.

Flycatcher’s story, “A Frog's Eye View”, is the saddest of them all. It’s about what happened to Flycatcher’s family when the Adversary’s army invaded, and it made me all teary-eyed. For those new to Fables, Fly is the Frog Prince of stories, and the whole turning into a frog thing plays a crucial role in what happens.

“Diaspora” is about how Snow White and Rose Red meet and save Frau Totenkinder when leaving for the mundy world, and also about the famous witches’ life story. Frau Totenkinder is the witch of Hansel & Gretel, and also of every other fairy tale featuring a nameless evil witch. The source of her power is unambiguously revealed at last, and it’s not very surprising – her name is Totenkinder, after all. She’s certainly an ambiguous and very interesting character, and I have a feeling she’ll have a big role to play in the series’ future direction.

These three stories were my favourites, but I really loved them all. Also, when it comes to the art, this is my favourite Fables book by far. The list of illustrators includes almost all my favourite comics artists: Charles Vess, John Bolton, Jill Thompson, James Jean, Tara McPherson, Mark Buckingham, and others. It really is a stunning book. From “The Fencing Lessons”, illustrated by John Bolton:


Art by Charles Vess:


From “Diaspora”, illustrated by Tara McPherson:
A collage with a bit of art from each story:


And now the question you might be asking yourself: is 1001 Nights of Snowfall accessible to those who are new to Fables? I would say that yes, it is. It’s a prequel, so it won’t spoil anything for you, and it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the Fables universe. On the other hand, you’ll probably get more out of it if you already know the characters, if you’re aware of their relationships, if you know the future consequences of each of the episodes shown in this book. But then again, reading this first will also make things more interesting for you when you get to the series proper. So I think both this and Legends in Exile would work as starting places.

Other Opinions:

Books of Mee
Fyrefly’s Book Blog
Everyday Reads
Tripping Towards Lucidity
Libri Touches

(Did I miss yours?)

Read More......

The Witches by Roald Dahl

How much do I tell you about the plot of The Witches? I would guess that most of you have read it already, but if, like me, you have managed to live a The Witches-less existence for so long, how much do you need to know? I will tell you this: there is an unnamed young boy, and he’s our narrator. There is – typical Dahl – a tragedy early in the book. There’s the boy's wonderful and loving cigar-smoking Norwegian grandmother. There are witches: bald, toeless witches who want to rid the world of children. There are thrills and chills and humour and transformations, and there’s what I thought was a very original ending. There—I won’t tell you more.

One of the many, many things I love about Roald Dahl is the fact that his stories are not tame. He’s not afraid to go there, wherever “there” might be. He’s wild, surprising, unlikely and slightly macabre, and that makes his books very satisfying on an emotional level. I feel this as an adult, and I’m willing to bet it's something children feel too.

Some authors—and this includes authors I love—always feel safe. You know that there are things that would never happen to their characters. That doesn’t mean their stories are bad, or even predictable, but from the very beginning you manage to more or less guess their shapes and their limits. The rest is a question of details—and of course, details do matter. This, however, is not the case with Dahl. You feel that anything, good or bad, is possible in his books. And nobody, horrid or nice, is safe from anything at all.

This is why I both was and wasn’t surprised with how things turned out in The Witches. He completely breaks the pattern, but that’s Roald Dahl for you. How do I say this without giving too much away? In most books in which a child goes through the experience this young boy goes through, the situation is reversed at the end of the story. Not so in The Witches, and I love it for that.

But enough about the ending. Here's a favourite bit of mine, this one from the beginning:

For all you know, a witch might be living next door to you right now.
(…)
She might even—and this will make you jump—she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don’t let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness.

I can only imagine how much fun it must be to be a teacher reading this aloud to a class. Or a librarian! I think that if I were a librarian reading this, I’d take the liberty of replacing the word “school-teacher” with "librarian", just for extra fun. I wonder if it would work to replace it with “mom”?

