Three Reads

Just because I haven't been posting here doesn't mean that I haven't been reading. But that wasn't the point, was it? Oops.

Most recently, I breezed through three books while I was laid-up in bed for a week recovering from gall bladder surgery. I'm not sure if I have ever read three consecutive books exclusively before; however, I gave each of these books my undivided attention for a few days at a time until I'd read each in its entirety.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. The sequel to The Hunger Games is, as the reviewers have said, fantastic. It does exactly what the second book of a trilogy should do: Take the story from the first book to new, unforeseen-yet-totally-conceivable heights, prepare the reader for the crucial final installment, and tell an engaging story of its own. I thought I understood the cruelty of the Hunger Games before, but now I realize that the story of Katniss Everdeen and her dystopian society of Panem has only just begun. I want to be there for the end.

Neal Shusterman's Unwind is possibly the most disturbing book I've ever read. The story is set in an undated, though not so distant, future in which a compromise has been reached in the abortion debate: There are no abortions, but unwanted children between the ages of 13 and 18 may be unwound -- in other words, gotten rid of by means of harvesting their organs as donor tissue. Life is, therefore, preserved. In theory. This, my friends, is why I was disturbed, but I kept reading because the circumstances that lead to this society are our own circumstances. While I do not think the future represented in this book is conceivable for many reasons (namely and most disturbing of all, the sheer cost it would impose), it calls into question many related issues that we face or may face in the future and deals with them in a very unbiased way.

After all that mind-warping insanity, I needed a book that didn't give me nightmares. Luckily, I'd checked out Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett from our school library before I took my leave. The only other MJ book I've read is 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which was quite a while ago. Since then, I've followed her on Twitter, which is a true entertainment. She makes all 140 characters count in the most succinctly hilarious ways. So reading a full-length novel in which she has hundreds of pages to share a story was such a different experience. Not a bad one, just different. I enjoyed the story. I was every bit as much glued to this book as a I was to Catching Fire or Unwind, but it wasn't because I was waiting for the next government-imposed atrocity. I didn't even care so much about the girl-boy relationship developing on the page or the mysterious Mrs. Amberson who turns Scarlett's world upside-down. I was most intrigued by and invested in Scarlett's relationship with her brother Spencer. To me, this was the key relationship and conflict in the story. To me, this is why Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett is worth reading. Isn't she writing a sequel called Scarlett Fever? If so, I want more Scarlett and Spencer.

And now the pendulum swings. As it is getting closer to Christmas, I find myself knitting more than reading. If only these two endeavors were more compatible. When I do find myself awake enough before bed to do more than the USA Today QuickCross puzzle, I'm reading on The Mysterious Benedict Society or Madeleine L'Engle's second Crosswick Journal, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother.

Fall break is less than a week away. Perhaps that will help.

Commitment Issues

Okay, I admit it: I have way too many irons in the proverbial fire when it comes to reading. At any given moment, I might be reading any of these books:

Things Not Seen by Andrew Clements, a YA novel about a boy who wakes up invisible one morning. He befriends a girl who is blind while his super-smart parents attempt to figure out and undo the phenomenon.

So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore by Wayne Jacobsen and Dave Coleman. Clever title, huh? I bought this one while browsing at WalMart after recognizing Jacobsen's name. I once read an article by the guy, curiously titled "Why I Don't Go to Church Anymore." I'm having sort of a hard time with the premise: an evangelical guy meets a strange stranger named John who seems to be a blast-from-the-past prophet. Interestingly enough, all of his supposedly divinely-inspired messages sound exactly like the main points of Jacobsen's article. Hm.

The Magician's Book by Laura Miller, which is in no way a spellbook or guide to becoming the next David Copperfield. It's an interesting mix of personal memoir and literary criticism of the Chronicles of Narnia, with a dash of biography of CS Lewis. Naturally, I'm all about it.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling. This requires no explanation. I'm rereading it (hopefully) before the movie opens. I am excited to the point of being obnoxious.

