All posts in: books

22 Mar 2013

fiction madness

I am not reading any fiction right now. I am reading a really long and interesting nonfiction book about food and products that are not really food but we eat them anyway. I am re-reading The Happiness Project because I have mental issues and this book calms me down. I just started a new audiobook, but but but I’m not reading any paper fiction and it feels weird.

I have also put myself back in hold jail, so I must work with what I have. Here are my top contenders:

Caring is Creepy – snagged from the Alex Awards list. Am I in the mood for something dark and creepy and messed up?

No? Maybe a fun, award-winning animal book? The One and Only Ivan is sitting here, waiting for me, and did you guys know that each page is mostly white space? I am fond of a good book with a lot of white space on the page.

Or I could dig into my ever-growing pile of Advanced Readers. Can Lauren Graham write a book that is worth reading? I have the answer to this question in my purse – Someday, Someday Maybe – if only I could decide on what to read.

And last but not least, a new-ish YA that has captured my attention – The Tragedy Paper. The public asked that I buy it for the library, so I did. My Dearest Former Roommate read it and didn’t like it. So I should read it and form my own opinion?

I have all of these books at the ready, ready to read. Which one will it be? Well, here’s a helpful tournament bracket that will help me decide:

Just kidding. There is no way I am making a bracket of anything. I am just going to hem and haw uselessly for a few more days and then pick whatever book is closest to me in whatever part of my apartment I happen to be in.

books

16 Mar 2013

the best thing on the kidlitinternet right now

School Library Journal’s annual Battle of the Books is fun… but Roger Sutton’s Battle of the Battle of the Books Judges is genius.

As the BoB judges – all authors of YA or children’s books – make judgements between two books, Roger makes judgements about their judgement. Although I like the idea of Book Battles (or any brackets that are not basketball related, actually), I always find myself skimming through the judge’s (always lengthy) reports to get to the good stuff – the results.

After reading Roger’s commentary for a few weeks, I think I know why – these BoB judges aren’t making arguments, they don’t let the books talk to each other, they don’t actively judge. Extended book summary, followed by “Oh gosh, how does anyone possibly decide between such amazing books?” and then a quick decision at the end that seems at best, personal, at worst, random. Roger’s meta-tourney calls everyone out on such bullshit.

I am probably not done with this topic. Relentless book praise is boring and makes the children’s lit world seem like one big cheering squad and not a legitimate literary atmosphere. At the same time, needless, arbitrary book hate is also damaging – there is nothing more obnoxious than a One-Star Goodreads review whose rationale seems to be “Ugh, that character should have just done Blah, Blah, Blah I couldn’t stand it!” There are a million ways to be a bad representative of a book – I have my own bad habits, I’m sure – but that doesn’t mean we can’t all strive to do right for the books we love.

book reviews

13 Mar 2013

Ask the Passengers by A.S. King

Astrid Jones is a lot of things. She is a senior in high school. She is a New Yorker whose parents moved her to Small Town Hell. She is the daughter less favored by a perfectionist mother. She is no longer interested in learning trigonometry, but philosophy lights up something inside of her. She is the best friend to the Homecoming King and Queen, and the only one who knows they are both gay. She is a secret keeper, a sender of love into the universe, and oh, she might be gay.

Maybe. But why lean into a label if she’s not sure? Why not spare herself the consequences of coming out, when labels are bullshit anyway?

I read a lot of very positive reviews for A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers, but sometimes I feel like reviews hone in on one or two choice aspects of a book and hang the rest of the reading experience on those. This was a Coming Out Story, the reviews said. This is a story with King’s trademark Magical Realism.

