So Many Books...

10:10 pm - Real life and (an LJ) one for the DSM...

Feel free to skip. I'm not posting so much because I think this is likely to be of interest, as out of a strong sense that synchronicity gave me a helping hand this morning and I need to respond with due gratitude. (And so possibly help someone else.)

The helping hand came by way of reading Emma Bull/coffeem's post about being given her brain back by an anti-depressant and thinking 'Damn - her 'before' describes exactly how I feel'. (Well, obvously - without the writing ability!) And this when I already had an appointment for this afternoon with my GP, primarily to talk about the ongoing headache treatment slog, but at which I was seriously considering echoing Emma's 'Give me hormones'.

No prizes for guessing what prescription I have now and what I don't have. (If you haven't read her post and guess - you get a prize for the guessing, but lose it again for not reading the post, which is fantastic.) And you know what? I've known for a while that I was depressed and it wasn't getting better and I should just admit it and do something about it. The one purely undistorted bit of thinking going on was the knowledge that what I have is NOT a severe depression - I've seen those and do know. The rest was the kind of rubbish that unfortunately depression tends to bring: because other people have real depression, it's just self-indulgent or weak for me to get drugs when I should be able to cope without them. Or the other classic variant, which is that this is just more evidence for how useless a bit of humanity I am, when others etc, etc. (Hey, one ability even I won't deny is my ability to feel good guilt.)

I never got to the point that Emma describes of thinking it perfectly reasonable to believe that dying would solve everything. I just felt like an important fuse somewhere had been loaded and loaded and loaded and finally blew, and that left all the other circuits firing desperately, but not enough to make things run right. And then everything kept feeding back, so I'd look at all the things I should do and couldn't get the energy to do and feel even more useless and hopeless and inadequate, and then not manage to do something that used to be fine and feel more and more useless and without energy and sink a bit further on every iteration...

So, here's the LJ diagnostic tool. There's a point when your desire to see what your interesting, witty friends have to say about books, the world, writing, reading, the universe and everything is overlaid with such a heavy, dark cloud that it feels a huge physical effort to look at your friends' page. And it's because every line that makes you laugh or think or celebrate for someone else is also whispering that you're boring and stupid and have nothing to say of any interest and certainly haven't accomplished anything like they have. That's not a good place, and time to be sensible and see if you can't shut that whisper the hell up.

It shouldn't need to be said, but it does - I am well aware that I'm the luckiest person alive, in many ways - and none of this is anybody else's fault. (steepholm? A bloody miracle. Becca and Younger Daughter? Awesomeness personified.) And I'm not writing this looking for sympathy, which I certainly don't deserve! I'm also painfully aware that many on my flist have or have had much more severe depression and this could seem like whining about nothing. I'm just writing this because depression is still something about which horrendously stupid things are said by people who should know better, and I felt a passing impulse to say nothing because I was ashamed, which is horrendously stupid. And because, well - it seems really, really rude to ignore Synchronicity, whether she offers help by tapping you gently on the shoulder or whacking you on the head.

09:10 pm - More Sutcliff...

I totally jumped the Roman Britain ship on Sunday, when a headache made me feel I couldn't bear one more page of the book steepholm chained me to with chains of burning pain...   (Okay, he did no such thing at all, but the burning pain part is all too true.)  Honestly - the wretched book is full of scenes in which our druid wannabe feisty girl heroine says things like "Oh Goddess, I will dance this sexy dance among the sacred trees to honour you in your eco-friendliness, as I did last moon and the moon before, though I could better honour you and save our Blessed Mother Earth if my hair curled like the flaming red curls of the warrior princess Sabrina, who should really marry my lame companion (damn! - he noticed my sexy dance!) and they can ride off together on the Mare Goddess, Epona, with all of Britain riding behind them to fight the evil Romans at whom I throw rocks and deep curses like 'Bastards!', united by his sensible words about presenting a United Front and not fighting each other - well, all of Britain except his nasty betraying uncle who's a Shadow Master really, and Caligula's boot-boy (bovver!) to boot, and - wait, the Sun God is almost at his zenith and I must go use the privy first!"  BLEH. 