I've been whittling on all of these books for weeks and, of course, have finished none if them. So I've taken to boosting my totals by reading books that take next to no effort to read from cover to cover:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney took me no time. Of course, it is a "novel in cartoons," according to the subtitle, for middle-schoolers. I could have read the entire series in one day, but wouldn't want to. The book was cute enough, but not exactly by idea of quality reading. I guess Sherman Alexie spoiled me.

Things I Learned from Knitting...Whether I Wanted to or Not by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee may not even count as a real book. The Yarn Harlot here lists forty-five well-known bits of wisdom and puts a knitterly and humorous spin on them. I'm not finished reading this tiny book yet, but I could be before dawn. And if it is as funny as it was last night, I'll be waking up everyone in my sister's house with laughter.

(I know. My book titles aren't underlined. And there are no links. This iPhone app has no frills, I tell ya.)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I once wrote a research paper in English 102 about the rise of reality television, its depiction of relationships, and America's growing openness to voyeurism. That was in 2003.

Six years later, I'm writing this in the in-between time of getting home from work and watching this week's American Idol kick off show. Tonight, the competition will be down to two, and I have to know who those two will be. Maybe it's American Idol's fault that I haven't yet published my reaction to a book that I finished reading over a week and a half ago…

The Hunger Games, for which the book is named, is a reality show that the government of Panem (a post-democratic United States) uses to keep its citizens under control. Each year, the citizens of all twelve districts watch as two "tributes" (one male, one female) from each of the districts are thrust into a dangerous landscape designed by the Gamemakers, government officials who control the elements and manipulate the tributes into killing one another. Twenty-four tributes, all between the ages of twelve and eighteen, enter the arena, but only one is to be released back into his or her home district, carrying the weight of the district's glory. Not to mention the personal guilt of having aided in – or at least survived – the death of twenty-three teenage countrymen.

There are no friends in the arena. At least there aren't supposed to be. But Katniss Everdeen, the tribute from District 12 who volunteers to take the place of her 12-year-old sister Prim whose name was drawn, finds more than one. In the fight to save herself (and her self), Katniss gets to know Peeta, her male counterpart from her district, and Rue, a girl from another district who reminds her too much of her little sister Prim. Having promised her sister that she really would try to win (ie, return home to continue supporting her small family), Katniss attempts to keep her word, even though it means playing the game – kill or be killed. Her conflicts are as numerous and complex as they should be.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Panem cannot take their eyes from their television sets. I could not take mine from the book, even though I was reading about the nearly two-dozen televised deaths of characters who met their end only because their names were drawn from a hat. It makes me wonder, what atrocity would I willingly watch each day if only it were broadcast on TV? This question alone disturbs me.

It also makes me ask, how might the U. S. government be controlling me via American Idol? I might explore the question, except they're about to announce the finalists. Gotta go.

Suzanne Collins's sequel Catching Fire is set for publication on September 1, 2009.

Coming soon: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle

Interlude: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle

Between YA books, I'm reading on a Madeleine L'Engle book. A Circle of Quiet is the first of four Crosswicks Journals, thoughts she wrote while at her family's summer home in Connecticut.

Madeleine L'Engle is without a doubt one of my favorite writers of all time. (I would name a child after her.) I find affirmation, inspiration, and challenge in her words.

Some quotations from today's reading:

• If we are given minds we are required to use them, but not limit ourselves by them.
• The creative impulse, like love, cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian or parent can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn.
• In a good story we find out very quickly about the hero the things we want to know about ourselves.

And my favorite, her response to a student's question:

'Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?'

'Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.'

But I base my life on this belief.

Burned by Ellen Hopkins

During my afternoon "meetings" with Karel (KTIP mentor, media specialist, and friend), I always make a point to see what's on the cart behind the circulation desk, to see what the kids are reading these days. The cart is where Karel places the newly-returned books that need to be re-shelved, and there are always some books that never make it back to the shelves, usually because they have waiting lists. If there is ever a Stephenie Meyer book to be found in the media center, it's on the cart.