I devoured this book in two day’s time, and I found it to be so much more than Coming Out and Magical Realism. The story does center on Astrid as she comes to terms with her other-ness in a very insular small town community – getting up the guts to live as herself in the world instead of keeping her identity precious and hidden. But the way King writes Astrid, it seems like sexuality is secondary to Astrid-as-a-Whole; it’s not just her weekly make-out sessions with the hot field hockey player she’s keeping to herself, it’s secrets about her friends and her family, about what she thinks about her mother and sister, her dreams and wishes. Similarly, the Magical Realism isn’t terribly magical. When Astrid sends her love up to airplane passengers overhead, and the narrative follows that love, giving you a glimpse of the life of a plane passenger, I didn’t read that as “magic” – I read it as part of that inner life that Astrid keeps to herself, that inner life that makes Astrid such a dynamic character.

Despite all that, I think you can tell that I liked this book a great deal. I liked it for being sharp and fast to read. I liked how the cast of characters around Astrid’s life in her small town were so richly developed, each one interesting, not a throw-away in sight. I liked how King made the We-Look-Perfect-But-Are-Deeply-Troubled Family trope feel entirely fresh. I liked how Astrid and her girlfriend have mismatched ideas about the pace of their sexual interactions, and instead of submitting Astrid pushes back; instead of fighting or breaking up, they have a rational conversation about it.

This one should have got a little more ALA love this year. Shame, shame. You should read it anyway.

books

09 Mar 2013

time is on your side

If I had to make a list of the things I have spent the most hours of my life worrying, stressing, and fretting over, I think time would be the hands down, number-one, top of the list. I worry about being late. I worry about being early. I worry about not having enough time to finish assignments and work tasks before they are due. I worry about not having enough time to accomplish what I want to accomplish in my tiny, insignificant life. I actually expend time thinking about how I don’t have enough time. This makes zero sense.

This is all part of the perfectionist Cycle of Self-Hatred, where you set very high standards for the way you conduct your life and then beat yourself up when you aren’t “on” 100% of the time. Even though the reason you might not be “on” 100% of the time is because you are full of anxiety because of said high standards.

The cycle. I’ve been mired in it for a few weeks now. I’m still mired in it, I guess, maybe for life, but it’s been bad these last weeks of winter where I am feeling cooped up and carbed up and it’s too cold to clean my apartment much think complex, coherent thoughts. I am spending my time worrying and soothing my worry-brain with mindless Internet and then feeling crummy about wasting so much time.

Yesterday I picked up Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (on a recommendation from the reliably awesome Janssen of Everyday Reading. I’m only a few chapters in, but man, but as much as I hate the axiom “Right Book At The Right Time yadda yadda yadda,” well, shit, here I am.

In case you couldn’t tell, I am a huge sucker for nonfiction that captures conventional wisdom in a straightforward manner. Blame Michael Pollan – I read In Defense of Food in 2010 was taken to my knees. Nonfiction that takes an everyday concept – food, time, whatever – and reminds you of what you know about it, in your bones, as a human. That you shouldn’t eat food that has ingredients in it that you don’t know what they are. That you shouldn’t spend time on activities that don’t give you pleasure or reward. Then, they reveal some secrets you probably didn’t know – that skim milk is full of additives to make it taste more milky, that the average American chronically underestimates the amount of free time they have in any given day.

And then, the good stuff – little mind/life tweaks to help get you back on track to feeling normal. Some simple ideas to get your body and brain back on the right track, out of the cycle. Not feeling like a manic perfectionist or a yo-yo dieter or a worried lump of indecision who is surely going to die before she ever gets the chance to do X, Y, or Z. Just normal.

Here are some Time Tips from the few pages I’ve read of 168 Hours. I suspect that at least 50% of you who read this will say “yeah, duh, everyone knows that,” but the other half of you are probably high strung nutsos like myself who tend to forget the obvious under duress. So this is for you.

And for me, in five days, when I forget everything useful I’ve learned in life and succumb to the cycle.

