ABAW April Edition

I’ve started master lists of what we’ve read this year to the navigation menu at the top of my center column.  (Warning: shameless marketing coming).  Each book there is linked to Amazon.  You know, if you’re interested in buying any of them.  No pressure.  

We read some books in April people.  Yes, how we read some books! These are random jottings from the notebook.  My apologies if they lack coherence or depth or any resemblance to a book review. 

Books I read to myself.  Without a child audience.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

I love Nick Hornby’s novels for two reasons.  1.  He juggles characters brilliantly, giving even the small players depth and interest in a few words.  Who is the main character of this book?  Is it Tucker, the reclusive, formerly-famous songwriter who is finally trying to be a good father?  Is it English Annie, the museum director who realizes after fifteen years that she has settled for something less than she had hoped?  I think perhaps it is the album, Tucker’s Juliet, the object that connects so many of the characters to each other, creates the circumstances for their coming together and apart.  Brilliant characters abound: Tucker’s crazy neighbor, dubbed Fucker by many who know him, the aging clubbers who wield their own minor celebrity, the various children, wives, and girlfriends of Tucker, and not least, Annie’s own pathetically obsessed Duncan.  We all know a Duncan.  Someone who knows more than is healthy about something that most of us deem trivial, someone who invests a bit too much of himself in someone else’s life or work.  I suspect we can all find someone we know in a Nick Hornby novel.  2.  Hornby writes private dialogue between two people that is incredibly believable.  There is an honesty to these conversations that is sometimes painful, but also hilarious.  Hornby relates the meandering, often absurdly illogical trajectory of emotionally charged moments so well that I often feel like I’ve had conversations eerily like those.  

Music, like other Hornby novels, plays a big part in this story.  By the end, you might just feel like you’ve heard Tucker’s music before.  I can’t say that I’m totally satisfied with the ending of this one, and Dan (who read this right after I did) concurs on that one.  But like those lifelike dialogues, life doesn’t always have a neat conclusion.  Things just keep moving on, day after day.   

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

This is a collection of essays about Chabon’s own writing, about his varied reading interests and influences, with bits and pieces of memoir thrown in for good measure.  I found some line or idea in nearly every piece that struck a cord in my readerly or writerly heart.  In an essay appealing for better new comics for kids, Chabon suggests a few simple ideas to make stuff kids will want to read: “twist endings, the unexpected usefulness of unlikely knowledge, nobility and bravery where it’s least expected, and the sudden emergence of a thread of goodness in a wicked nature.”  On ghost stories, in particular the work of M. R. James, Chabon defines ghost stories as about a “state of perception … in which the impossible vies with the undeniable evidence of the senses.”  There’s also a very funny metaphor in there about James’ pre-post-modern tendencies.  On fiction and lies: “It is along the knife-narrow borderland between those two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth, more than along any other frontier on the map of existence, that Trickster makes his wandering way, and either comes to grief or finds his supper, his treasure, his fate.”  Chabon touches on the psychology of writing (putting your work out there and accepting how it’s received and treated and behaves, writer’s block, inspiratioin) without ever feeling like he’s giving instruction about writing, and yet I felt I was learning.  He talks about Jewish cultural identity, the nature of truth, fatherhood.  These many destinations are found in essays about widely varied topics, yet every piece works together with the others, and I felt certain from the beginning that Chabon was navigating a logical path from one place to the next, with a clear destination in mind.  He makes an overarching argument about the value of the short story and genre lit in particular, but also about creating new stories, or at least new variations, at the edges and intersections of what has come before.  I found myself repeatedly wanting to go reread something he discussed (Sherlock Holmes or The Turn of the Screw for example).  Except with McCarthy’s The Road.  I can’t go back to that one, but I did come to understand one reason I found the story so difficult (and perhaps why Dan refuses to read it), that the story, as Chabon argues, is a horror story, playing on base fears.  A slasher flick might play on the essential fear of violation for a young person.  The Road exploits the guilt and fear a parent has that he might not survive long enough to protect his child from a world fraught with peril.  Anyone who enjoys reading or aspires to writing will find something worthwhile in this very smart book.  Don’t let it intimidate you.  Let it inspire you.  

Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod

This was a very quick read, built around the business-card drawings of MacLeod, and based on a successful blog.  I didn’t feel like I found anything new in the encouragement (the title was my favorite piece of advice), but some of MacLeod’s drawings are very funny.  

I am an Emotional Creature: the Secret Life of Girls Around the World by Eve Ensler

You might recognize Eve Ensler as the author of The Vagina Monologues.  Ensler’s latest book is a collection of monologues, dialogues, poems, short stories, and statistics that speak about the interior life of girls and the physical and emotional challenges that girls face every day.  Some of the pieces are very emotional, very difficult to read.  Though the short format of the book makes it quick-reading, I could only read it in bits and chunks.  I needed a break to process the emotions they inspired.  Girls struggling with eating disorders, with sexual slavery and abuse, with female genital mutilation, with finding their voices, their place in the world, and with assertions of their own identities.  But not all is hopeless and horrible in this collection.  The pieces gradually build, finally inspiring and hoping and encouraging.  My very favorite poem in the book is “Refuser,” an almost anthemic piece about the ways in which women do stand up every day.  And here are two favorite lines from different pieces.  From “My Short Skirt”: “But mainly my short skirt / and everything under it / is mine, mine, mine.” From “I Am An Emotional Creature”: “And I love, hear me, / love love love / being a girl.” The V-Girls website has a beautiful introductory film made up of pieces of this book, and links to programs around the world designed to help make this a better world for girls to grow.   

