ABAW August Edition

I had a bit of a reading slump in August.  It was too hot to hold a book.  Or something.  I’m not convinced that that the slump iss over. Very few things are holding my attention.

Books I read out-loud to the kids: 

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

This was our second time reading these books out-loud.  We’ve read through the whole series once together.  I think it’s the fourth time I read Sorcerer’s Stone and the third time for Chamber of Secrets.  I’m not sure what prompted the Sonars to choose these this summer. Perhaps a bit of nostalgia after we caught one of the movies randomly.  The kids have all changed so much in the two years since we read them last time.  These lovely stories hold up to rereading beautifully. I took great delight in watching as the Sonars noticed things they’d missed the first time, as well as details that become important later in the series. So much fun.   

Books I read silently to myself:

Walks with Men by Ann Beattie

This small novel surprised me.  I sometimes found it hard to breathe as I read it, I was pulled in so close alongside the narrator.  I had to stop frequently and stare out the window, wondering, like the narrator, just exactly what was happening.  That’s not to say that the prose isn’t incredibly crisp, just that life is often deliriously confusing.  Jane is a young and talented writer who begins an affair with an older married man in the early eighties.  The story follows the course of that relationship.  Neil is, of course, a total jerk. Beattie contrasts Neil with Jane’s former lover and her father.  I’m not sure whether I liked this story or not.  I can’t figure out quite how Jane is changed, her emotional reaction is often very distant and we see what she does, not what she thinks.  I loved the words though.  Beattie’s words wrapped me up, blocking out the things around me.    

My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’m misleading you by including this book in the list.  I didn’t read the whole thing.  I’m having an on-again, off-again romance with this book.  It’s been going on for months.  I’ll bring it home from the library, delight in a few stories, then return it.  Later, I’ll see the book, peeking coyly down at me from the shelf, and I’ll bring it home to flirt with a few more stories.  The title refers to Lesbia’s sparrow in the poems of Catullus.  This book is filled with love stories that hit all along the life-cycle of love, by many different authors. You can check the contents somewhere. I won’t bore you with a list.  I was enchanted and heartbroken by the Chekhov this time.  My favorite bit: “Closing his eyes, he saw her as if alive, and she seemed younger, more beautiful, more tender than she was; and he also seemed better to himself than he had been then, in Yalta.”  Like any very good collection of short stories, there are lessons to be learned by writers.  If you read no other part of this book though, read the Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides.  He will instruct you in the ways of understanding the love story.  I quoted him a few weeks ago, here. 

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

“For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a Reserved sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I’d never see her again.”  Except that he (Hajime) does see her (Shimamoto) again.  They are essentially strangers.  Strangers with a connection in the distant past, when they were both just twelve years old.  When they meet again they try to build a connection out of those fossils.  But friendship cannot contain the intensity of his desire for her.  She isn’t even a whole person.  She is a beautiful and fragile image.  She says she destroys everything she touches.  His deterioration is internal.  His exterior life remains largely unchanged.  His business seems fine.  He has money saved up.  He loves his family.  Someone called this book Murakami’s “existential romance,” and I have to agree.  I’m never quite sure whether Shimamoto is really there in Hajime’s life, or if he has created her in his mind, some secret sharer to manifest his internal turmoil about his guilt and dissatisfaction.  Expect moments right at the edges of the fabric of reality, with incidents left unexplained or unexplainable.  Like Sputnik Sweetheart, someone disappears, someone is broken.  Each character echoes the next as Hajime tries to return to the person he was before he hurt others.  All of the women become some version of the first woman he hurt—Izumi.  All of the men become some version of himself.  The two most compelling ideas in this story are the Hysteria Siberiana, mentioned by Shimamoto, and the differences between only children and their peers with siblings.  Lovely story.  Haunting.  Probably because I read it so recently, I was struck by similarities between this novel and Ethan Frome.  SotBWotS is Ethan Frome without the oppressive misery or the suicide attempt, though there is one moment when Shimamoto considers a suicidal path. 

What I’m reading now:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

What I plan to read next:

Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman

ABAW: July Edition

Yes, yes. I read a few things in July.  Yes, I know I’m running behind.  I’ve quit trying to figure out what the kids have read. Though in passing, I know The Ranger’s Apprentice was very popular. Captain Underpants and the rest of Dav Pilkey’s crew have experienced a resurgent popularity around here (Curse you Dav Pilkey!)*

Books I read in July (Yes, more than one per week. Summer vacation is awesome.)

This month I will use many incomplete sentences. Deal with it. Also, this is less review and more general reaction. 

