Yesterday, I was in such a foul mood that people were noticing, even at work. I decided I'd better try not to bring that home and went to the library instead.
I wasn't expecting much. Usually when I go to the library in a bad mood, I have a hard time thinking of things I want to read, and my mental state means that I won't luck into anything that looks good, because NOTHING looks good. And I get irritated that they just buy crappy books for morons and that the whole place is geared towards lovers of Danielle Steele and people who only visit the library when they want to try to fix their sink themselves and not people who actually like decent books, which by the end of my trip, I can't even define anymore.
Miraculously, that didn't happen to me yesterday. I found all kinds of books, including some I've wanted to read for a while, at a library where I've historically had bad luck despite it being the second-busiest in our 37-library system. I could have even had Jill Kelly's book, "Without a Word," but I flipped through it and it seemed to have more Jesus in it than the Bible, so I left it on the shelf.
Here's what I got. Try not to die of envy.
Matched, by Ally Condie. I actually read this one already and will have an entry about it soon.
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I was reminded to look for this book when I saw another patron with it. I figured, why not see if they have another copy? And they did.
City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and early Manhattan by Beverly Swerling. I liked "The Island at the Center of the World" a lot and was excited to see that someone had novelized about an era that doesn't loom large in our collective imaginations. She has several books, too, so the prospect of discovering a whole new author is exciting.
The Year that Follows by Scott Lasser. I only remember that it was a family drama that looked interesting.
Gifted: a novel by Nikita Lalwani. I deal a lot with 'stage parents' in my job. I don't mean that they are literally trying to make actors out of their children, but they're usually trying to gain some sort of renown for them. This novel is about a girl whose parents are trying to get her to be the youngest person ever admitted to Oxford, and what happens when her own desires clash with theirs.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson. I liked the movie.
Townie: a memoir by Andre Dubus III. The author of "The House of Sand and Fog" recalls growing up in two worlds: that of his working-class mother and his academic father.
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. As you know, I like anything that's weird, anything that promises to be different. This is about a 12-year-old cartographer and his cross-country journey to accept an award from the Smithsonian. Other than "Matched," obviously, this is the one I'm looking forward to reading the most.
So yeah, it was a good day at the library!
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Happy birthday, Mr. Dickens. Today, you are 200!
If you Googled anything today, you will already know that today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. I know I'm a bit late to the party, but if you've never read any of his works, I encourage you to give him a shot.
I will be bluntly honest. Literature that pre-dated the twentieth century by much had never really been my thing. I'd love to claim that I had a childhood love affair with "Huck Finn" or "Treasure Island," but I didn't. I guess when I was younger, I had a hard time getting accustomed to earlier writing styles. The references would throw me. And I just liked it to be easy.
I gave Dickens a try after reading the Jasper Fforde books. Miss Havisham features prominently in them, as does David Copperfield and Uriah Heep. If you feel as I used to about older books, Dickens will help dispel your prejudices. He writes in a warm, emotive style, and employs memorable characters and lots of humor. I do plan to read all of his books. I haven't gotten very far, just "Great Expectations," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "David Copperfield," but I certainly plan to keep the project alive. If you've been meaning to read one of his books, now is an excellent time!
I will be bluntly honest. Literature that pre-dated the twentieth century by much had never really been my thing. I'd love to claim that I had a childhood love affair with "Huck Finn" or "Treasure Island," but I didn't. I guess when I was younger, I had a hard time getting accustomed to earlier writing styles. The references would throw me. And I just liked it to be easy.
I gave Dickens a try after reading the Jasper Fforde books. Miss Havisham features prominently in them, as does David Copperfield and Uriah Heep. If you feel as I used to about older books, Dickens will help dispel your prejudices. He writes in a warm, emotive style, and employs memorable characters and lots of humor. I do plan to read all of his books. I haven't gotten very far, just "Great Expectations," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "David Copperfield," but I certainly plan to keep the project alive. If you've been meaning to read one of his books, now is an excellent time!
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
I stand against SOPA
Tomorrow, I'm blacking out this site (assuming the coding worked) to oppose the internet censorship legislation currently under consideration by our government. As you cruise the web tomorrow, hopefully you'll see a lot of this. According to sopastrike.com, you will. Don't try to get your entertainment fix in via Failblog or Reddit tomorrow. Need to look something up? Don't ask Wikipedia. Everyone's getting active, whether they've got one of the largest search engines or a tiny little book blog. If you've got a website and want to help make this point, go to the above address. See you on the other side of the blackout, and let's hope it's not a permanent one.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Life under the bridge: The Lost Memory of Skin
Pedophiles are high on the list of things that we, as a society, fear and hate. States are passing stricter and stricter laws that carry harsher sentences and lifetimes of punishment. In one very well-publicized instance, it led to a colony of sex offenders forming under a Florida bridge. The law stated that sex offenders couldn't reside within 2500 feet of schools, parks, daycare centers, or similar places that attract a lot of children, and the bridge was one of the few places that met the criteria.