Now for the down side: another thing that is not uncommon when reading books by Roald Dahl is to come across uncomfortable bits. There’s the way the Oompa Loompas were originally described in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there are the traces of colonialism in Going Solo, and in The Witches, there are lines such as “There was something indecent about a bald woman,” just to give you an example. This is by no means uncommon in older children’s books in general, I know, but the reason why I react to it more strongly in Roald Dahl is because he’s one of my favourite authors. Does this happen do you too? Are you more demanding with books by authors you consider your favourites?

Anyway, none of this is to say that children’s shouldn’t read Roald Dahl, or any other such silly thing. By all means they should read him, and enjoy him and laugh and be scared. But it’s also important to be aware of these things, to ask questions, to probe the story. Jane Yolen has a wonderful essay that deals with this in Touch Magic. I also found what the webmistress of the site RoaldDahlFans.com had to say interesting.

To end on a positive note, because I really do love Roald Dahl to bits: The Witches is a wonderful book. I somehow missed out on it as a child, but I really think I had just as much fun with it now as I would have had fifteen years ago. This is not something I can say of every children's book. Also, reading it made me want to borrow Alice’s idea and have myself a Roald Dahl marathon.

Other Opinions:
Hello, My Name is Alice
Nothing of Importance
Touchingly Naive Books
Maw Books Blog
The Movieholic and Bibliophile’s Blog
Books & Other Thoughts
SMS Book Reviews
Reading Comes From Writing

(Did I miss yours? Let me know.)

Read More......

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me – I could go as far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity – and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people, ‘science’ is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.

In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre does two things: first, he explains how the scientific method works, and he does so in a simple, accessible and enjoyable way. And secondly, he denounced how the concept of ‘science’ keeps being distorted: by the press, by drug companies, by individuals trying to make money or push their own agendas. Goldacre is a British doctor, so the examples he uses are mostly UK-based and about health, but the ideas in this book are applicable to all sorts of fields of scientific knowledge and cultural contexts.

One of the most important ideas presented in this book is that science is a method, not a power game nor a system of belief. It has, of course, been appropriated by those who mean to use it to reinforce their power, but when that happens, we are entering the field of bad science. As any other method, science has rules, and those rules are not established arbitrarily with the intention of excluding anyone. They exist because they work, and there are very concrete reasons why they work.

Testability, clinical trials, randomization, control groups, representative samples, statistical significance, peer revisions, meta-analysis, you name it: Ben Goldacre explains it all in a way that anyone can understand. Actually, that too is part of his point: the scientific method is accessible. Anyone can understand it, and anyone can perform simple experiments. Likewise, anyone can spot a dubious experiment. The idea that science is out of the reach of mere mortals is one of the ways in which it keeps being distorted.

Also very important, he explains why: why all of this stuff matters, why we need it, why it’s used, and why studies with methodological flaws cannot be trusted. It’s not a matter of nitpicking – or rather, it is, but this kind of nitpicking is healthy and desirable, and it’s thanks to it that we know as much as we do today.

Reading Bad Science reminded me of my research methodology classes, which were taught by one of the best teachers I’ve ever read. In addition to how science works, he taught us think critically. And that too is the aim of this book. I have to admit that in my case, Ben Goldacre was preaching to the choir a little bit, because I’m a sceptic and I’m prone to being suspicious of pretty much everything. But no matter how you feel about science and health and alternative therapies, read this book. You will not be bullied into changing your mind. You’ll be given very concrete information that will hopefully allow you to make more informed decisions.

But I don’t want to give you the impression that Bad Science puts traditional medicine up against alternative therapies and explains why one is superior to the other. That’s not the case at all. Ben Goldacre writes about big drug companies, about nutritionists, about homoeopaths, about conventional doctors, about doctors-who-are-not-quite-doctors, you name it: about anyone who uses dodgy methods or makes questionable claims, really.

Another important point is that even though Goldacre can be sarcastic (hilariously, deliciously so), Bad Science is not an unkind book. It will not make anyone feel stupid or unwelcome or inadequate. It doesn’t mock or belittle people for believing the things they believe. There is, in fact, a chapter entitled “why clever people believe stupid things”, which explains the several cognitive process that can lead to wrong conclusions we are all prone to.

