Girl Detective

I had this lovely vision of being able to read the books for my book group, the books for the online discussion of Muriel Sparks, the YA books I already owned, plus a bunch of new and classic YA books from the library. The good news is that I found a bunch of good YA books at my favorite used bookstore. The bad news is that when I made a list of all the books I thought I’d like to read for the summer, there were thirty nine, which is about half again as many books as I’ve read in the first five and a half months of this year. So I’ll limit my to-read list to those I own. The starred books are ones that have been on my shelves for a while. The others are newer purchases. Allowing for the chaos factors of library reserve queues and friend recommendations, I think a list of twenty will be plenty challenging.

King Dork by Frank Portman
*Sense and Sensibility by Austen
*Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 3 by Bryan O’Malley
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks
another Sparks book
*Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
*Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Prop by Pete Hautman
*Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty
*Second Helpings by McCafferty
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier
Magic Lessons by Larbalestier
*The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky
*Satellite Down by Rob Thomas
*Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
Monkey Island by Paula Fox
Baby by Patricia Maclachlan
I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
We All Fall Down by Cormier

Amanda’s Weekly Zen, (whose site I found via Pages Turned) put out a summer reading challenge. It’s too late to sign up (I missed it, too) but there’s a forum to talk about summer reading challenges. You set your own challenge, and then post about what you’re reading and what progress you’re making.

Initially, I thought I wasn’t interested in a summer challenge, since I already have my fifty book goal for the year, of which I want at least 25% to be books I’ve owned for over a year but haven’t yet read. (Is that as overly complicated to understand as it was to write?) But when I thought about what I WANTED to read, I was able to clarify a reading project that’s been bubbling for a while, but which I’ve tried to dismiss, since it would involve way more library books than sitting-on-the-shelf-at-home books. Once it broke into my consciousnes, though, I could no longer deny it. I want to do a young-adult centered reading program for the summer. I want to read some of the classics that I missed the first time ’round. As both a fan and a writer of YA fiction, I think it’s remiss of me not to have read The Chocolate War, for example. I also want to read some of the more recently released YA titles that I’ve put off this year in my attempt to be less of a slave to the libarary reserve system when I have so many deserving books that I’ve purchased but not yet read.

I have a couple YA titles on my home shelves, both unread and to re-read, so I think this can fit into my overall challenge for the year. I’ll have to detour a few times since I belong to a book group, but overall, I’d like to make my summer challenge YA-centric.

Also, a reading group hosted by Bookworm (also found at Pages Turned) caught my interest. There’s going to be a discussion of the late Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the end of this month, as well as discussion of her other works. I very much enjoyed The Driver’s Seat last year, so I may add this to the summer list as well.

Though I enjoyed neither, I’m harking back to high-school gym class and baseball to help me manage my to-read list. I distrust myself to commit to any more than three books at a time (I doubt I can even be held to those), but I think this model will help me keep me on track a little better, especially because it includes a fudge factor.

At Bat: What I’m currently reading
On Deck: The very next book to be read
In the Hole: The book after that
Pinch Hitter: The book that jumps in the queue, for some very good reason or other

Current lineup is

At Bat: King Dork by Frank Portman
On Deck: Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
In the Hole: Sense and Sensibility by Austen
Pinch Hitter: Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 3 by Bryan O’Malley

I read a recommendation for the cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques that emphasized its menus based on seasonal produce, so I reserved it from the library. I find cookbooks some of the best things to check out of a library, since they make poor impulse buys at the bookstore. I don’t know if a cookbook’s any good till I’ve tried a few recipes, and by that time it’s usually spattered and unreturnable.

Sunday Suppers is a heavy, gorgeous book with lots of photos, and delicious sounding menus. But if I’d bothered to research the book even a little, I would have discovered how completely wrong it is for me right now.

Read through the recipe to find out what needs to be done before you begin cooking. Often there are onions to be chopped, spices to be toasted and ground, garlic to be minced, flour to be measured, and herbs to be picked.