Most days, I see these chunky, ominous-looking books with one-word titles all written by Ellen Hopkins, and at first, I couldn't quite figure out if they were part of a series or not. They have titles like Crank and Impulse, and something about the fonts chosen for the cover designs remind me of horror films, particularly Saw. Right or wrong, I judge books by their covers, so if you know me at all, it goes without saying that I'm not attracted to these books. But I can't help but notice that students devour them.

Then, after our Book Club discussion of Go Ask Alice, we were discussing our current and recent reads, a student brought up Hopkins' books and explained, to my surprise, that they are written in verse, which explains why students breeze through them despite the page-length. Another student chimed in to explain that the author arranges the words on the page so that the poem can be read from different directions – left to right, top to bottom, corner to corner – to glean extra meaning. Now, I was intrigued. So when I learned Ellen Hopkins would be at the Book Fest in Bowling Green, I ran out and bought Burned. I couldn't bring myself to read Crank after having re-read Go Ask Alice. I can only read about so much drug use.

I read the first 50 pages (lots of white space) sitting on a couch at Opry Mills mall while my teacher friends Sarah and Jill perused a last few stores. Pattyn, the narrator (or speaker, I should say), opens her narrative openly addressing her suicidal thoughts, her feelings of not belonging. It is cliché, but it's relatable. The exposition continued to pull me in, mostly because she spent several "poems" describing her journey as a reader. She mentions reading C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle, and I was sold. This girl and I are birds of a feather! She soon reveals that her reading life is an escape from her oppressive home life.

Her Nevada family is headed by an abusive father, whom she describes as having an affair-like relationship with Johnnie Walker Black whisky, and her apathetic mother who delegates the parenting of the five or six other daughters to Pattyn. She is frustrated by the teachings of her family's Mormon faith, and she particularly struggles with the expectation of being a submissive female. Not only does she distract herself with literature, she frequently takes to the desert to practice shooting her gun, an interest she used to share with her father until he picked up the bottle.

The foreshadowing is blatant. She rebels and, as punishment, is sent off to live with her aunt, an experience that turns out to be the best thing that ever happens to her. She has an awakening, but it's clear that Hopkins doesn't believe in happily ever after.

I can understand that. Nice, neat little packaged resolutions are hard to believe, but sometimes so are cautionary tales. I'm still trying to decide if Pattyn and her story are believably complex.

And the verse. Hopkins admittedly does some cool stuff with the words, but I'm not sure she didn't just take prose paragraphs and hit enter and tab so that it looked cool. And when multiple readings were possible, I found the phrasing forced. Thank goodness, though, that the story was condensed into short poems that filled less than half the printable area of the pages, or I would've never made it through 531 pages.

Maybe I didn't choose the best of her books to start with. Maybe it's because I'm not a teenager. I wasn't bowled over, but really, I want to know why the kids are. I mean, when I was in high school, I loved Go Ask Alice, but now, I'm not so impressed. I suppose adolescents are more comfortable with a world that is black and white, rules with clear consequences.

One person has voted for Identical, the other Hopkins book that I have, for my next reading. Still only one vote for The Hunger Games. Big Fat Manifesto and Feed are tied for first with two votes each. What's it gonna be?

Vote!

I'm doing my best to get Burned by Ellen Hopkins read by the weekend. I've already passed the one-week mark on this one, I'm sad to say. Even though the book is something like 500-pages long, it shouldn't take me any time to finish.

Hopkins writes free verse novels for young adults -- an interesting concept I'll deal with later in the blog dedicated to this book. As far as I can tell, all her books have tragic themes with tragic heroines with tragic endings. Drugs, abuse, prostitution, gun violence, the list goes on. And this just going off what she said during her presentation at the SoKy Book Fest. Apparently, her most popular novel, Crank, and its sequel, Glass, are heavily based on her own daughter's meth addiction. I'm not sure how I feel about the literal transposition from life to fiction. I mean, when speaking about her loved ones to her readers, the author refers to the real life people by their fictionalized names. I smell a law suit.