And why does any of this matter, you ask? Because in many cases it’s a matter of life and death. The chapter “The Doctor Will Sue You Now” (new in the paperback edition because Goldacre was stopped from publishing it before) is about how millions of people are dying of AIDS in Africa and being advised to treat it with vitamins rather than conventional medication. It’s so horrifying it literally made me cry. And a well-known example: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s well-meaning but untested advice that babies should sleep on their bellies led to thousands of cot deaths. This is why knowledge is important. This is why we need to follow the method.

Ben Goldacre also denounces (and how I love him for it!) what he calls the “medicalisation of everyday life”, and the increasing tendency to present pills as solutions for complex social problems. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that this is a topic I care about passionately.

Another favourite chapter of mine was the one about how the press contributes to misinforming people about science. This is now it usually goes:

The scientific content of stories – the actual experimental evidence – is brushed over and replaced with didactic statements from authority figures on either side of the debate, which contributes to a pervasive sense that scientific advice is somehow arbitrary, and predicated upon a social role – the ‘expert’ – rather than on transparent and readily understandable empirical evidence.

This whole idea that scientific knowledge is a form of bogus authority that simply feeds on itself is unfortunately very common. And like I was saying before, that does happen. But when it does, we aren’t really dealing with science, but rather with its misuse.

Ben Goldacre is my new hero. Everyone should read this book. Not so that you can be persuaded to take one position or the other, but because there is information here that everyone should have. Also, it’s fun! Really, it is. Ben Goldacre is extremely funny and an excellent writer. I found this book impossible to put down - so much so that I completely neglected the also very gripping Wicked Lovely until I was done with it.

More awesome bits:

Because they cannot find new treatments for the diseases we already have, the pill companies instead invent new diseases for the treatments they already have. Recent favourites include Social Anxiety Disorder (a new use for SSRI drugs), Female Sexual Dysfunction (a new use for Viagra in women), night eating syndrome (SSRIs again), and so on: problems, in a real sense, but perhaps not necessarily the stuff of pills, and perhaps not best conceived of in reductionist biomedical terms. In fact, reframing intelligence, loss of libido, shyness and tiredness as medical pill problems could be considered crass, exploitative, and frankly disempowering.

In the aggregate, these ‘breakthrough’ stories sell the idea that science—and indeed the whole empirical world view – is only about tenuous, new, hotly contested data and spectacular breakthroughs. This reinforces one of the key humanities graduates’ parodies of science: as well as being irrelevant boffinry, science is temporary, changeable, constantly revising itself, like a transient fad. Scientific findings, the argument goes, are therefore dismissible.

How do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? Often they use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. ‘Scientists today said…Scientists revealed… Scientists warned.’ If they want balance, you’ll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach which can be seen at its most dangerous in the myth that scientist were ‘divided’ over the safety of the MMR). One scientist will ‘reveal’ something, and then another will ‘challenge’ it. A bit like Jedi knights.

Bad Science Blog
Ben Goldacre on Twitter
Asylum Review

(Have you posted about this book? Let me know and I’ll be glad to add your link here.)

---

I'm so sorry! I should have announced this last week, but I completely forgot. The winner of the copy of The Fox Woman I was giving away is Paperback Reader. Congratulations! E-mail me your address and I'll send the book your way as soon as possible.

Read More......

The Sunday Salon - Bookish Songs

Even though I don't talk about it often on this blog, I really love music. I love it about as much as I do books, really. I love the fact that music forces me to feel. Books do too, but they tend to be more far removed. They give us room to pretend the emotions are not really our own, and that can be part of their appeal. But music is rawer, more unforgiving. It doesn't let you hide.

Anyway, I thought I'd combine my two passions today and share with you a couple of bookish songs that I love: these are songs named after, inspired by, or about short stories or novels. You can click the links to listen to them:

• The Booklovers by The Divine Comedy: Trust the title - this is a song that will make any book lover smile.
  