That bridge inspired Russell Banks' new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin." A young sex offender, known only as The Kid, is struggling to build some sort of life for himself under the bridge. After a raid, he meets The Professor, a sociologist interested whose interest in studying the community quickly crosses the line into actively trying to help The Kid and the other denizens of the bridge make things better for themselves. But The Professor has a past, too, that ultimately catches up to him (and no, it's absolutely not what you're imagining).
While child molestation is one of the worst crimes someone can commit, I've long felt that as a society, we're entirely too hysterical about it. And given the devastating consequences of it, that's a difficult stance to pull off. But we've managed it. People see them lurking everywhere, in pretty much anyone who so much as looks at a child they don't know. Seventeen-year-old boys are forced to register for life for receiving "child porn" sent to them by a classmate. Nineteen-year-old boys are stamped with the sex offender tag for having sexual contact with girls three or four years younger than them. The outcome doesn't even matter. On the Free Range Kids blog, I have seen comments from people who grew up, married the guy when they were of age, and have children with him, yet he's unable to attend their school events or get involved in their activities, all because of something he did with his now-wife years ago when they happened to be on the wrong side of an arbitrary age line.
So I viewed this novel, of course, as a scathing commentary on all of that. Banks did an excellent job of walking a fine line, knowing that many people would have little or no sympathy for The Kid. He made him not exactly likeable, but somehow sympathetic anyway. It's ambiguous just how much of a danger to society The Kid might be. It's more that he's simply not very bright, and not very social. He grew up without much of a home life. Around the age of 10, he discovered porn, and that was pretty much all he did for the next several years until going to basic training in the Army. I won't get into the exact nature of how The Kid came to commit a sex crime, but that story is rather pathetic, too.
Overall, this is a terrific novel, and it has a lot in it. I'd be interested to see what other people think of the book. I'm glad to see someone willing to take on such a controversial and highly charged issue. It's one that's not going away any time soon.
That bridge inspired Russell Banks' new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin." A young sex offender, known only as The Kid, is struggling to build some sort of life for himself under the bridge. After a raid, he meets The Professor, a sociologist interested whose interest in studying the community quickly crosses the line into actively trying to help The Kid and the other denizens of the bridge make things better for themselves. But The Professor has a past, too, that ultimately catches up to him (and no, it's absolutely not what you're imagining).
While child molestation is one of the worst crimes someone can commit, I've long felt that as a society, we're entirely too hysterical about it. And given the devastating consequences of it, that's a difficult stance to pull off. But we've managed it. People see them lurking everywhere, in pretty much anyone who so much as looks at a child they don't know. Seventeen-year-old boys are forced to register for life for receiving "child porn" sent to them by a classmate. Nineteen-year-old boys are stamped with the sex offender tag for having sexual contact with girls three or four years younger than them. The outcome doesn't even matter. On the Free Range Kids blog, I have seen comments from people who grew up, married the guy when they were of age, and have children with him, yet he's unable to attend their school events or get involved in their activities, all because of something he did with his now-wife years ago when they happened to be on the wrong side of an arbitrary age line.
So I viewed this novel, of course, as a scathing commentary on all of that. Banks did an excellent job of walking a fine line, knowing that many people would have little or no sympathy for The Kid. He made him not exactly likeable, but somehow sympathetic anyway. It's ambiguous just how much of a danger to society The Kid might be. It's more that he's simply not very bright, and not very social. He grew up without much of a home life. Around the age of 10, he discovered porn, and that was pretty much all he did for the next several years until going to basic training in the Army. I won't get into the exact nature of how The Kid came to commit a sex crime, but that story is rather pathetic, too.
Overall, this is a terrific novel, and it has a lot in it. I'd be interested to see what other people think of the book. I'm glad to see someone willing to take on such a controversial and highly charged issue. It's one that's not going away any time soon.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Hey, Boo
So, the Mr. and I were fed up with Time Warner Cable's usurious rate hikes, and finally did something about it: we ditched the cable portion of our package, got an Xbox Live Gold Membership (around $60 per year) and got streaming Netflix and Hulu. It's not exactly the same experience. One upside is that Netflix has all sorts of offbeat stuff streaming that you'd really have to hunt for on cable TV. The documentary "Hey, Boo" is one of them, and we watched it tonight.