Summer Knight (Dresden Files Book 4 ) by Jim Butcher

I loved the changelings in here, and the explorations of the politics of faerie. 

Heat Wave by Richard Castle

I started reading this one last summer.  Check here to read my comments about the preview.  They hold up well for my reaction to the whole book.  A fun diversion.  And if you like this Castle meta-story, check out @WriteRCastle on Twitter for an unfolding mystery.  

Blockade Billy, and “Morality” by Stephen King

This is a baseball novella plus a straight-up morality tale. King’s reputation heightened my expectation for the bizarre or the horrible in both of these stories.  No one builds anticipation like King.  Sometimes he builds so well that the climax is disappointing (Helloooo It).  I wouldn’t call the end of Blockade Billy disapointing, but the build up to it is better.  My favorite part of the story is the baseball talk.  I felt like I was standing in the dugout next to the narrator in many scenes.  I haven’t read any of King’s short stories in many years, but “Morality”took me back in time to Skeleton Crew and the like.  No monsters except the human ones.  No evil except that wrought by wrong choices.  Good stuff. 

The Giver by Lois Lowry

When I finished the book: an empty feeling. No, a sense that my feelings were drifting. Sadness.  The mild confusion that I wasn’t sure what happened. Why had no other Giver chosen this path?  I had never read this book before, in spite of its presence on so many You-Must-Read-This-Now lists.  I’ve been trying to convince the kids to read it.  Now that I’ve read it, I think only Sonar X10 would enjoy it.  Maybe.  It is the story of a seemingly utopian future, told from the perspective of a boy who slowly becomes aware of the problems and the ugliness all around him.  There is one shocking and horrifying scene in the book.  I felt like I should have expected the harsh moment, but it surprised me in its starkness and the absolute calm with which it happens.  Which only makes it more horrible.  Trying not to spoil only makes my comments obtuse.  Let me just say that the story might be difficult to follow for younger children and some parents might not like the idea of kids reading about killing babies. Oops. So many possible lines of discussion in the book. I can see why it’s a popular classroom choice. 

Death Masks (Dresden Files Book 5) by Jim Butcher

This one included the Shroud of Turin and explored and expanded some ideas about the magic of faith.  Can an atheist be a Knight of the Cross?  Apparently so. Rock on.  The patterns of the Dresden books are well set, a little predictable, but that predictability can be cozy sometimes.  This one felt less humorous than the others, or more like the humorous moments were forced.  I did love the use of the Cabbage Patch Doll and the wind-up duck.  But why did Dresden have those things?  Especially the duck in his pocket?

Sold by Patricia McCormick 

2007 National Book Award Finalist. This is the story of a young Nepalese girl named Lakshmi who is sold into sex slavery in India.  McCormick tells the story from Lakshmi’s perspective in a series of short vignettes.  Many of Lakshmi’s experiences are brutal, but McCormick’s prose feels gentle, helping provide a barrier for the reader against the torment Lakshmi experiences.  I find it profoundly sad and frustrating that many girls and women around the world are having similar experiences every single day.  The story ends with hope, with Lakshmi’s triumph over the violence and despair.  Would that all girls like her could find the same hopeful ending. 

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

When I read this book in high school, I threw it across the room on the last page.  I suspect that the teenage me wanted the characters to escape and thwart expectation.  The thirtysomething me was still disappointed in the weight of the ending. This time I was suffocated by the poverty and oppressive convention enveloping the Fromes.  By Ethan’s downward spiral of pain and repetition.  

Grave Secrets (Harper Connelly Book 4) by Charlaine Harris

I haven’t read anything about Harris’s intentions with this series, but it feels like this was the conclusion.  Or maybe it doesn’t start out that way, but the hasty summary of the last few pages make it so.  Harper figures out what happened to her sister.  Commitments are made.  She doesn’t say “happily ever after,”more like “the road goes ever on, in a happy way.” My favorite character is Manfred, and I felt like he was sort of thrown under the bus.  I can always hope that Harris will give him his own novel.  

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

“Do you know the difference between a symbol and a sign?” This is a story of the semiotics of longing and loss.   Each characters stands in for another as an object of desire.  Some characters are split—by magic? by intention?  I loved this book.  It is among my favorite two or three books I’ve read this year.  Murakami’s prose is so crisp, his plots so elegant that I don’t always realize how I’m being wrapped up by the complexity of the ideas.   

The Four Arguments by Don Miguel Ruiz

Be impeccable with your word.  

Don’t take anything personally.  

Don’t make assumptions.  

Always do your best in each moment.  