This book is for someone who wants to devote time to the process of cooking. I’m all for the type of seasonal, local, organic ingredients it recommends. The food sounds wonderful, but it’s way down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from where I am with two small kids.

#24 in my book challenge for the year was The Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore. This is not an easy book to summarize succinctly. The main character is Noel, a synesthete and hypermnesiac. His mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, and three friends are the other neurological misfits who surround him. The entire story is supposedly written by a third party (Moore) and edited by a fictional neurologist, Emile Vorta, whose self-congratulatory views are related through an often hilarious set of endnotes. The narrative switches between first-person diary entries and third person. The font switches to emphasize this, though I don’t think the visual cue is necessary, except in the few instances that it happens within one chapter. One chapter is a discussion between Noel and another character about the details of synesthesia. The information is necessary, but I find dialogue an awkward way to convey a lot of factual information. The neurological conditions are fascinating, as are the insights into Noel’s kaleidoscopic mindworks. The humor is clever and dark. The structure of the book is complex but serves the story. The mother’s decline, told by Noel and though her own diary, is tragic. I found all the characters engaging, but I felt the males were more thickly characterized than the females. But the strength of this novel lies most in the emotional interactions of its characters. The characters all cared about, and for, each other. That made it easy to care about them, and their fascinating stories.

#23 in my book challenge for the year was The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. This was a complex, challenging and disturbing book. Set in the New England town of Varennes, its omniscient point of view shifts among characters, animals, and sort of wide-focus panning of history. The prose defies a quick reading. The characters are beautifully drawn, which is suprising given the number of them. I cared about many of them, which is why I found the novel so troubling. In general, good things did not happen. I love a good redemptive ending. This novel not only didn’t have one, but also suggested that redemption may be only lucky accident.

One thing that bothered me in this novel that had so much going on was an apparent mistake. One character at a dinner early on says, “Help yourself to some of Mrs. Banner’s mashed potatoes, girls.” (p. 28) but on the next page, the omniscient narrator states “The room smelled like potatoes and varnish and baby powder, though they weren’t having potatoes but Le Sueur canned peas…” This novel is juggling so much that I needed to feel the author was in complete control. This passage made me doubt it early on, though nothing else in the book did.

Overall, though, the book was provocative, thoughtful, dark, and funny, like this passage I particularly liked:

The minds of twelve-year-old girls are wound round and round with golden chains, padlocked shut, and the key tossed out the car window on the way to the fast-food restaurant. This is probably a good thing, since what they keep in there isn’t always very nice. Human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual advantures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn and puppies chewing on slippers and soft pink babies and disembowelings. (p. 59)

The New York Times recently did a stupid list of books, one that purported to discover the best American novels of the past 25 years. The list was predictable and boring, as was the pseudo-controversy it inpired, as other lists have done.

I find canon lists boring because I’m more interested in how individuals I like respond to books, emotionally or intellectually. And while some books are most certainly good, many of those aren’t actually enjoyable. Take Beloved, for example, the novel that won the top spot. A great novel. But so wrenching and awful that it scared the bejesus out of me. It’s not one I press on friends who are looking for a good read.

There are two questions I find useful when I ask people about books. One, what books have you read that you both admired AND enjoyed? And two, what was a watershed book for you, one that might not be a so-called great book, but that had an important role in your life?

The latter question was one asked by The Guardian in this article from last month, which discusses differences between typical watershed novels for men and women. I have read very few of the New York Times list, but most of the women’s watershed novels listed, and a few of the men’s as well.

There is one book that answers both of my questions: Possession by A.S. Byatt. I admired it, I enjoyed it, and it was a watershed novel (touched on previously here).

What do you think? Are lists worthwhile? Did you like the NYT list? What are books you admire and enjoy? What are your watershed books, and were they listed in the Guardian’s article?

Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the [Titanic], while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle “women and children first.”