It's a strange coincidence that I was just writing yesterday about how I'd like to interview Harper Lee, then I watched a documentary about her. I learned many interesting factoids about her life and her book, for example:
The courtroom in her hometown, where her lawyer father used to work, was replicated precisely for the movie, and is now a museum.
When Harper Lee was a young woman, working at the airline reservation counter in New York and trying to hone her writing, a very good friend of hers who had made a big pile of cash off music royalties gave her a year's worth of living expenses so she could write. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was the result.
She had a brother who died of a brain aneurism at 31, and a sister who turned 99 in 2010 (the year of the documentary) and was still practicing law.
The documentary was studded with many literary stars, including Richard Russo, Wally Lamb, and Allan Gurganis. Oprah Winfrey was also in it, as was the girl who played Scout in the movie. It included footage of teachers discussing the book with their students. The writers talked about their favorite parts of the book, and what it meant to them. Richard Russo highlighted the father-daughter relationship, and the conversation Atticus had with Scout after she told him that other kids were saying he defended niggers. Oprah Winfrey choked up, reading the moving passage in the book after Tom is found guilty and the entire black community stands to honor Atticus' efforts to defend him. Anna Quindlen said that she collected incendiary, non-conventional heroines growing up, and counted Scout among them.
I had no idea that Harper Lee hadn't granted an interview since the 1960s, although I knew she'd stepped back from the public eye. The documentary made me wonder even more, how she felt about the tremendous, enduring reaction to her book and what her intent was when she wrote it.
It's a strange coincidence that I was just writing yesterday about how I'd like to interview Harper Lee, then I watched a documentary about her. I learned many interesting factoids about her life and her book, for example:
The courtroom in her hometown, where her lawyer father used to work, was replicated precisely for the movie, and is now a museum.
When Harper Lee was a young woman, working at the airline reservation counter in New York and trying to hone her writing, a very good friend of hers who had made a big pile of cash off music royalties gave her a year's worth of living expenses so she could write. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was the result.
She had a brother who died of a brain aneurism at 31, and a sister who turned 99 in 2010 (the year of the documentary) and was still practicing law.
The documentary was studded with many literary stars, including Richard Russo, Wally Lamb, and Allan Gurganis. Oprah Winfrey was also in it, as was the girl who played Scout in the movie. It included footage of teachers discussing the book with their students. The writers talked about their favorite parts of the book, and what it meant to them. Richard Russo highlighted the father-daughter relationship, and the conversation Atticus had with Scout after she told him that other kids were saying he defended niggers. Oprah Winfrey choked up, reading the moving passage in the book after Tom is found guilty and the entire black community stands to honor Atticus' efforts to defend him. Anna Quindlen said that she collected incendiary, non-conventional heroines growing up, and counted Scout among them.
I had no idea that Harper Lee hadn't granted an interview since the 1960s, although I knew she'd stepped back from the public eye. The documentary made me wonder even more, how she felt about the tremendous, enduring reaction to her book and what her intent was when she wrote it.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Booking Through Thursday: Dream Interviews
This week's question sort of made me laugh:
As some of you know, I interview people all the time. I'm a reporter for a weekly community newspaper. I've interviewed a wider variety of folks than that description of my job might imply. The biggest thrill for me was the time I got to interview Judith Viorst, in my opinion, a true living legend, author of "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" and a book my mom had in the bathroom titled "Yes, Married." I read that book many times when I was 10 and it kind of gave me a thrill, since I viewed it as being all about sex. It wasn't about sex in any kind of racy way whatsoever, more a humorous look at marriage (I kind of viewed her and Erma Bombeck as being the same, growing up). But when you're 10, anything about sex is pretty interesting.
One thing my job has taught me is that you never know when you're going to get a quality subject to interview. I've interviewed people who've done tremendous things and had little to say about them. And I've interviewed people for stories I'd been forced into doing that sounded poke-your-eyes-out boring, but the people behind it had such passion for the subject that they got me excited, as well. I've noticed that sort of dynamic even as a reader of profiles in magazines. I despised the music of Marilyn Manson, for example, but whenever I saw him profiled in a magazine, I would usually pick it up, because he's quite an interesting person with a unique take on the world and a lot to say.