Where was I? Oh, right, on Sunday, read Carolyn MacCullough's Saving Henry, which I loved, as much as I loved Drawing the Ocean, instead of reading the blech book.  (Will try to say more about both, as they deserve it.) And then I got a really bad headache yesterday, and cracked out Sutcliff's Blood Feud, which is one I picked up a few years ago, rather than a childhood favourite.  There was a Thames TV production, which I'd love to get hold of and watch (or hear about, if anyone saw it.  It was called Sea Dragon, and came out in 1990, I think.)

The thing which really struck me about it was that it's in essence - if a very boiled-down essence - giving the story to Esca from Eagle of the Ninth, though over a very different landscape and about 800-some years later.  steepholm and I noticed on our recent Eagle reread, the total lack of the conflict one might expect Esca to feel about helping Marcus retrieve the Eagle and so prevent its ever being used against the Roman forces by the British tribes.  His one loyalty is to Marcus, as is made very clear - and being killed in helping him would not be loss because 'I have shared the hunting with my brother, and it has been a good hunting'. While Marcus is 'keeping faith' with his father, the Legion and Rome, Esca is sharing the hunting with him, and that's enough.

In Blood Feud, Jestyn (later called Jestyn Englishman) is sold into slavery (in Dublin, no less!) and bought by a Viking, Thormod, who seems to do it pretty much on a whim, although there is one moment of eye-catching like the one between Marcus and Esca at the Saturnalia Games (though not nearly as intense).  When Thormod and his ship-mates are planning to go home, Jestyn realises with desperation that he can bear being owned by Thormod, but not by anyone else.  Thormod frees him and then offers him the choice of going back with him to Denmark, and that's it.  There's quite a bit of mention of the feeling of being shoulder-to-shoulder with Thormod, but essentially Jestyn follows him - back to Denmark, where they become blood brothers (in a startlingly slashy ritual), and then head off to Constantinople to fulfill the blood feud - kill or be killed by two brothers who have killed Thormod's father.  And he never really feels the fight as his own, any more than he feels the desire to become a fighter, or than he wants to worship the 'many gods' in the Norse 'god-house' with Thormod instead of his own, one God.  But he does everything without any of the conflict you'd expect him to feel about allowing Thormod's beliefs to supersede all his own.  (This doesn't cover the end of the book, btw, so no spoilers).

I found it fascinating in light of Esca, and interesting in being both a very typical Sutcliff (strong male friendship; characters displaced or with their world changing - often catastrophically - around them; someone wounded and left crippled by it; a healer;society with conflicting or clashing ideologies or peoples) and a quite different one, in only briefly - and rather vaguely - having a British setting.  This one ends in Constantinople, where Jestyn permanently settles, and although he says he remembers his childhood home, especially when spring twilights 'turn the heart homeward', definitively states that 'Home is not Place but People', which surely isn't a typical Sutcliffian sentiment?

11:45 pm

Especially for steepholm - more insightful commentary on Prince Caspian, via myntti.

Warning: 'This is not sexy talk!' and 'I see that this is not going to be the most subtle royal assassination in the world' would have made me snort tea, had I happened to be drinking it when reading this, even after a start to the morning which involved a large glass bowl containing chicken soup leaping from the fridge to smash itself into thousands of tiny shards, well covered in delicious-smelling (to the hounds) chickeney goodness, before I'd had my first cup of tea. AND I haven't even seen either film yet...

07:47 pm - Hold on (With multiple meanings, for greater value!)

The first two relate to birthday CDs burned for me by the girls. Becca did one called "Fire and Hemlock", complete with the Nowhere, New Hero etc sections. Some great songs on it, though she's told me I have to use my brain such as it is atm, and figure out some of the trickier songs and how they relate to the book. But completely independently Younger Daughter made me an album called 'Hold On', and if you don't know how that relates to Fire and Hemlock, I think there's some reading you might want to do. (The titles don't all fit, but include: 'We Rule the School'; 'You Really Got a Hold on Me'; 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and 'Hold On, Hold On'. Cool, eh?)