You have 168 hours to kill in a week. Even if you sleep 8 hours a week and work 40 hours a week, that is more than enough time to do some stuff. Whatever that stuff is that you decide you want to do. If you don’t believe me, schedule out your next week, fifteen minutes at a time, and see how hard it is to fill the slots. Or, take Vanderkam’s advice and do the reverse: chart out your hours for a week – jot down when you do what – and then take a good hard look at your data.
I repeat: You have enough time. (See also: Daring Greatly)
Okay, so you have enough time, but you don’t know what to do with that time. I mean, you have some ideas of what you should be doing, what you want to accomplish, but that doesn’t lead to anything you are going to do instead of surfing the internet. Vanderkam’s suggestion to list 100 Things You Want to Do In Your Life is a good place to start, especially because you don’t frame it as a series of goals. This isn’t a Life List or a 101 in 1001 days or a 30 before 30; it’s just you and a piece of notebook paper and 100 Things You Might Like. You might hate them all, but that’s okay, and it’s a good place to start.
If you’re still feeling stymied, think about what you like to do and what you are good at. Do those things, even if those things are “sorting the sock drawer” and “reblogging pictures of cats for your friends.” Start your dreams from where you are and where you’ve been.
Did I tell you that you have enough time?
You meaning me.

books

05 Mar 2013

a book forgotten

I have been thinking about what books are in my personal canon and how they got there. When I wrote that post, I had some books in mind, but since then I’ve been second-guessing myself. I only read that book once – could it really have been that important to me? I felt inspired when I read that book in 2007, but it’s 2013 now – has my life truly been changed? This is why I generally try to avoid superlatives, lest I become completely paralyzed by the pressure to decide what books are BEST and what the word BEST means and excuse me I need to go write an academic paper on the topic before it makes any sense…

Books/labels/everything-else-in-life is more fluid than my perfectionist urges, and I try to lean into that fluidity when I can. Books can speak to you at one time in your life and then seem completely irrelevant or lame or poorly-written at another time. C’est la books.

But what about books you just plum forgot? I have also been thinking often about my Unread Library, probably because my writing & thinking space has a clear view of my blue bookshelf. When I look up from my typing or reading, there are half the books I own, all of them staring at me, most of them wondering if they will ever be read or if they will sit on that blue shelf, spines un-cracked, forever.

In the corner of the middle shelf is a book I have read, read more than once. A book I used to love but haven’t thought about in years and years and years.

Donna Tartt’s A Secret History was one of the first contemporary adult novels that really appealed to me. It is not quite a Secret YA novel, but it is set in a small private college, and definitely has a young person’s sensibility (please don’t call it New Adult). Protagonist Richard comes to college without expectations and a charismatic professor sucks him out of the sciences and into the highly useful field of “Classics.” The small group of students Richard studies with become his friends, even though they are all slightly off-center and hiding all sorts of dark secrets. Violent acts occur and Richard is caught in the middle of either a mystery or a cover-up, and life changes for everyone involved.

Senior-Year-in-High-School Jessica was all about it. When her English teacher challenged her reading choices yet again (“You need to read the CLASSICS!”) this was the first book she stepped up to the plate for, quoting reviews from the back of the book, arguing for its literary merit, its acceptance into the modern canon, that it was a damn good book and not at all fluffy or YA and everything else she found unacceptable for me, her sometimes-pet student.

It was maybe my first literary argument, maybe helping to unlock that Passionate!About!Books! thing that makes up so much of my identity. I read it two or three times as a teenager, called it my favorite book. And now it sits in the corner of my bookshelf, taking up space.

I could give it a re-read. I could donate it to a teenager who might like it. Or I could let it sit there forever, its spine reminding me of Senior-Year-in-High-School Jessica, whoever she was, and the books she liked an awful lot.

book lists

03 Mar 2013

reading wishlist: memoirs

I love a good memoir. Something about the pouring of the psyche onto the page is intoxicating. You can be famous and interesting and wise . You can have a completely boring life and do one interesting thing for a week or so.. You can be a questionably moral person. If you write a good memoir, it’s all good.

Actually, I sometimes love a bad memoir, too, especially if they involve Addiction or Fundamentalist Religions.. Ghostwriter-schmostwriter.