I read this book review of Masculinity, a book by Harvey Mansfield (link from Arts and Letters Daily), and was surprised at how not offended I was. Had I been on the Titanic with my two kids, I would not have been gallant; I would have taken a seat on a lifeboat, and appreciated those who let me. Titanic example aside, I think Mansfield’s argument for masculinity as presented in the review is a compelling one. Yes, I’m certain that there are countless individuals who don’t conform to the norm. But I bet they don’t make a dent in the majority who do. I gave up the illusion a long time ago that my husband would care as much about the house as I do. And one of the main reasons I consider schooling my children myself is that I don’t see conventional schools that can accomodate the energy of boys. (Hey, I can barely do so most days.) I especially like Mansfield’s idea of a public/private split. That publicly, we strive for equality in the sexes, but at home we embrace what differences come naturally. Like Nietzsche, whom Mansfield quotes, the book sounds like it is problematic, and its arguments dangerous in the wrong hands. Yet his un-PC arguments sound so well-grounded and reasonable that this feminist was provoked without being pissed off.

#22 in my book challenge for this year was My Sister’s Continent by Gina Frangello, a recommendation from Blog of a Bookslut. I nearly stopped reading at page 23 because of writing issues, but a friend said it was worth it, so I continued and am glad I did.

I’ll cover the writing issues first, because most of them are technical issues. Perhaps they’re matters of taste, but they were pervasive enough to repeatedly interrupt my progress through the book. There were overwritten sentences, like “Her hair smelled cold like Christmas.” There were passages of unwieldy dialogue. The framing device for the novel is clumsy. It is supposed to be a re-writing of one twin’s psychological case study to include the perspectives of both twins. This leads to a thoroughly wacked point of view. It’s told in first person by one twin who includes her sister’s experiences in third person (both in near past and in flashback), but occasionally goes into second person to address her shrink, the author of the original case study. It begins and ends with diatribes against the shrink that felt unearned, because the shrink sessions were such a small part of the overall narrative.

In spite of my problems with writing and structure, I really liked the book. It is a contemporary re-telling of Freud’s Dora case, and is filled with complex, interesting characters. There’s dysfunction, illness, mystery and a lot of dark, messy sex. There’s some Atwood-ian ambiguity at the end, leaving the reader to decide what (and whom) to believe. Kirby, the narrator, goes through a believable and wrenching transformation. Her sister Kendra, the absent twin, seems to be self-destructing, though things are not as simple as they might appear. Frangello puts some intricate twists right through to the end. Though Kirby asserts that it is both their stories, ultimately Kendra is the one I cared most about.

#21 in my book challenge for the year was highly hyped The Accidental by Ali Smith. The prose struck me immediately as more than usually challenging, though not in an obvious, arduous way. Smith worked some subtle hocus pocus behind the scenes. The book shifts among five points of view, four of which are told in third person, only one of which is in first person. Not only does Smith pull off five distinct voices, but also five distinct styles. I was indifferent to the book at first, suspecting it of being clever rather than good. It grew to a strong finish, and further thought on it has made me appreciate it more.

One thing that bothered me, though, was that the text of the book wasn’t justified. I wonder if this was done deliberately to unsettle, because it certainly did so to me. I never knew how comforting typesetting was until I experienced its absence in this book.

#20 in my book challenge for the year, Fall on Your Knees has been on my shelf since 1998. It was a recommendation from my friend Queenie, whose past picks (Alias Grace, Bee Season, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, The Intuitionist, Plainsong, among others) were both intelligent and entertaining. At 500+ densely printed pages in trade paperback, though, its size put me off. But since part of this year’s book challenge is to read those poor souls gathering dust unread on the shelf, I finally gave it my time. This is a big, juicy novel with lots of characters and time shifts and a secret that took me by surprise. I especially loved two characters–Materia and her daughter Frances–and couldn’t quite bring myself to hate some others, no matter how nastily they behaved. There’s lots of painful stuff, but there’s also lots of joy, and I enjoyed the time I spent with the Cape Breton family, and am now off to dig up my Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac CDs.

