Girl Detective

I did it. I finally made it through all the feeds from the blogs and sites I read. This past May preschool ended and our routine changed then changed again, plus I’ve been slowly working myself out of a minor slough of despond, and my number of unread items ballooned to 415.

And I didn’t read them all in a day. Or a weekend. Or a week. It’s taken several weeks to slowly, slowly get to zero.

Part of it is my own fault; I fret that I might miss anything. Also, I’ve carefully selected and regularly cull the sites I read. Most of the stuff on my to-read list is stuff I actually WANT to read. And some of it, as from The Morning News or Arts and Letters Daily, can be long and challenging. So I skimmed what I needed to skim. Skipped what I could skip. Made time for things that took time. And I’ve finally made it back to zero unread items.

Now I just need to do this every day. Wish me luck.

I do so love a good arbitrary deadline. Some of the folks from The Morning News propose reading poor, dead David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. Four writers who’ve never read it are guides, with other guest experts joining them along the way. They start 6/21 at summer solstice, and ends 9/22 at the autumn equinox. It works out to about 75 pages a week. Totally do-able, no?

Speaking of chunky classics, David Copperfield is the selection for the next book club (real and virtual) at Semicolon. Sherry does the online book world a great service every week by hosting a Saturday Review of Books, where readers can share links to what they’ve written, and find other blogs by other readers.

After weeks of drowning in unread posts at other sites and blogs, I am DONE! Caught up! Whew!

I had fun doing it. I have whittled down the sites I follow to those that entertain, inform and/or educate me. The volume of unread material was daunting, but reading it was still a joy.

I didn’t get the Google Reader magic message, “You have no unread items,” though, since I still have some Sepinwall reviews of episodes I haven’t watched of Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Dollhouse and Breaking Bad.

But watching those shows, and reading their reviews, and trying to keep up and not get so weeded again with my online reading? Those are all to be done some other day.

At The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Geoffrey K. Pullum declines to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style:

The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can’t help it, because they don’t know how to identify what they condemn.

I never quite “got” The Elements of Style. I was amused by its cranky-old-man tone, but still couldn’t fathom much difference between “that” and “which” except “which” is used after a comma and “that” is not. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut)

Alan Moore and Frank Miller have done laudable things for the comics world, but I suspect that their dark work in the 80’s (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke) helped scuttle comics as reading material for kids. Darker and with adult themes, comics of the 80’s and beyond earned a wider audience and widespread critical acclaim. But comics also seemed to lose their roots as the coveted items from the grocery store bought with allowance money. Yes, Archie and the Ducks were still out there, but the plethora of superhero comics and popular adaptations that I remember as a kid all but disappeared.

I’ve been pleased to see more young reader and all ages books on the shelves of the comic shop. Yesterday I was happily surprised to see three titles from imprint Boom! Kids comics, all for young children. My two sons, 3yo Guppy and 5yo Drake, were thrilled, and have been carrying them around ever since. We got Cars, The Incredibles, and The Muppet Show. More titles are coming and all with be ongoing. And clearly demand is out there; the titles sold out immediately to retailers, though they can still be found in stores.

Additionally, Toon Books has put out some wonderful hardcover comic books for kids. By request, I read Luke on the Loose, by kid favorite Harry Bliss (of Diary of a Spider, Worm and Fly) and Stinky by Eleanor Davis, umpteen times last week.

If you and your child are looking to expand horizons, check out some of these new titles and books. The mainstream media spent much of the last three decades being shocked that comics aren’t just for kids anymore; they missed that comics often weren’t for kids anymore. Perhaps a true all-ages revolution has begun.

As the weeks of 2009 went by, I didn’t see new reviews in Entertainment Weekly by Jennifer Reese, my favorite book reviewer. I emailed her to find out if she was still at EW and learned she was laid off at the end of last year. That explains why I’ve been so disappointed in the book reviews this year.

The good news is you can find Reese a couple places on the web. She’s a contributor at the National Book Critics Circle site and blog, and at NPR’s “Books We Like.” She also has a cooking/baking blog, Tipsy Baker.

Susan Meddaugh’s Martha Speaks and its sequels became the basis for the current PBS Kids show–one of the better ones that’s more watchable for parents, in my opinion. Our family discovered the TV show first, then sought out the books from our library. Thus far, 5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy have enjoyed Martha Blah Blah, Martha Calling, though they don’t like Martha Walks the Dog, which has a mean, big dog. But we all enjoy Perfectly Martha, my favorite.

Martha is a dog who learns to speak English after she eats alphabet soup and the letters go to her brain. When a shifty man comes to town and promises dog owners he can train the pets to be perfect pups in a day, Martha is suspicious.