  
• First Love by Emmy the Great: based on the Samuel Beckett novella of the same title, which I haven't read yet. Have you? My previous experiences with Beckett weren't very successful, but this song makes me want to give this novella a try.
  
  

• Charlotte Sometimes by The Cure: Based on the Penelope Farmer children's novel of the same name, and the reason why I read it.
  
  
• Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel - From one of my favourite albums, In an Aeroplane Over the Sea, all of which was inspired by Anne Frank's diary.
  
  
• Ghost World by Aimee Mann - named after Daniel Clowes' wonderful book.
  
  
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Sufjan Stevens - You guessed it: Flannery O'Connor.
  
  
• Wrapped Up In Books By Belle and Sebastian - Not based in any particular book, but bookish enough to be included. Plus, I think you'll enjoy the video:
  
  
  
• Playground Love by Air - this song is part of the soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides, so yes, it's about the movie and not the book. But because this is a perfect adaptation, the song really captures the feel of the book:
  
  

What about you? Do you like music? Do you have any bookish songs you'd like to recommend? What are some of your favourite musicians or bands?

Have a great Sunday, everyone.

Read More......

Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I have a lot of my mind and not a lot to do so it’s going to come out, all of it, and then, then, it may begin to make a sort of sense.

Raleigh is eighteen, confused, and convinced that a cat stole her soul. At the beginning of this story opens, she’s in a car with three of her classmates, travelling back to Toronto from California. Bit by bit, we discover what motivated her trip in the first place, and why she feels so lost and disconnected from everyone else. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot. Lost at Sea is a short book, so to say much more would half ruin the fun.

Lost at Sea is such a lovely book. It’s tender, sad in a quiet sort of way, and occasionally very funny. This is Bryan Lee O'Malley’s first book: he’s better known for his Scott Pilgrim series, which I haven’t read yet (but after this, I really want to). What I liked the most about Lost at Sea was how honest and intimate it felt. It brought me back to my days as an awkward eighteen-year-old. (And just how different that feels from being an awkward twenty-something is perhaps a subject for another time.) There’s a bit in particular I really want to share with you. Unfortunately I couldn’t find these two panels online, and since my attempts to take a picture of the page were disastrous, the text alone will have to do:

I get thoughts like: I look in the mirror and I don’t belong here. I see myself and I look all wrong. Stephanie looks bold and bouncy and fresh and normal, and I look like something else. Too long, too stringy, too pasty, too squarish. Kind of inhuman.

What is that makes me not fit in, and is it in the world, or in my head? Why do I look like a mutant in photographs, anyway?

Ah, I remember that feeling very well. And of course, Raleigh's discomfort is not just physical. It also has to do with feeling isolated, with trying to figure out who she is, with being afraid to open up, to trust others, to connect, to speak at all. I could relate to that very well, but when she does speak, when she tells Stephanie why she was in California and what has been happening in her life, I felt closer to her than ever. Her pain and vulnerability made more sense than ever. It made me want to go back to the first page and read the book all over again, and that doesn’t happen very often.


The blurb on the back cover of Lost at Sea says, “If you’ve ever been eighteen, or confused, or both, maybe you should read this book.” Perfectly put. Bryan Lee O’Malley really captured what being on the verge of adulthood feels like.





Other Opinions:
A Book a Week (Thank you so much for recommending this book, Kiirstin!)
Small Victories
Read About Comics
The Book Zombie
Books & Other Thoughts

(Let me know if I missed yours.)

Read More......

Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Naomi and Ely have been best friends and neighbours for as long as they remember themselves. Naomi is straight and Ely is gay, and so to avoid hurting their friendship they have come up with a No Kiss List: a sort of written promise not to kiss any of the boys they’re both attracted to. But one day, Ely confesses he kissed Bruce, Naomi’s boyfriend. And that leads to a major fight: not necessarily because of Bruce himself, but because it turns out that knowing Ely is gay didn’t stop Naomi from developing some complex feelings about him. As far as she's concerned, there's something behind their constant “we should get married here” jokes.