Anyway, once I'm finished with Burned, it'll be time to crack open another book. What should it be? I've put a poll in the sidebar for you to add your two cents. Only one person has chimed in, and that vote was cast for The Hunger Games. I bet I know who that was.

The run-down, going on book jackets, hearsay, and assumptions alone:

• Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught is the fictional narrative of Jamie Carcaterra, a high school senior who writes an unapologetic column called "Fat Girl" in her school paper. I saw Susan Vaught last weekend, when I learned that she wrote this book I've been seeing on bookshelves everywhere. P. S. It says "SASSY" on the cover, among other random words.
• M. T. Anderson's Feed is one of those YA books that makes people give me funny looks when they learn I haven't read it. (Even Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian names it as one of his favorite books.) From what I gather, it's a futuristic novel in which society has gone and done what all the technological skeptics fear: put chips in our brains. Everyone has a live feed of info streaming at all times. I think the Brothers Green once compared it to having Wikipedia in your head.
• Victoria read The Hunger Games and immediately suggested I do the same. The premise alone is enough to spur an hour-long discussion. Suzanne Collins' futuristic version of the United States is divided up into something like 12 or 13 districts, and each year, each district pulls one boy and one girl's name out of a hat and enlists them in a televised fight-to-the-death competition. Think "The Lottery" meets the Tri-Wizard Tournament meets Survivor meets The Village. Or at least that's what I'm getting after about ten pages.
• Identical is Ellen Hopkins' (the author of Burned) latest book. It's about a set of twins. Something about sexual abuse. I don't know. Maybe I should've put a different book in this spot on the poll.

Suggestions?

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The absolutely true diary of Arnold Spirit, Jr., struck a nerve in me from the get-go.

When Junior, as his family calls him, finds himself frustrated with the less-than-quality education he's receiving at his reservation school, he chucks his out-dated math textbook – it was once his mom's! – directly at the teacher's face. Now, Junior's not an anti-hero. Even though this outburst happens relatively early in plot, I knew such behavior was uncharacteristic. Junior is intelligent and likable, not at all like any of the students whom I would expect to wallop me upside the head with a Spanish book.

Still, he gets suspended and a home visit from Mr. P, the teacher whose nose he smashed in. Instead of reprimanding Junior further, Mr. P not only forgives the boy, but he makes his own apology, too. It is understandable, he explains, to react the way Junior did to his education. The students on the reservation are being done a disservice by the school, with its hand-me-down resources, and its teachers, who make no effort to educate. (I imagine that very few young adults would ask themselves the question I was asking myself at this point: Should my students be hitting me with their literature books?) Mr. P encourages Junior to find an education elsewhere, the education that he deserves.

Junior does just that. He transfers to Reardan, "the rich, white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly twenty-two miles away from the rez" (45), but not without many a second thought or endless torment from the members of his tribe. Torn between two worlds, Junior struggles to maintain his relationships with his best friend Rowdy, his family (including his alcoholic-yet-harmless dad, his bandanna-wearing grandmother, and his romance-novel-writing sister Mary Runs Away), his tribe, and his new friends (and maybe girlfriend?) at the "white school". The balancing act is tempered with the narrator's prolific drawings. Junior's artistic interpretations of his life are as layered and as entertaining as the narrative. Without a doubt, the illustrations by Ellen Forney are indispensable.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie treats the themes of poverty, identity, loyalty, and death with dignity and incessant humor. I'm glad he made this diary public.

Birdwing by Rafe Martin

I have a feeling that even if the plot of this fairy tale had been disappointing, I would have still loved it despite itself. Luckily, the coming-of-age adventure of Prince Ardwin did not disappoint. I had not expected that a winged boy would become the one character in all of literature with whom I most identify.