I’m currently listening to Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith on audio, and while the subject matter is awkward, extremely personal, and sometimes painful, I’m digging it. Because Awkward, Extremely Personal, and Sometimes Painful are the stuff of the decent memoir, right? Here are some more memoirs that have caught my fancy recently:

Drinking with Men by Rosie Schaap

I am a raging introvert who values a certain level of feminine propriety in my daily conduct. I am the last lady to drink in a bar alone. One our friends from Michigan moved here, to Boston, a few years ago without a clear trajectory other than to enjoy the fruits of City Living – one such fruit, for him, was Becoming A Regular At A Bar. I was judgmental, but time passed, and heck if he didn’t succeed in making some charming neighborhood bar friends. One of them helped me move into my apartment. My third story apartment. That is something special.

Rosie Schaap is a lady who seems to understand this something special, and while I won’t ever be a lady to drink in a bar alone, I might read her book while drinking alone on my couch.

Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart

An examination of the author’s complicated family heritage, spanning generations, moving from country to country, and wrapped up in the business and exploitation of early America. This is the kind of book that fascinates me – part history, part memoir – but that I don’t know if I ever *read*. Although I will say, just typing that last sentence made me want to put it on hold and prove myself wrong… because that’s a reasonable way to aim your incessant sense of competition, naturally. Outread yourself.

Living and Dying in Brick City: An ER Doctor Returns Home by Sampson Davis

So, there was a little bit of time when I was in love with Atul Gawande and all I wanted to read was doctor memoirs. This may have also coincided with the longer bit of time when I watched Grey’s Anatomy reruns on a nightly basis. Since the words “ER Doctor” occur in the title of this memoir, I hope there is some medical drama, but this memoir looks like it focuses on the social issues surrounding Davis as he returns to his hometown of Newark, NJ after defying all sorts of odds to leave.

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked James Lasdun

I don’t know about you, but pretty much anytime I hear a dude talking about his “crazy ex-girlfriend,” I wonder what kind of douchey things he did to her. Surely, there are at least a few. That being said, I could listen to the other side of the story if it’s in the form of a dishy memoir. Lasdun didn’t have a romantic relationship with his stalker, but there seemed to be some conflation of a professor-grad student relationship. Scandalous!

Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani

Parravani’s memoir focuses on her relationship with her twin sister, Cara, as they grew up together children of a single parent, found success as artists, and Cara’s subsequent downward spiral. If one of my sisters died, I would absolutely lose my shit; I will probably read this and just weep and weep and weep.

After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey

I could really label any memoir with a needlessly specific category. This one I would call a Solving A Family Mystery That Has Obviously Done Some Emotional Damage to the Author memoir. Hainey’s father died when he was a child, under circumstances that were innocuous but lacking significant details. After a lifetime of wondering about those details – and dealing with the pain and grief that accompanies living without a father – Hainey sets out to put the mystery to rest.

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom by Leonard Marcus

This is probably the least memoir-y of the bunch, and it was published in 2000, but Recovering Grad Student me is fixated on its existence. For those of you who aren’t exceptionally nerdy kid lit junkies, Ursula Nordstrom was the head of Harper & Collins children’s book division from 1940 to 1973. She had a tremendous influence over the books we now consider children’s classics, and the way we think about children’s books today. Do I want to read her correspondences with these authors, illustrators, and other kid lit legends? OF COURSE I DO.

Vow: A Memoir of Marriage and Other Affairs by Wendy Plump

I am getting married in six months. Good idea: reading memoirs of marriages to prep my mind to what is in store.

Bad idea: reading memoirs of marriages fraught with infidelity and extra-marital children.

We’ll see which side I land on.

books

01 Mar 2013

march

1. Today is the first day of March. March means my birthday (a holiday I usually like), St. Patrick’s Day (a holiday I usually hate), some basketball, there is some sun out when I get out of work at 5 p.m., and we all hold a sliver of hope that maybe, MAYBE the snow and freezing air and stuff is done with for the year. Just maybe.

