I've Been Reading, a Month in Book

Sonar X9 and I have each agreed to read at least one book per week this year.  I am taking the assignment literally and reading a book each week.  He’s taking an averages approach, sometimes reading two or three books one week, then taking on a longer book over a couple of weeks.  So far our lists have not overlapped, though I bet that won’t last, especially since I’m reading some juvenile fiction.  I’ll talk more about his list of books in a future post. 

Here’s a list to get me caught up on recent reads.  If I can manage to stick a wedge in between Everything Else in life, I have high hopes of writing more comprehensive comments on upcoming books.  

December 2009

Ok, these don’t really count for the book a week deal, but I did read a few things over Christmas vacation. 

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and When Santa Fell to Earth by Cornelia Funke

I read both of these out loud to the kids.  A Christmas Carol was an experiment in returning to the original.  I wondered if the kids would find it difficult (a little, but we went slow and looked up words), or boring (again, a little here and there, but they were surprisingly attuned to the drama of Ebeneezer’s night with the ghosts).  This is a story that has been diluted and adapted so many different ways, I wanted to see where it all started and to share that with the kids.  I’m glad I did.  

We have read the Funke each December for the past three years.  It has become one of our Christmas traditions.  I find Niklas Goodfellow an irresistibly charming Santa.  The foul-mouthed elves (“steaming reindeer poo!”) always produce a few bouts of giggles from the kids.  The story is told from the perspective of ten-year-old Ben, a thoroughly relatable character for the boys.  He befriends Charlotte, a shy but determined new girl at the school, and her dog Mutt, and together they help Niklas fight the forces that have dismantled much of the magic of Christmas.  Rather than epic battle, the story feels more intimate.  The kids and Niklas are victorious, but that victory is private.  No one knows what they’ve done to save Christmas.  The book leaves you with a cozy feeling about what Christmas can mean for a kid who is growing up, and the hope that the magic can continue to grow.  

Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales, edited by Deborah Noyes

This was my night-table reading, snuck in gulps and nibbles in a house full of Christmas guests and excitable children.  This YA collection includes several notable writers working in traditional suspense and mild-horror stories.  There is nothing overtly gruesome in there.  Several stories leave you with the claustrophobic feeling common in classic gothic novels, such as The Monk.  Others have a mood of isolation and confusion more evocative of Sartre.  Though some might call it a book more appropriate to Halloween, the creep-factor was a good antidote to the saccharine side of Christmas.

Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson

Apparently I did not read a single thing intended for adults during December.  Suite Scarlett is another YA novel, this one featuring Scarlett, a fifteen-year-old New Yorker whose family lives in and runs a small, historic hotel.  The story is one summer in the life of Scarlett, featuring her first romance and her first job outside the family business (sort of).  The characters are rich, and I loved the snappy dialogue between Scarlett and her siblings, especially her brother Spencer.  You cannot beat a teen novel featuring a smart protagonist, filled with Shakespeare quotes, the hijinks of a mysterious smoking, yoga-doing, veangeful hotel guest, and a family that seems to be going every direction at once without quite seeing each other in the middle.  I liked Scarlett as a protagonist.  Her world seems to swirl confusingly around her, and there are moments where she seems to be pushed powerlessly hither and thither, but when it counts, she makes her own choices (and her own mistakes), is smart and loyal and exerts power she didn’t realize she had.  Highly recommended for the preteen and teen out there, or anyone else looking to cleanse their Twilight-palate.  

January 2010

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

When I set out to read a book a week, I thought it would be a good chance to read a few things that I had “missed” but felt like I should have read.  Bless Me, Ultima is one of those.  It is an important work in New Mexico (where yours truly spent her formative years), and it shows up on banned books lists all the time.  I wanted to know what the fuss was about.  This book was very compelling, difficult for me to put down.  The seven-year-old Tony witnesses several frightening deaths in the course of the book, events which parallel his own first awareness of his connection to and role within the world.  So many different cultures and ideas come together in the book and in the character of Tony.  His father is a llanero, from the roaming culture of the vast open spaces of New Mexico.  His mother is from Las Pasturas, a stable farming community, connected directly with their land.  They live on the edge of the llano, on the edge of town.  The home and the town often feel rural and primitive, but the father works building highways across New Mexico.  World War II is raging, with broken men (including Tony’s older brothers) returning home all the time.  The bombing of Japan causes fear that the people have taken the power of god into their hands.  The traditions of the Catholic church and of the curanderas, the wise herb-women that some would instead call brujas, or witches, all live in the same house.  Religion, culture, modernity all wage war in Tony’s young mind as he makes choices about who he will be and what he will do.  An incredibly rich story that I may read again.  