Another meaning may be self-admonition, and yet another just verification that I will be back and book-talking soon - Monday, I hope. Unless the rain washes away this part of the world completely by then, in which case, all bets are off. (Yes, I know people outside the British Isles think it rains here all the time anyway, but it honestly doesn't. This has been unreal, and is threatening brain-rot of the worst sort, along with the other things that are mouldering away.)

Just about to finish off reread number umpteen of Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth. This was a co-ordinated read with steepholm and was done with intent. I've been fascinated at the different perspectives the book offers - this time I've been keeping an eye on how she manages to do what's really a pretty neat trick and ease the reader into accepting that the Romans in early Britain were to become 'us' rather than remaining hated invader. I've always loved the wonderful way she shows the possibility of respect between individuals of very different, often hostile, groups, but now I think she does something a little different here with the British tribes (of the North, anyway) as groups.

On a silly note, there's a picture (Walter Hodges, of course) which is supposed to show an 'unforgettable figure of nightmare beauty, naked and superb'.



It looks far more 'Hey dudes, OK if I crash here tonight?' to me. (This copy is yours BTW, sartorias.)

On which note - check out another unforgettable figure - no nightmare to the beauty this time! (ETA - you have to click on the link, not use the snapshot. No idea why the pics are different. Charlie's updated his website for summer. Dublin regulars might have recognised the background for the original photo, but the cropped version would be tricky.) (Hint: we were on our way to a bookshop, for a change...)

09:26 pm - Debbie Harry Sings in French

Honestly - I was somewhere between Georgiana and Darcy (that's eager and determined to be pleased respectively) on this one, in large part because of the typically thoughtful review on Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which I read with interest. I'm certainly all in favour of any YA book which "introduces shades of gray into the black-and-white ideas of sexuality and gender", as the jacket-flap description of this book says it does. Seriously in favour. But then I read it... At first I thought the problems were merely the sort that could be overlooked as first novel narrative ones, such as the excessive number of issues packed into a too short book, and then I found myself saying 'Well, that could happen like that, if unlikely' -- and saying it again and again. I finished and was waiting to write it up until Wendy got a chance to finish and kept coming back to some of the potential problems I'd seen, and now am considerably on the far side of 'it's so well-intentioned that its technical flaws make it disappointing but no more'. Can you imagine how Georgiana would have felt had she been displeased with Elizabeth?

12:18 pm - Group read!

Wendy of Blog from the Windowsill posted in her wrap-up for the 48 Hour Challenge that she was thinking of doing mini weekly challenges year-long, which I thought was a great idea, and then suggested we do a co-ordinated read.  So, we're both reading Debbie Harry Sings in French atm, and then we'll....   Well, not sure exactly what's next.  Book-talking, definitely.

(I was thinking of a big picture, but the cover?  Do not like.)

10:08 pm - Question (arising from K.V. Johansen's *Nightwalker*)

Just finished this last night, and I liked it quite a bit, but didn't feel a burning love.  I was telling steepholm  that I thought the way the humans - who have always proclaimed the Nightwalkers (magic users) to be EVIL - must be destroyed! - burn them all!  etc - actually turn out to be the land-stealers, torturers and murderers of long standing themselves - a bit less subtle than it might be.  Actually, I'm not sure I told him that at all, but I definitely told him that it belonged to a large group of books in which there is one story told by society, and that is that some group or other is inferior, dangerous or pure evil.  And of course the whole plot-line leads the protagonist to find out that at best, the group feels the same about his/her people or the whole thing is reversed.  But having come up with Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, and together managing Diana Wynne Jones' Power of Three, I blanked out, while remaining sure there are gazillions of books which do something like this. 

Help?

Only interested in fantasy, and only in children's or YA.  And only in a society in which the prejudice is against a whole group of people (so I'm not talking about individual prejudice as in Crown Duel or DWJ's The Ogre Downstairs). Left Hand of Darkness territory. 

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher, maybe.  (I did think of the Book of the Crow series, which -- well, complicated a bit, but sort of work.)
 
Shannon Hale in Enna Burning and River Secrets?  Not sure about the group aspect, though the number of individuals with magic seems to be growing with each successive book.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy? (It's scary how much I've forgotten about that.) Not sure if it's more your standard corrupt politicians (who happen to have got more power through being magicians) eventually being shown to be corrupt ,which isn't what I'm looking for.