This story is told from multiple perspectives: Naomi’s, Ely’s, Bruce’s, the other Bruce’s, Gabriel the doorman’s, etc. I tend to prefer fewer narrators, but in this case, it really worked. This is a short book, but there are actually quite a few characters and subplots, which all have a common theme: relationships, and how complicated even the simplest of them can be.

I loved this book so much. It’s smart and bittersweet and wise, and it doesn’t try to oversimplify things. When I say it’s about how relationships can be complicated, how friendship can be as tricky as love, I don’t mean it in a negative way. By “complicated” I mean that they need a similar kind of commitment, honesty and openness to work.

The point about friendship not being all that different from love is made several times throughout the book, and this is something that really speaks to me. However, people tend to misunderstand me when I say this. I don’t mean you could replace your significant other with your best friend tomorrow and not notice much of a difference. But what I believe is that the reason why not is not because your significant other has some essential irreplaceable quality that makes them perfect for you, but because of the joint memories and meanings and connection that you build over time, the degree of closeness you achieve. That’s the bottom line, really: both in friendship and in love, closeness is something you build, something you have to keep perfecting and working at.

More strong points: the romance between Ely and Bruce is incredibly sweet. It’s not – you guessed it – easy, but it’s wonderful to see them learning to communicate and getting closer. Just look at this:

We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.
Yes, I know Bruce will never look good on the dance floor. I know he’s got issues. I know he’s a mutant.
But I like that.
I just have to convince him. The same way he needs to convince me he doesn’t think I’m reckless and heartless.
This is what we need to do.
We know it won’t all happen now. And it can’t ever happen perfectly.
But we can get close.

Just so you know, the “mutant” thing is a reference to a conservation they have earlier. But anyway: aww. There is also the fact that Bruce had never actually been with a boy before Ely, and there’s a painful conversation he has with his mother, and…I won’t tell you everything. But it’s beautiful, even if it's not simple.

I just loved the characters so much. I think I remember hearing people say they didn’t like Naomi, and I can see how she’s not your traditional likeable character. But you know what, she’s beautiful and she breaks hearts and she knows it, but she’s also smart, and she knows there’s much more to her than her looks. And though she can be manipulative, she’s sensitive enough to realize it when she’s doing to others what was done to her, and to stop before she hurts anyone further. So yes: I liked her.

And plus, it was very easy for me to sympathize with her hopes and expectations regarding Ely. And with her pain, which is very real and not something that can be dismissed with a comment like “you silly girl, don’t you know he’s gay?” I can’t imagine being Naomi and not ending up as hurt and confused as she was. Not while their relationship crossed some boundaries but not others. Not while they were still trying to figure out just how close and how distant they needed to be.

I also loved Gabriel the doorman, who has a crush on Naomi and makes her a mixed tape with songs by Belle & Sebastian, Jens Lekman, Elliot Smith, Fiona Apple, Nina Simone, etc. This is a detail, but I can’t remember the last time I read a book in which a doorman was portrayed as a real person and not just a prop. But this is the kind of book in which every person is a person, and I loved that.

Favourite bits:

I thought when I found the right person, it would be easy. He would be mine and I would be his and that would be that. And with Naomi. I would be hers and she would be mine and that would be that. The perfect friendship. The ideal. What kind of tension could a straight girl and a gay boy have? None. Easy.
No. No no no no. It is not easy. Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.

I thought Naomi and I had perfectly matched up our vocabularies and our definitions. But that’s just not possible. There are always meanings that are different, words that are heard differently than they’re said. There’s no such thing as a soulmate…and who would want there to be? I don’t want half of a shared soul. I want my own damn soul.
I think I’m going to learn to appreciate the world close. Because that’s what Naomi and I are. Not identical. Not soulmates. But close. Because that’s as far as you should ever get with another person: very, very close.