“Hmmmph!” Martha said to Skits. “Dogs are perfect already.”

Clever Martha figures out the scam, and goes about fixing things in her own talkative, assertive manner. She is a charming, capable heroine, and this book seems especially aimed at dog owners who love their pets, quirks and all. My sister Sydney would love it.

I can’t remember where I first came across a recommendation for Holly Keller’s Farfallina and Marcel, but it’s 3yo Guppy’s current favorite book. A caterpillar named Farfallina and a gosling named Marcel become friends, then are separated one day:

But one day Farfallina was not herself.

I’m not sick,” she told Marcel,

“just a little uncomfortable.

I need to climb up onto a branch and rest for a while.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Marcel called

as Farfallina made her way up the tree.

Marcel does wait, but as most parents know, Farfallina isn’t coming down immediately; there is a note at the beginning about metamorphosis. Marcel eventually gives up and returns to his pond. Farfallina wakes and looks for Marcel, but he is gone. The friends are sad at the loss, and don’t even recognize each other when they do meet again, though they eventually discover the truth.

Keller’s watercolors are simple and lovely, perfectly suited to this sweet, engaging tale of friendship that survives through change.

At the Times Online, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which I always confuse–understandably, I think–with David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green) gives ten rules for life in a random world. (Link from Boing Boing)

“Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.”

Longtime reader and email correspondent Holly, of the blog On My Bookshelf, kindly gave this blog a butterfly award. I’m supposed to post the butterfly visual and list other sites, but I’m just terrible at this kind of thing. Thank you, Holly, and please accept my apologies for being lame. Everyone else, go check out Holly’s blog.

Carrie, of the blog Books and Movies, tagged me in a meme about the excuses we use when we’re behind on reading, particularly the books on our shelves. I’m also terrible at memes. I replied in her comments to the post, but I forgot to mention that I often give movies precedence over books and later regret it. Go check out Carrie’s blog, too.

Finally, as always, I apologize because I get and read all your comments but don’t always have time to comment or email back. I do read and enjoy every one, and will try to do better this year about keeping up, because I really value the email pen pals I’ve gained here.

Oh, I am filled with geek joy. Not for the NCAA tournament, but for the Morning News Tournament of Books 2009! They’ve published the contenders (see below), and you can become a fan at Facebook.

Care to join me in nerdishly obsessing over some of the best books of last year? I read along with the tournament last year, and found some of my favorite books of the year. I’ve only read one from this year’s list–My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru–but it was a good one. And several others were already on my TBR radar. I’m off to scan reviews and load up my library request queue.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

2666, Roberto Bolano

A Partisan’s Daughter, Louis de Bernieres

The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon

My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen

The Dart League King, Keith Morris

A Mercy, Toni Morrison

Steer Towards Rock, Fae Myenne Ng

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

City of Refuge, Tom Piazza

Home, Marilynne Robinson

Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas

Over at Game Theorist, Joshua Gans writes about the Slate article, “Reading isn’t Fundamental.” Gans believes the article starts well, by noting the concern some parents have seeing other kids read before theirs do. He thinks the article does well to point out that reading is a learned, unnatural skill with many variables. The Slate article, though, goes on to offer suggestions on teaching kids to read, a gaffe Gans adroitly points out:

one would think that the Slate article might be a call for rationality and an alleviation of blame. No such luck. Right away it falls into a standard trap: children learn to read at different rates (a good true fact) and if parents are worried here is a thousand things you can do to overcome it (a bad conclusion).

Gans makes the sharp and useful distinction between reading and communication:

The issue is not ‘love of books’ but ‘love of communication’ and reading is just a part of that. You need to read to communicate in society and that is the primary consideration.

My own anecdotal experience backs up his analysis. 5+yo Drake has been reading for about a year, but his early reading is not reflective of his communication skills; in fact, they seem to be inversely related. His communication skills right now, especially with peers and in periods of stress and transition, are relatively delayed, and this has resulted in difficulties both at home and at preschool.

I echo Gans’ conclusion to other parents. Don’t push early reading or be overly impressed by it, since it may in fact run counter to the more useful and important skills of general communication. I’d go further to say that playing with kids (something I’m not good at) is likely to be better for development than reading to them (something I do all the time).

Michelle Slatella, in the NYT, on reading like a girl:

But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.

Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds – any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch – and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.

The link is from Mental Multivitamin, who accompanies it with a (qualified) book recommendation. Mmv wonders, “Can you still read like a girl?”

Still? I never _stopped_ reading like a girl: one book at a time, fiction preferred because of its transporting qualities. I’m a more critical reader than I was as a girl, and more selective. But I’m no less ardent. I often distinguish between books I love, especially ones that aren’t necessarily great, and ones that are good, even great, but that I don’t love.