This is one of the many books that I've purchased because of its attractive cover, even though I later learned that the artist's rendering of the protagonist, the one-armed-one-winged Ardwin, is inaccurate. (No, the wing is on his other left, I'd say.) I picked it up at the Scholastic Book Fair that the book club sponsored in the library at school. I mean, I had to buy books to support the student organization, right?

Not surprisingly, though, the book landed on my bookshelf unread until a month or so later when Victoria asked me for reading recommendations and I, despite having read the book, suggested it. She and I once had a tryst with the Brothers Grimm, and this story reimagines and expands the Grimm's tale "The Six Swans". Birdwing seemed like a match. She took it, read it, loved it, and foisted it back at me so that I could read and love it, too. Done and done.

Rafe Martin's writing style drew me in immediately, and I suspect it would carry me through an even poorly spun yarn. The tale is written in prose, but it is nothing short of lyrical. Martin is fond of alliterative and original adjective pairs, prepositional possession, intriguing names, and weighty nouns and verbs. His characterization is vivid and his setting is timeless in the way that the realms of the best legends are. The cast line-up is full of archetypes (orphans, evil step-mothers, and wizened wizards), but Martin develops them into a unique humanity despite their otherworldliness. The themes of love, loss, betrayal, and belonging are worked out with heartbreaking and redemptive reality.

Birdwing's narrator is omniscient, which explains my frustration with the thought processes and choices of Ardwin, the young hero. The reader is far more enlightened about reality and its consequences than he, so the attempt at dramatic irony sometimes fails because the plot twists are apparent to the reader long before the twists occur. This makes Ardwin seem very naïve, but this may just be part of the tale's theme. This youthful naivety juxtaposes nicely with the young man at the end of the novel.

I would have loved this book no matter what because I am a sucker for a nicely turned phrase, but Birdwing is more than a pretty book. It is a journey that takes us – Ardwin and the reader – fearfully into our insecurities and brings us victoriously out of ourselves.

Bound and determined.

I have a problem. I cannot stop buying books.

Once after acknowledging our similarly overflowing bookshelves, Niaz and I half formed a pact in which we vowed to allow ourselves to buy only one new book after reading three already-purchased ones. That sounded nice, didn't it? A good way not only to get through my ever-lengthening reading list, but also to give my bank account a break. I don't know about him, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he too surrendered like I did to the siren song of bookstores. I think I read one whole book before going to Barnes & Noble and buying enough books to make my 10%-off Member Card worth the membership fee.

I have never been good with resolutions – New Year's or otherwise – and it's becoming increasingly apparent that I might have an addictive personality. This probably explains the almost-one-hundred dollars I dropped at the Southern Kentucky Book Fest in Bowling Green on Saturday. While unpacking from the weekend last night, I somewhat proudly and somewhat ashamedly added seven or eight freshly-bound books to my collection, dividing them up among the large bookcase, the small unofficial YA shelf, and the stool-turned-nightstand beside my bed. I stepped back, surveyed the situation, and one thing was abundantly clear: It's time to rededicate myself to the not-a-resolution I considered back in February.

I refused to make it public then because I'm fairly convinced that telling other people about my goals has approximately the same effect on my progress as high school sweethearts professing their love to one another via a yearbook ad has on their relationship's longevity. The endeavor is doomed before the intentions are even published.

So I knowingly enter into this with great trepidation, but here it is: My goal is to read one book a week. To an average reading adult, this seems doable, but in the two months since I half-heartedly began, I've finished three books. (Time to buy more?! Okay, so I've already taken care of that. Plus, I've decided not to impose a book-buying embargo on myself because I learned long ago that I'm too smart – er, weak – to fall for my own fictitious rules and deadlines.) I can blame in on the lifestyle of being a new teacher, but let's face reality. The height of the book-stacks has reached mountainous, and intervention is critical.

I'm bound and determined to scale this constantly growing mountain. And I'm taking you with me.