2. If it’s light out after 5 p.m. and it’s not freezing or snowing, that means It Is Time To Start Running Again. Super excited! I am thinking of doing the Couch to 5k again because I find it much easier to get excited about exercise when it’s only 20 minutes and I get to walk half of the minutes.

3. I am kind of stuck in a little reading rut. I haven’t finished a book in a week, which means I’ve been reading the same handful of books for at LEAST a week, most of them more. Boring. Boo.

How did I get so reading-impatient? How did my attention span become so small?

Oh wait, grad school.

4. Did I mention my birthday? Did I mention that I am old? So, so, so old. So old that this past week, my 10 year high school reunion became a thing on Facebook, and people that I thought I had completely forgotten and did not care about are making little red boxes pop up on my notifications and wow, I am old. If we could just refrain from taking about a 10 year college a cappella group reunion for a moment that would be great…. oh wait, that happened yesterday. Suddenly having urges to delete my Facebook account.

5. March means it is time to start looking for a new place to live. This is exciting (yay! a fancy new apartment! or at least one with a shower head that is taller than my own head!) but horrible. Mostly horrible. I’m angsting about leaving my neighborhood – I like it, but finding a place we can afford that has reasonable amenities is difficult. I try to get hyped up about another neighborhood, which is supposedly up-and-coming, so I Google it, of course, limit my results to posts in the past year… and find a bunch of articles about how 5 women got robbed at gunpoint near the T station IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS. Gaaaaaaah.

6. March also means I am going to two comedy shows. One is that rescheduled WTF podcast… and one is Nikki Glaser, of my favorite podcast, and it’s tonight! And it’s being taped for Comedy Central! And it’s free! Let’s stop being sick and melancholy and get excited about March! And also get dressed, because it’s morning and that’s what you do. Especially if you might be on TV later

books

26 Feb 2013

these books

That thing where you are recovering from a busy trip out of town, an illness, your work inbox after you come back from vacation days and sick days, and you find yourself checking out a book you just read not six months ago, a book you’ve already read twice now, a book you don’t even entirely think you believe in.

And then you realize you have a comfort book. Probably more than one. Maybe they have something in common – an author, a genre, a time of your life when you first discovered them. A time when you were discovering many things about the world and your place in it, a time when your head felt cracked open and everything you read poured right inside. Maybe there’s something about the words and how they sound in your head as you read them, even if the cadence is a cross between a fairy distant memoir and an academic paper. Pop psychology. Lady memoir. Women making changes in their lives and the world, sharing their stories with you in a way that says “you can do this too.”

When you are well, you’ll go somewhere else: to your teetering to-read stack, to a book you read in grade school, or a dippy romance you’ve read a dozen times, or maybe something shinier, newer, with complex ideas and sentence structure, written for grown-ups even. These books will be there when you are well. For now, you can just read and re-read and re-read your re-reads.

Oh, these books.

book awards

24 Feb 2013

Alex Awards, 2013

I think this wraps up my gaggle of ALA awards posts for the season… I could keep going and talk about them all, of course, but limits are a good thing.

I have been enjoying looking back at last years winners and seeing which books I read, which ones are still on my radar. From last year’s Alex Awards, I didn’t read anything more than the book I’d already read, but everyone and their second cousin read Ready Player One and are still talking about it from time to time, I checked out The Night Circus three times without reading it, and I just put Salvage the Bones on my eReader.

One Shot at Forever by Chris Ballard

I have been thinking about high school sports lately, because wow, is there anything I don’t understand more than high school sports? I am the least sporty person alive. I played a few years of JV tennis while not being a sporty person and not really understanding high school sports. My brain-body coordination can’t be trusted. My ability to join in on a Team Mentality is lacking.

I could take all this and say “No, I should not read a book about a high school baseball team because I just won’t get it,” or I could say “I should read a book about a high school baseball team because I would like my brain to be more open to things the world seems to understand that I don’t.” That is the difference between an enlightened, wise reader and one who is not. I am not sure which reader I am.

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

It has just recently come to my attention that I probably know more about serial killers than I do high school sports.