Books I sort of skimmed because the idea of them made me twitchy.

I did some spring cleaning on our finances this month and browsed through a few books to see what tweaks I might be missing.  Turns out we’re running about as lean as we can around here and moving in positive direction.  Five cents a month, but positive nonetheless.  

The Busy Family’s Guide to Money by Sandra Block

The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

Start Late Finish Rich by David Bach

The Smart Cookie’s Guide to… Blah blah blah money.  You get the idea.  

Books I read out loud to the kids. 

Mossflower by Brian Jacques

If you’ve been following this reading project for any length of time, you’ll know that we’ve been reading Mossflower for months.  This month we finally finished it.  Hallelujah.  

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman

This was my second time through this lovely little book.  Odd joins Gaiman’s other great protagonist Bod (from The Graveyard Book) as a great, not perfect, clever, funny boy character who doesn’t need to act stupid to solve his problems.  (say that five times fast) The injection of Norse mythology into the Sonar’s imaginative repertoire is refreshing and hilarious.  This book also inspired a most fabulous ongoing conversation with the Sonars about Absent Parent Syndrome in books.  How do authors solve the problem of getting kids the independence they need to have adventures, solve problems, assert themselves, and explore the world?  Well, as the Sonars have very astutely pointed out, the authors often kill the parents, even though the incidence of orphanhood is not quite as common as these books might lead us to believe.  This is not a criticism of any particular murdering author, mind you.  Some of our very favorite kid-lit involves orphans (Harry Potter is alive in this house).  Odd himself is (with a perfectly acceptable justification) missing a father in this book.  But the Sonars have also very astutely asserted, that sometimes orphanhood is a cop-out, and they pay very close attention to every story they read now, to figure out what trick the author uses.  Back to Odd.  This short book will appeal to readers at many levels, and works very well as a book read out loud (especially if you are willing to give different voices to the bear, the fox, the eagle, and the frost giant, among others).  

Sonar X9 is Kicking My Butt (but it’s not a contest, Mom. Um, yeah, I know, honey). 

Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger by Kevin Bolger

Yes, every booger and fart gag you can think of is tucked into this book.  X9 and X7 have both read this one and they snorted, snorked, and belly-laughed all the way through it. 

The Cabinet of Wonders: the Kronos Chronicles Book I by Marie Rutkoski

This one was slurped up so rapidly, you’d have thought X9 had fallen down a rabbit hole in search of Oz.  No, that metaphor doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but I use it only to convey how carried away he was with the fantasy world of this story.  

Mossflower by Brian Jacques

Jacques and his Redwall books are lovely, but I swear, I lived with this book for so long that I don’t want to talk about it anymore.  Unless you want to talk about the moles.  Then I’d be a roight noisebag of wondermus blathering.  

Seekers: The Quest Begins by Erin Hunter

He has dabbled in Ms. Hunter’s world here and there, and yet doesn’t seem to want to read every book like some of his classmates.  Not sure why.  

Final Crisis (D.C. Comics) by Grant Morrison et al

Each of the Sonars spent some time with this graphic novel.  I browsed it a bit, shut my eyes to the more horrifying illustrations (including Batman, sans face flesh), and found it a bit disjointed and confusing.  Perhaps I’d have liked it better if I’d started at the beginning.  

The Dangerous Days of Daniel X by James Patterson

Hunting for Max, we found this instead.  Another one that he read in two days.  

Dragon Games by P.W. Catanese

He can’t wait to read another of these.  

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman

The D.C. Comics Encyclopedia

All three Sonars have spent hours poring over the pages of this massive and beautiful book.  Right on the heels of Loki, they filled their brains with a gargantuan quantity of superhero lore.  All of their made-up superheroes now have some element in the name (e.g. Cobalt). 

The Celestial Globe: The Kronos Chronicles Book II by Marie Rutkoski

Just like Cabinet, this one fell quickly to X9’s eyeballs.  This was his pass-the-time-after-I-finish-my-TAKS-test-and-wait-for-everyone-else book, and he finished it in two afternoons.  He loved it and will happily tell you all about it if you ask.  

What We’re Reading Now

Drizzle by Kathleen van Cleve

A lovely book about a magical rhubarb farm, we’re reading this one out loud.  

Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman

One book often leads to another, and this one is no exception.  Waldman and Chabon are married to one another.  While I was looking up Chabon’s bibliography, I found Waldman.  And I’m really glad I did.  I enjoy her essays as much as I enjoyed his.

Blah blah blah estate planning books.  

No, we’re not planning to die anytime soon.  Just following up the financial facelift by making sure we have other documents in order as well.  This one does keep falling to the bottom of the to do list though.  It’s too hard to look at these decisions directly sometimes.  

Sonar X7 continues to read Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles and the second of the Edge Chronicles, a few pages here and there.  He is determined to finish the Whangdoodle book this week though, and I think he will. 

Sonar X5 is tripping merrily through another Junie B. Jones and just started The Dragons of Trellian by Michael Knudsen.  The Trellian is more dense than almost anything he’s read, and I’m not sure how far he’ll get.  I will not discourage him though.  Check that, I think this is the longest book he’s read by himself.  The longest one before this was The Tale of Despereaux, which also holds the distinction of being the only chapter book he’s read twice.  

Sonar X9 is not currently reading anything.  He is experiencing a bit of post-TAKS-testing book-ennui.  I don’t blame him.