#19 in my book challenge for the year is the ubiquitously reviewed Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. He wrote three previous novels, the first and third of which were nominated for the Man Booker prize. Most writers do their autobiographical stuff first, and move on to more complicated stuff. Mitchell, whose previous three novels are both lauded and derided for their intricacy, saved his autobiographical bildungsroman for his fourth book. He and others have noted how unusual this is. The benefit to this method is that it’s a really well-written personal novel. The drawback is that it’s frequently so well-written that it ejected me from the narrative, which was told in what is supposed to be the voice of a 13-year- old boy in 1982 suburban England. Yes, the character is a poet, and yes, he has developed a complex interior life in reaction to his stammering problem. Neither of these, though, completely convinced me that certain sentences and certain insights were congruent with the 13-year-old narrator. For example, “Mr. Nixon, the headmaster, dashed past the doorway, emitting fumes of anger and tweed.” and “….the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what they are.” It became clear as I read that Mitchell had set himself a difficult task, at which I think he partially succeeded–trying to write in the voice a boy who aspires to be a good writer, but isn’t there yet. In the end, though, I liked the book so well, and the characters in it, that I gave in and dismissed any quibbles that the voice wasn’t consistently believable. The book is the definition of bittersweet, veering between sadness and humor, with great characters.

Reviews, discussions, and interviews (strangely Seattle-centric links via Blog of a Bookslut):
Entertainment Weekly
CBC Canada
The Guardian: The Digested Read
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Times
Christian Science Monitor
The Stranger
New York Observer
Village Voice
The Book Standard
Seattle Weekly
The New Yorker

One of the best things about the Loft’s Festival of Children’s Literature last weekend were the talks by editors. The festival had one headlining NYC book editor and several local book editors for smaller presses. Some of what was said was common sense, some of the common sense was stuff worth repeating, and some other stuff was good to know, because it clarified or contradicted advice in some of the usual children’s literature canon. One thing that became even more clear to me than previously is that children’s lit is a different thing than adult lit; the same rules do not apply.

Here, in no particular order, are some pieces of advice from various editors, some of which were repeated by all of them.

-Submit polished work, not early or partial drafts.
-Cover letters should be short and professional. No biographical info needed, no past publishing history unless it’s directly relevant, no marketing info for the book, no hyperbolic references to other work. A simple, Dear [Editor], Here is my work, Thank you, [Author] should suffice because it’s your writing that should speak for you, not your cover letter.
-Again, your writing is what should distinguish you, not the color of your paper or your font choice. Use white paper, 1 inch margins, double spaced, 12 point Times New Roman. Never a sans serif font, never all caps. No exploding confetti (I wondered if other people were reminded of Tobias from Arrested Development when that was mentioned.)
-Reseach the publisher and submit to one that is a good match for your work.
-Children’s publisher’s do not want to work with agents; they want to work with you.
-Picture book writers should keep their text short and relatively adjective free. The illustrations will do the work of adjectives.
-Unless you’re an author/illustrator, and a good one, the editor will pick the illustrator for a writer.

There was also a good panel of authors on agents. One had a good agent who had pretty much fallen into his lap, another had sought an agent at a huge firm who had not been a help, and two other authors had never had agents, but instead used a book lawyer as needed for contracts and other legal stuff. The concensus seemed to be that a good agent could help, a bad one could hurt, and a children’s author is fine without one.

I buzzed by the library after the festival to pick up a few books by the local authors from the panel. Drake is currently loving all of these:

The Best Pet of All by David LaRochelle
When Mommy was Mad by Lynne Jonell
Night Driving by John Coy

The Scotsman talks to David Mitchell, whose most recent book is Black Swan Green (link from Bookslut last month). What’s nice about the article is that it isn’t a dissection of the book, rather a conversation that includes it. There’s some good stuff on writing a novel from one’s life:

Black Swan Green does not traffic in veiled autobiography and wish-fulfilment.