This is a graphic novel about Jeffrey Dahmer, created by someone who knew Dahmer as a teen. This sounds right up my alley, but I have heard some mixed reviews from my friends on Goodreads. I will probably check it out, though, because graphic novels are just SO easy to put on hold, so check-out-able.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

One thing I like about the Alex Awards is that it reliably highlights some high-profile adult books from the year that have teen appeal. Secret YA books are all around us! Adults, even adults who purportedly hate YA, read them all the time! And put them on their Best Adult Books for Adults lists every year!

This book is a magical-realism, pseudo-fairytale about a crazy bookstore. I should probably read this post-haste.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

Cut and paste first paragraph previous. This book got so much buzz in the Fall, and was written by an Arrested Development writer. Again, I post-haste.

Pure by Julianna Baggott

I recognize the name “Julianna Baggott” because she has written adult books with teen appeal before. A cross-over author. Pure is a dystopia for adults… a cross-over genre. A cross-over cross-over.

Sounds intriguing, but I pretty much don’t read dystopias any more unless there is a gun to my head, so I will probably skip it.

Juvenile in Justice by Richard Ross

Out of this year’s Alex bunch, I’ve heard the most about this title. It is purported to be powerful – photography of juvenile detention facilities, collected over five years – but is not available through traditional book vendors, really. There aren’t even any new copies on Amazon! As someone who thinks a lot about how libraries build collections, relationships between publishers and vendors and libraries, and how awards shift publication practices, I’m interested to see how this one pans out. I, for one, would love to get my hands on it for my library.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

I’m going to ignore the contents of this book and focus on the cover, since I am an unashamed, unabashed book-cover-judger. Love good cover art. Love love love it.

This is a great cover, right? A bear. A silhouette. A teapot (?). Ribbons. Hand-lettering. Swirly swirls. Love it. I put it on hold months ago just because of the cover. I’m glad it seems to be getting some attention for it’s literary contents because otherwise that would be a fine cover wasted.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Alex Awards seem to have a steady relationship with the National Book Awards. Or, the National Book Awards have a strange favoritism for Secret YA Books. Or, Secret YA books are awesome and are universally loved.

Anyway, The Round House won the National Book Award, and here it is on the Alex List. I am number 44 in line on the hold list.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

Any protagonist who is described as “the least likely of Girl Scouts” is a protagonist I’d like to meet. That is all.

Caring is Creepy by David Zimmerman

This book sounds like a completely frightening read – parents involved in drug deals, meeting strangers on the Internet, something that sounds like a teenage girl kidnapping a grown man… and I appreciate the title invoking the title of a Shins song that is probably the least frightening song in existence.

book reviews

23 Feb 2013

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

I have mentioned this book about a dozen times in the past year, so now that I have finally read it, I should probably write up a proper review.

Except for the part where I don’t think I can. Call it what you will: unwillingness to approach a book with an analytical, professional perspective, unwillingness to exert the effort, the respiratory virus I am currently hosting in my body, post-vacation-itis, my tendency toward the mush and the gush. I don’t want to. So I won’t.

What I will do is tell you this: in the first chapter, we meet Ari, who is likeable but shy, looking for his people but worried his people won’t like him, a little angry, a little scared. Then we meet Dante, who has a bit firmer grasp on his place in the world, but is used to being an outsider. They are both fifteen, and they become fast friends in a way that neither can quite understand.

By the end of the book Dante moves away and then comes back. We meet Ari’s mother and father, who both suffer from traumas past they don’t talk about. We meet the heavy absence of Ari’s brother who is in prison and no one will tell him why. We know Ari so well that we know something is always wrong, something deep down, is unsettled.

It is settled by the end, don’t worry.

Reading this book felt like a dream. Saenz is does realism right, let me tell you. It felt like I wasn’t reading, but just slipping into someone else’s life.

Just as beautiful and awesome as you’ve heard all this time, and completely deserving of that Printz silver medal (among other honors…) Hurry along and read it.