Patricia Wrede's Dragons series?  It's sort of a toss-up between those being inverted fairy tales, which isn't quite what I'm thinking of, and  working perfectly, with the dragons, princes and witches of those fairy tales being totally misrepresented. 

Mercedes Lackey does this in spades, I suspect, but I can't remember whether the books of hers I borrowed were adult or YA. (Uh, borrowed from dorianegray, not borrowed from Mercedes Lackey!)

Blank. Blank. Blank. But still sure about the gazillions.

01:50 pm - People are strange. (You said it, Thomas Lynn.)

Not referring to the 'No' vote Thursday, which I consider quite un-strange, actually, despite its leaving me in bed (purely figuratively speaking) with some very strange company.  No, this post is in the 'but most of it's all about me'* class, and I'm referring to my neighbours and in particular, the one in the house next to me in the terrace, and her response to the news (discovered at the cost of many hundreds of Euro, three more days of blocked sewer hell, headaches, tears, and more headaches) that the broken pipe was actually in her back garden, which is the only place it can be fixed, though she has never experienced any problems and probably never would.  She couldn't have been nicer AND said she refused to worry about it because we'd sort it out between us and she doesn't worry anymore. The neighbour who'd always been easy-going and friendly, on the other hand, had earlier been quite horrible.

So, despite the relief headache's expected appearance, I've started my catch-up on all matters bloggey by reading all missed flist posts, and am determined to get the last book of the 48 Hour Challenge done so I can finally do the 'Why I read YA' ramble I've been thinking about for a bit.  The book is Sarah Dessen's The Truth about Forever, and the post is 'most of it's all about me' because I got hit hard enough by the 'gotcha' of recognition that I'm not all that able to be terribly objective about the book itself.

The only other book I've ever read which gave me that same grab of startled self-recognition was another Sarah Dessen, Just Listen, and in neither case was it the circumstances, though those were far closer in The Truth about Forever than in Just Listen, but something about the description of the exact way in which the character responded which did it.  It was certainly more than the 'Oh, that character takes out as many library books as she's allowed each visit? Just like me' type of similarity. And somehow it also went beyond the psychology text-book level of cause-and-effect (girl has sudden death of a parent  => tries to control everything by being perfect) to feel really right to me.  There was a fair amount that I thought was good about the different responses to loss (Macy's father had a heart attack, Bert's & Wes's mother/Delia's sister, died of breast cancer) throughout. But the line that really got to me was Macy's saying - in response to being told not to be afraid but to be alive - "it's the same thing". Being afraid and being alive are the same thing.  It took years after my father's death for me even to be able to understand the extent to which I felt that way, but I'd been living it all the same.

Dear Samuel Taylor C.,
Enclosed is some verse. It could be
     That there's rather too much
     About Nature and such
But most of it's all about me.

Ron Rubin

08:43 pm - 2 X Book snippets

Still haven't been able to catch up on reading flist or bloglines, let alone extra blogs from the 48 Hr Challenge, and feeling very apologetic.  Not being rude on purpose, honestly!

Two quick things - one about the current read - Darkside, by Tom Becker.  I quite like the cover, if the book hasn't totally blown me away yet.  Admittedly, not a good time to be reading about crossings over through filthy sewers, into dark and dangerous places where people turn on you for no good reason at all...  Sorry. It's been a tough couple of days.

   Anyway (if anyone figures out a way to fix LJ's annoying image/text scrunching, please tell me, okay?) last night, I turned off the light after reading a bit, put the book down beside me in bed as I usually do, and realised the thing was shining.  Yup - the front is all covered in glow-in-the-dark paint.  Tons of it too, as I eventually turned it over, and light came leaking out underneath in the most eerie way. 

08:55 pm - Challenge packed away for another year...

and I should be having a lovely time congratulating the winners with their amazing results, reading all the reviews and enjoying the whole afterglow thing.  Instead, I'm up to my knees in ...  No, I'll put this more politely, if possible.  This Victorian house is showing her age in the drainage department, and we're stuck with running up to my mother's for personal washing, and avoiding ... well, no more details needed, I'm sure!  Having behaved perfectly for a year, it seems unkind in the extreme that it had to happen in the middle of Y.D.'s Leaving Cert.  (Horrendously long day tomorrow, with her most important exam in the afternoon, so good thoughts would be appreciated again!)