I could have stayed over with Bruce, but this is where I wanted to end my night. This is what I wanted to come back to. This is as much a part of my story as anything else. Friendship is love as much as any romance. And like any love, it’s difficult and treacherous and confusing. But in the moment when your knees touch, there’s nothing else you could ever want.

Other Opinions:
YA Fabulous
Bookshelves of Doom
I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell do I Read?
Sassymonkey Reads
Bart’s Bookshelf
Teen Book Review
The Book Muncher
Frenetic Reader
What Vanessa Reads
Laina Has Too Much Spare Time
Peace, Love, Vote Books
yaReads
Harmony Book Reviews
Books & Other Thoughts
The Zen Leaf

(Let me know if I missed yours.)

Read More......

Ironweed by William Kennedy

A few weeks ago, I was invited by the Peabody Institute Library blog, Read This!, to write a guest review for them. I was thrilled - they have a great blog, and previous guest reviewers include Carl, Iliana and Danielle, all bloggers I love and look up to.

The book I chose was Ironweed by William Kennedy. I picked it up because it's a Pulitzer winner, because I enjoyed Legs by the same author, and because Nick Hornby wrote good things about it in one of his columns (and I'm quickly starting to trust Nick Hornby's recommendations as much as I do Neil Gaiman's). I wasn't disappointed at all. To read my review, click the link below:

Ironweed by William Kennedy

One last thing: if you could comment on the review over at their blog, it would make me very happy. Thank you so much!

Read More......

The Savage by David Almond and Dave McKean

The Savage is the story of Blue Baker, a young boy whose father unexpectedly dies of a heart attack. Mrs Molloy, the school counsellor, is constantly telling Blue to write down his thought and feelings, so that he may better deal with his grief. But Blue finds that this doesn’t help. What does help is writing the story he’s started to write – the story of The Savage, a wild boy living in the woods who has adventures and shows bullies like Hopper that they can't go around abusing people. As Blue continues to write The Savage's adventures, he begins to realize that the line between fiction and reality is starting to blur.

It’s official: I love David Almond. He writes such lovely books. Judging by this, Skellig, and the first chapter of Click, he seems to write about how children deal with grief and loss quite a lot. And he has a way of suggesting deep feelings with only so many words, of writing incredibly tender scenes that never cross the line to sentimental. Take this, for example:

Mam brought Jess into my room. We sat there on my bed and the moon shone in. We cuddled her and tried to soothe her, but she was sobbing hard.
“Daddy,” she gulped. “Want Daddy.”
“Oh, love,” said Mam. “Oh, my little love.”
Then Mam forced her face into a smile and said, “Hey, you’ll never guess what. Our Blue’s writing a story for us, Jess. Aren’t you, Blue? Go on. Show her the funny pictures.”
So I showed Jess the pictures of the savage and I made a funny savage grunt and Jess giggled through her tears. Then Mam told Jess about the smelly pigs, so I read that bit again and I trotted round the room like I was on a pig’s back and I waved my hand like I had an axe in it. And it worked. She giggled and her tears dried. We all sat close together again and Jess slowly went to sleep.

Of course, it works better in context. But I just love how delicate he is, how much he suggests.

Let me tell you about The Savage’s structure:I’m not sure if I’d call this a comic, a long picture book, or an illustrated novella. The sections about Blue’s life are told in text only, and the bits about the savage are richly illustrated by Dave McKean. Sadly, I only found one page online. I wish I could share more, but I'm sure that if you like McKean’s work in general you'll definitely like the art in this book.



Towards the end of The Savage, the story crosses the line between realistic fiction and fantasy. I think I liked Almond’s use of magical and mysterious elements in this book even better than in Skellig.

The Savage is about loss and mourning and anger and healing, and also about stories: why we tell them, how they impact our lives, why they matter.

Other Opinions:
Puss Reboots
YA Books and More
Highland LC Blog
Library Buzz
News From Nowhere
Kitsuchi
Bitten by Books
Jenny's Books
Bart's Bookshelf
Fluttering Butterflies

(Let me know if I missed yours.)