Hey folks! I’m interviewed over at Minnesota Reads, a great local reader resource, by Jodi, who also blogs at I Will Dare. It’s six short questions, and I had fun answering them; click over to see which fictional characters and author I have crushes on.

From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Arden 1995, ed. Lothian and Craik):

Duke.

There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much: they lack retention. (ll. 94-97)

Viola.

We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will: for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (ll. 117-19)

From Austen’s Persuasion:

Captain Harville:

I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bering most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.

Anne Elliott:

Your feelings may be the strongest, but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.

In Twelfth Night, Viola is a woman dressed as a man, in love with the Duke, who is in love with Olivia, who in turn is in love with Viola’s male persona. Viola’s point is proved later, when the Duke learns that she’s a woman, and immediately appears to forget his “love” for Olivia, and instead declares for Viola.

In Persuasion, however, the love of woman (Anne Elliott) and man (Captain Wentworth) are portrayed as equally enduring. Interestingly, Captain Harville’s sea metaphor can refer both to his and Captain Wentworth’s naval experience, as well as to Twelfth Night’s shipwreck that separated Viola from her twin, Sebastian.

Joanna Weiss on the problems of sanitized fairy tales, a la Disney:

Rich in allegory, endlessly adaptable, fairy tales emerged as a framework for talking about social issues. When we remove the difficult parts - and effectively do away with the stories themselves - we’re losing a surprisingly useful common language.

(Link from Blog of a Bookslut) I recently found Angela Carter’s collection for children, Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, at our library. I’m not sure 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy have the attention span, but I know these won’t be toothless tales.

Found by my husband G. Grod, the Hamlet weblog.

Mark Harris at Entertainment Weekly writes about what piles up on his DVR: quality programs he finds himself unable or unwilling to watch, instead turning to shorter, lighter fare.

The oldest movie on our Tivo is Guys and Dolls (1955)–three hours long, and recorded at least a year and a half ago during Oscar month at Turner Classic Movies. There never seems to be enough time, or the right mood, for a 3-hour 50’s musical.

As Harris notes, the same reluctance applies to books and music. I wonder, how many others besides me are feeling bad that they’d not yet read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? It’s been on my shelf for a decade.

There’s been a lot of noise lately about whether the information is making us, people in general and students in particular, stupid. Helpfully, the Chronicle of Higher Ed collected links to many recent articles and followed it with another article suggesting the solution is to support teachers, not vilify the digital age. (Links from Arts & Letters Daily)

As with many (most?) internet kerfuffles, I think the problem is blown out of proportion by the bloviation, and the answer’s pretty simple. Is Google/internet/lack of liberal arts/overemphasis on liberal arts/etc. making us stupid?

Only if we let it.

Google, blogs and feeds are part of my reading, writing and research life. Since graduate school, I’ve become an autodidact, learning on my own about subjects that interest and are relevant to me. The internet and its increased presence has been, and continues to be, an important part of this learning process. Even more important, though, is and always has been, reading full texts. Reading things about the texts. Thinking about them. And then finding out what others think about them. For the latter, the internet is an invaluable resource, as a supplement to, not a substitute for, real-time, in-person interaction.a v

As in many aspects of life, variety contributes to a balanced experience. The internet and Google are tools, not the toolbox.

To borrow a phrase from Mental Multivitamin: Read. Think. Learn.

I’d add, “in all the ways we can.”

In the short story “A Night at the Fair,” Fitzgerald described over eighty years ago what so many people still experience today at the Minnesota State Fair. I was surprised and delighted to find that much about the fair hasn’t changed.

The Magnificent Fair

The two cities were separated only by a thin well-bridged river; their tails curling over the banks met and mingled, and at the juncture, under the jealous eye of each, lay, every fall, the State Fair. Because of this advantageous position, and because of the agricultural eminence of the state, the fair was one of the most magnificent in America. There were immense exhibits of grain, livestock and farming machinery…a grand exhibition of fireworks…took place in the Grand Concourse every night.

Boys at the Fair

At the late afternoon of a hot September day two boys of fifteen, somewhat replete with food and pop, and fatigued by eight hours of constant motion, issued from the Penny Arcade.

Sensations of the Fair

The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of pop corn and peanuts, molasses and dust and cooking Wienerwurst and a not- unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.

Night at the Fair

Once again the fair–but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.

Yes, many things have changed. There are no aeroplanes, horse races or hoochie-coochie shows. And the wienerwurst has been replaced by the Pronto Pup (from Minnesota), the corn dog (an Iowa import), and the absolutely delicious pork-chop-on-a-stick. But the sights, the smells, and the fair as an event–all these abide.