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite novels.  This was my third time through.  I remember the first time I read it, at around 13, I didn’t realize for several chapters that Scout was a girl.  I was thrilled at the discovery.  I can’t recall my college reactions to it.  They’re subsumed in all the other books I swallowed then.  This time I related most directly to Atticus.  Yeah, I know, I’m a parent now and that makes a kind of sense.  There were moments though where something in me resonated with the grown voice of Scout remembering the events, or perhaps it was the voice of Harper Lee, recounting what it means to be a Southern woman through the formative events of Scout’s life.  I lost count of how many times I cried, at the injustices portrayed, at the pain of awareness and discovery, at the beauty of the words.  Several moments stand out for me in the book.  Atticus explaining the courage it took for their mean old neighbor to break her morphine addiction.  Midnight under the jail when Scout helps the mob remember their humanity.  I keep coming back to the scene in the parlor and the kitchen, when the ladies of the town are there with Scout and her aunt and Calpurnia.  The moment when Atticus comes in to ask for Calpurnia’s help because Tom Robinson is dead.  The parlor ladies are oblivious to the tragedy, and one has just insulted Atticus, but Scout and her aunt lift up their chins, set their faces, and Scout hefts  a tray to serve the cookies, swallowing her pain and growing in a painful way because of it.  I’m not sure why this particular scene stands out with me but I reread it twice and wondered at the arch-truth displayed and understood by Scout about what it meant to be a “lady.”  

I did not intentionally read these books together, but was struck at how well they work together, both beginning with young protagonists just about to start school for the first time, and the discoveries they make about the way their worlds work.  They would work beautifully, I think, taught side-by-side.   

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

I checked this out of the library a few days after the Haiti earthquake.  Weirdly, I didn’t think about the quake when I picked it up, only realizing the connection later that day.  Last year I read Murakami’s memoir,  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  This was the first of his fiction that I’ve read.  It is a collection of short stories connected by references to the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1986.  Each story has an element of magic or magical realism in.  One story features a giant Frog that needs the help of a mild-mannered loan collection officer to do battle with Worm in order to prevent another earthquake from destroying Tokyo.  Others are more subtle.  My favorite, or at least the one that haunts my thoughts, is the story of the writer who finally makes a choice for love.  What haunts me is the dream of the little girl in the story.  The dream about the “Earthquake Man” who wants them all to come down into the darkness with him.  I’m making the story sound creepier than it is, but the significance of the dream is not addressed, except as a bad dream of a child who has watched too many horrible realities on television.  I feel like there must be more to the dream than that!  The story is an achingly beautiful examination of love deferred and later perhaps regained.  But I want to know more about the earthquake man!

Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is another one I read out loud to the kids.  This was tough.  It reminded me a little bit of reading Treasure Island to the kids a year or so ago.  We had to stop very frequently to talk about words, though not as often as I would have thought.  There were times that the kids were pretty astutely getting what was happening without knowing what every word meant.  I spent a little time summarizing bits for them here and there, but they were often able to tell me just exactly what was happening, even if they couldn’t articulate the tiny nuances of the story.  I pushed this one on them for a couple of reasons.  We have read a lot of fantasy the past couple of years and I was looking for something different.  I wanted to get them to try out a mystery.  I also wanted to revisit the book myself (I was amazed at what I could NOT remember) and see if they could handle something less contemporary.  They liked it on both counts.  Ok, Sonar X5 wasn’t crazy about it, but he is very contrary about much of what we read at bedtime, so I take it with a grain of salt.  This was a fun book.  My favorite bit was the incredibly funny arrogance with which Holmes carries himself in all things, and Watson’s gushing about how amazing Holmes is in every way.  I chuckled frequently.  

Comments

[Patrick]

Very nice - I am glad that il pointed me to your new blog.

I found I wasn't reading nearly as much as I needed to for my soul and am working at a book a month - not quite so ambitious as either of you, but good enough for now (and, quite likely, I will read more once I get back in the habit).

I am curious if you felt that Bless Me, Ultima was ban-worthy? Could you tell the elements that led to that?

[Eglentyne]

Hey Patrick! Yay for reading more! According to "The Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, Bless Me, Ultima was banned for being "profane and anti-Catholic." My source here is "Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009 (available on the American Library Association's Free Downloads Page).

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/free_downloads/index.cfm

I understand why someone might react to the book that way, but I think the story is more complicated than that. The main character, Tony, is a boy who is wrestling with a lot of different ideas about himself and the world around him.

I recall another reference (though I can't seem to find it right now) that the book was sexually explicit as well, but I honestly can't recall what that might be referencing in the book.

It turns out that To Kill a Mockingbird is even more frequently banned. That one presents some much more challenging controversies about the presentation of race and language in historical context to contemporary audiences.