Since this is on BTT, I am guessing that the idea was that we choose an author. I might pick Harper Lee. I've always wondered what her intent was behind writing her book. I'm curious as to why she thinks it remains so widely read after society has changed so much. I'd talk to her about her character development, and the balance she had to strike in writing in Scout's voice, since it was an adult looking back on her childhood. I also wonder why she stopped at one book, and what she's been doing with herself since "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published. But I highly doubt she'd answer most of those questions.
Really, my dream interview is anyone who's had an unusual life experience and can talk about it well, though. That's who I look for in writing articles.
If you could sit down and interview anyone, who would it be?
And, what would you ask them?
As some of you know, I interview people all the time. I'm a reporter for a weekly community newspaper. I've interviewed a wider variety of folks than that description of my job might imply. The biggest thrill for me was the time I got to interview Judith Viorst, in my opinion, a true living legend, author of "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" and a book my mom had in the bathroom titled "Yes, Married." I read that book many times when I was 10 and it kind of gave me a thrill, since I viewed it as being all about sex. It wasn't about sex in any kind of racy way whatsoever, more a humorous look at marriage (I kind of viewed her and Erma Bombeck as being the same, growing up). But when you're 10, anything about sex is pretty interesting.
One thing my job has taught me is that you never know when you're going to get a quality subject to interview. I've interviewed people who've done tremendous things and had little to say about them. And I've interviewed people for stories I'd been forced into doing that sounded poke-your-eyes-out boring, but the people behind it had such passion for the subject that they got me excited, as well. I've noticed that sort of dynamic even as a reader of profiles in magazines. I despised the music of Marilyn Manson, for example, but whenever I saw him profiled in a magazine, I would usually pick it up, because he's quite an interesting person with a unique take on the world and a lot to say.
Since this is on BTT, I am guessing that the idea was that we choose an author. I might pick Harper Lee. I've always wondered what her intent was behind writing her book. I'm curious as to why she thinks it remains so widely read after society has changed so much. I'd talk to her about her character development, and the balance she had to strike in writing in Scout's voice, since it was an adult looking back on her childhood. I also wonder why she stopped at one book, and what she's been doing with herself since "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published. But I highly doubt she'd answer most of those questions.
Really, my dream interview is anyone who's had an unusual life experience and can talk about it well, though. That's who I look for in writing articles.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Popular
The library system in Erie County (where I live) has released its list of most borrowed books in the past year. I found it pretty interesting. The top adult fiction novel surprised me, and it surprised me that it's ruled for two years in a row.
I'm not at all surprised that "Without a Word" dominated adult non-fiction around here. A decade and a half after retirement, Jim Kelly is still revered as a god in these parts. Thousands of people participate annually in the Hunter's Hope fundraising events. He and his wife remain sought-after speakers, emcees and commentors. Some of the others surprised me. I'm curious, do other library systems do this sort of thing? I feel like I've never seen a list like this from the Erie County system before. If anyone else has a link to one from a different part of the state or the country, or another country altogether, I'd love to see it. I wonder how much what we read varies by region.
I'm not at all surprised that "Without a Word" dominated adult non-fiction around here. A decade and a half after retirement, Jim Kelly is still revered as a god in these parts. Thousands of people participate annually in the Hunter's Hope fundraising events. He and his wife remain sought-after speakers, emcees and commentors. Some of the others surprised me. I'm curious, do other library systems do this sort of thing? I feel like I've never seen a list like this from the Erie County system before. If anyone else has a link to one from a different part of the state or the country, or another country altogether, I'd love to see it. I wonder how much what we read varies by region.
Adult Fiction: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson ** this is the second year this title has been the most borrowed library book in Erie County.
New Adult Fiction: "The Confession" by John Grisham
New (21-day) Adult Fiction: "Sing You Home" by Jodi Picoult
Graphic Novel: "Grim Hunt (The Amazing Spider-Man)" by Joe Kelly, Fred Van Lente and others
Adult Non-Fiction: "Without a Word: How a Boy’s Unspoken Love Changed
Everything" by Jill Kelly
Adult Paperback: "Eat This, Not That! 2011: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution" by
David Zinczenko
Children’s: "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth" by Jeff Kinney
"Princess Bedtime Stories (Disney Princess)" (no specific author)
Children’s Non-Fiction: "The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary" by Jeff Kinney
Children’s Paperback: "The Sea of Monsters" by Rick Riordan
eBOOKS
Fiction: "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett
Non-Fiction: "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand
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