“I kind of evolved a distinction between a personal novel and an autobiographical one,” says Mitchell, leaning forward on his elbows and speaking softly. “A personal one is where the protagonist and the writer have many things in common. An autobiographical one is where events and everyone around the protagonist or the narrator come largely from life.”

And the difficulty of writing in first person:

So, if you write a book in the first person, you can’t give any information to the reader that the protagonist doesn’t know - unless you smuggle it either through the narrator’s stupidity, or, in the case of Jason, this device of him not knowing what he knows.

#18 in my book challenge for the year is Wuthering Heights. I wanted to read this as a contrast to Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s work is bright, sparkly, and romantic. Wuthering Heights is dark, twisted, and hardly romantic–it’s more horrific, in my opinion. There are so many fascinating things about it: the character of Heathcliff, who is cruel and yet difficult to despise; the multi-layered narrative; the Shakespearean mix of tragedy capped by a tidy wedding. Many of its influences are clear, as are its progeny. Yet it stands as a singular work, the only novel by its author, and a novel unlike any other.

#17 in my book challenge for the year, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was an interesting complement to Capote, the film. Capote the author only let himself creep into the narrative in two places near the end. Once, he refers to a friend of Perry Smith, and another time to a journalist who is friendly with both Perry and Dick. It is odd to recognize that this book was the precursor both to true-crime thrillers and the creative non-fiction genre, both of which are so prevalent today.

#16 in my book challege for the year is Dillard’s tiny but powerful Holy the Firm. I finally read the copy I purchased so long ago that the friend who recommended it is no longer in my life. The book is more of a keeper than the friend was. More poetic than prosaic, it’s beautifully written, sometimes painfully so. A wandering, but not meandering, meditation on faith, it plumbs some of the same territory as Anne Lamott’s Travelling Mercies, though in a very different way.

There is no one but us…., a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead–as if innocence had ever been–and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved. So. You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church.

#15 in my book challenge for the year, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell took me over three weeks to read. I didn’t resent the time, in fact, I was sorry to be done. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and its characters and I admired the book for its craft. Both the characters and the story are complex and well drawn. The prose is appealingly Austen-ish, and I was glad to read JS&MN so soon after Pride and Prejudice. Clarke’s homages of prose, humor,and character were easy to see when read in proximity. This book was one I owned, but for a long time I doubted I would read it at all. To a person, everyone I knew who read the book, my husband G. Grod included, merely liked it. No one owned to loving it, and I thought one should love a book that’s so long. But when my friend Becca said she had just finished it, I decided to give it a try, since it’s one I already own.

(Aside: I thought I already noted that this year’s book challenge would be less about the number of books, and more about reading books I already own. Yet I can’t find that in an entry. Perhaps I imagined that I wrote it. But I mean it.)

I am curious why I liked JS&MN so much better than others did. The reviews are so good it’s almost ridiculous. Did the others have high expectations based on reviews, while I had lowered ones based on the non-glowing feedback of friends? G. Grod will offer only that he thought Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books are so much better that JS&MN suffers in comparison. I haven’t yet read the Baroque Cycle, so I don’t have that potentially unflattering contrast. I entreat any readers who have read JS&MN to comment.

#14 in my book challenge for the year was V for Vendetta. The mixed reviews of the movie prompted me to re-read this. It was one of my “gateway” comics–one that someone else gave me to introduce me to the medium. It worked, where Watchmen and Dark Knight hadn’t. For that alone, it will always have a place on my shelf. V is both dated and less polished than some of Moore’s other, later works. But the creators’ obvious passion for their tale drives the story through the early, more clumsy chapters to its dark, complex middle and conclusion. It’s still a compelling read, and one I enjoyed enough that I’m not going to tamper with by going to see the movie.

#13 in my book challenge for the year is Dylan Horrocks’s excellent graphic novel Hicksville; it’s a self-referential tale, a history of comics, a romance, a mystery, and more. It’s been almost five years between issues of Atlas, Horrocks’s related follow-up project. I hope the wait for Atlas #3 is somewhat less long.