This is a book of guidance about transforming life using ancient Toltec wisdom.  I love the idea of the (hard) simplicity of the four agreements.  I was less interested in the spiritual guidance and explanations of them, but it is a straightforward little book that many might find comforting. 

Throw Out Fifty Things by Gail Blanke

Another book from the self-help section.  I was cleaning house, so it caught my attention.  Blanke is a motivational speaker and her approach to decluttering lives is interesting.  The first part of the book is a room-by-room guide to getting rid of the physical clutter in our lives.  The second is about getting rid of mental and emotional clutter that might be stifling us.  This second half is much more important for Blanke.  The physical clutter is really a symptom of the mental clutter.  Getting rid of the junk piled around us can make the entry into personal improvement a little easier.  I only kept a list through 27.  I threw out a lot more stuff than that, but didn’t write them down.  Blanke didn’t get me to do anything I hadn’t already planned, but reading her book as I worked made me feel like I had a cheerleader on my side.  

*I don’t really mean that, of course. I love you Pilkey.  Have you read your Underpants today?

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.  

Run! Write! Make!

Growing up, I was not an athletic kid.  I was a tiny, scrawny, little white girl.  I could not hit a ball, I could not run very far, I never lasted very long in dodgeball.  I played no sports.  My closest brush with athleticism was in high school marching band, where I learned to march backwards while holding crash cymbals steady for a snare drummer to play.  (Don’t laugh.  Those cymbals are heavy and we did it in the New Mexico heat.  In hideous cream and brown polyester uniforms and plastic egg-shell hats.)

I will be 36 later this year and the desire to keep my body fit and healthy presses on me.  Simultaneously, the effort to keep my body fit and healthy seems to rise exponentially.  I’m not interested in joining any sports, and my options are limited there anyway.  I’m not interested in anything that requires an investment of equipment or a membership pressure.  I have found, however, that I really love to run.  I feel good when I run.  Unfortunately, the first thing to go when my schedule gets busy is my daily run.  So I tend to run in fits and starts.  Running regularly for a few weeks or months, and then not at all for months.  Sometimes I’m derailed by the general mayhem of family life.  Once I was knocked off track by the flu.  

A few weeks ago at the library, I found a copy of Haruki Murakami’s memoir-ish book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  I’d not read any of his work before, but was led to him in my quest to read through some magical realism this summer.  I haven’t read any more magical realism since I suffered through Love in the Time of Cholera (I’ll save my ennui with that one for another post perhaps), but Murakami’s personal tale of writing and running gave me a swift kick in the butt on two counts.  

For Murakami, running and writing work together.  He does not write when he runs or even particularly think about ideas.  But it seems that running gives him an absence of thought and an ability to focus that increases his ability to focus on writing.  By training to run (and he is a serious runner of marathons and triathalons) he is a more focused writer when he is writing.

In spite of the particularly harsh and dry summer we are experiencing here in the Coastal Bend of Texas, I have been running five or six days a week for the past two weeks.  Since I haven’t run for months, I’m back to doing interval work to build up my stamina.  I’m up to half-running, half-walking a little more than two miles a day and it feels great.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever build up to a marathon, but if I could continuously run a few miles a day, without being sidetracked for months at a time, I’d feel very proud. 

Running is hard and it is hot and I get sweaty and dirty and funky.  But I’ve been injury-free so far, and working my body just feels so good.  I am more physically tired, but it is a satisfying tired.  Now that I’ve settled into a running rhythm, and my body is getting stronger and I am less worried about injuring myself, my mind is free to wander as I run.  Mostly it wanders into empty spaces.  Thoughts do come to me as I go, worries sometimes plague me.  But in running, I find that I can embrace meditative thought more effectively than I’ve ever been able to in other ways.  The thoughts and worries don’t linger.  They float by me like clouds, and I am able to consider them dispassionately, letting them pass without clinging to them.  At other times my mind wanders to the beat, counting the steps, predicting my tempo, comparing the beat of my heart to the thump of my shoes.  

And I’m learning (or rather reminded), slowly, that I need balance in my life.  Everything feels better when I’m running.  Everything feels better when I’m writing.  Everything feels better when I’m crafting.  But all three of those things have to work together somehow.  When one of those things drops out of my life for a while, the other two tend to disappear as well.  

Besides blogging a little bit more often again, I can’t say that I’m actually writing again.  But I’m getting closer.  I’m working the balance.  The writing notebook is on the desk again.  A few ideas have been scribbled in it, and the more I run, the more the ideas come to me.  The more ideas for writing I get, the more crafty ideas I get and the more enthusiastic I get about running each morning.  

I’m chasing my activities around in a circle.  I just have to keep them all moving in a positive direction, moving with balance in mind.