---

Thanks to Amy, I found out that May 11-17 is Children's Books Week. Amy is challenging everyone to read a children's book to celebrate, or to revisit an old favourite, which I think is an excellent idea. Visit the links for more details.

Read More......

The Sunday Salon - Book Coveting

Hello everyone. Today the Sunday Salon will meet Debi's mini-challenge for the Dewey's Books Challenge. Let me explain: Like me, Debi was a big fan of Dewey's Sunday Book Coveting posts, so she's inviting everyone to write book coveting posts of their own during the month of May as a tribute to Dewey.

Lately I've been really excited about non-fiction. This is not something I remember ever happening before. But I'm currently reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and it's one of my top reads of the year so far - I love it so much I've been neglecting my (also awesome) current fiction book. And I also started Feeling Like a Kid by Jerry Griswold, which was a random library find. It's a slim and gorgeous little book about how some of the most successful children's books capture the feeling of being a child. Furthermore, I found myself entertaining thoughts of having a non-fiction month so I could get to all these non-fiction books I've been dying to read. It's not likely to happen, because I do need stories. But a non-fiction and comics month? Now there's a thought.

Anyway, because of my newfound enthusiasm, I thought I'd tell you about some non-fiction books I've been coveting:

• The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings is, as you can tell by the title, about the history of the English language. Specifically, it's about the history of its vocabulary: how foreign words entered the language, what this means in cultural terms, etc. I'm a proud linguistics geek, so it's no wonder I'm dying to read this. But from what I hear, the book is very accessible even if you'd had no contact with the topic before.
  
  
• Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar is about children's literature: why children love stories, the cognitive benefits of reading, the role of horror in children's books, etc. It uses examples from Narnia, His Dark Materials and Harry Potter, which makes me even more excited to read it. I've just finished Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales (which I can't wait to tell you about), and I think I have a little bit of a brain crush on her. Also, Neil Gaiman praised this book, and his recommendations have led me to countless wonderful books before.
  

• I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination by Francis Spufford. By the author of The Child that Books Built, this is a book about the hold that journeys to the icy end of the world have had on the English imagination. He analyses the writings of Mary Shelly, Byron and Coleridge, among others, as well as journals of actual polar explorers, to get to the bottom of what's behind this obsession.


• The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA by Mark Schultz, Zander Cannon, and Kevin Cannon. The title says it all: it's a comic about genetics and DNA. Science in graphic format! How can I resist? The Stuff of Life has received a lot of praise. I hear that the science is made accessible but not at all dumbed down. Sounds like my kind of book.
  
  
• Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank. An analysis of the history of the concept of virginity, its cultural meaning, the ways it which it has been used. I can't remember how I first heard of this book, but I know that shortly after I added it to my wishlist, Jenny reviewed it and made me want to read it even more. On a similar note, Heather recently reviewed The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti, which sounds just as fascinating.
  
  
• This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff. This is a memoir about Wolff's childhood in the 1950s and his travels throughout the United States with his mother. I'm not always drawn to memoirs, but Nick Hornby included it in his Writer's Table, so how can I resist? Besides, any author who sings with John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats (and one of my favourite songs too!) is an author I most definitely should be reading.
  
  
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. I've been meaning to read something by Joan Didion for quite some time, and this collection of essays about what was happening in California in 1968 sounds like something I'd really enjoy.
  
  
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. For some reason, it was only recently that I first of this classic. Published in 1962, Silent Spring was largely responsible for creating public awareness of the consequences of the destruction of wildlife, and it inspired many of the environmental movements we know today.

There. And since we're on non-fiction, now seems like a good time to join Trish's Non-Fiction Five challenge. The goal is to read to read five non-fiction books between May and September. I'm not going to make a list, but this post should give you an idea of what I'd like to read. But we'll see where my reading mood takes me.

What about you? Which books, fiction or non-fiction, have you been coveting lately? Have you read any of the ones I listed? What did you think?

Read More......