I'll catch up on LJ and blogs, including other challenge participants' when and if I get this sorted.  And my left eye stops twitching constantly... 

08:34 am - 48 Hour Wrap-up

The numbers:

Hours spent reading - 21 hours, 45 minutes

Books read - 5 and just over three-quarters (of Sarah Dessen's The Truth about Forever)

Pages read - a lot more than I normally would have read in the time, but enough fewer than many doing the Challenge that it's pointless to count.

Number of pairs of dead parents - 2 (two apiece in The Penderwicks on G. St and The Truth about Forever, which I thought odd if perhaps not that striking to others)

Number of birthday wishes missed - just 1, but it's MotherReader's, so hardly insignificant. Happy birthday!

The uncrunched:

I was pleased that I did just what I'd said on the tin, and didn't worry about not reading for time spent on family stuff of whatever type, but didn't spend any time I could have been reading/blogging on other fritterings.  I knew I'd get through far fewer books in the time spent than a lot of people, so tried not to worry about it. (But still did a bit, inevitably.)

Not going to get all emo on your poor selves, but the mix of reading actual books, reading about books and writing about them is a complicated one, at least for me. Sometimes it's a cheerful sense of being part of a loose online community of people who love books (especially, though not exclusively, children's and teen) and share recommendations and just enjoy talking about books with people all around the world and sometimes there are silly amounts of energy spent worrying about having or 'deserving' a place in that community, however loose it is.  </over-share>

Other than that, I enjoyed the opportunity to do something like this in company with a bunch of great readers, and many thanks to MotherReader for organizing it again!  It may take a while to have a look at the huge number of books that were read and talked about by the combined forces, but it's something to look forward to.

Last of my reflections about the weekend: I have been alerted to the fact that I failed pretty miserably to show Fly on the Wall's delights, and have rectified that with the alerter, but am sorry my tiredness/headacheyness yesterday afternoon had me insufficiently emphasizing the fact that this isn't just a kind of female-oriented Doing It [shudder], even with the addition of real humour.  I didn't bother trying to defend the book from the 'Pornography!' cries, as there isn't much point - though it's definitely a teen book rather than one for younger children. But ultimately, it's only about the guys' bodies in as much as everyone has a relationship with their own body, and that's as individual, and potentially impossible to discern unless you are in Gretchen's situation, in boys as it is in girls (and adults, of course).  And Gretchen's original wish to be a fly on the wall was in order to understand guys a bit, and for her that pretty naturally went through the curious -->horrified and enthusiastic focus on their nekkidness stage before it could get to the more complex understanding, which it did.  This is E. Lockhart, after all, and the observation and description of human behaviour is almost guaranteed to be much better than average.

08:55 pm - Book five and the end for me...

My 48 hours aren't actually up until 11, so two more hours to go, but I'm going to post this and then call it quits, doing my final tally of hours and books read tomorrow morning, while Younger Daughter is doing maths paper 2.  (Only 1 in 5 leaving cert students are doing honours maths, I discovered yesterday, which I thought surprisingly low.)

Anyway, my fifth finished book was Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and I really, seriously can't think of anything new - or needful - to say about it, given its fame.  I hadn't realised that it ended so abruptly, and unfinished-feelingly, though I knew little about it before starting, and maybe that was just me, and I could have got the second book two, so I should have been warned by that at least.  But it was very impressive, and very well done, and I liked the artwork, and despite apparently not being a graphic novel type of person, I was still very glad to have read it. 

That's all I've got (aside from an oncoming flattening headache) for now - sorry! 

04:12 pm - Book four and running out of steam....

Book-talking steam, that is, not the reading.  Anyway, despite my often-professed huge admiration for E. Lockhart, the only book of hers I'd not got hold of was Fly on the Wall, though I'm not sure where I saw the things about it that stopped me grabbing it.  Possibly it was someone (not a teen, at a wild guess) who disapproved of the constant discussion of all the 'gherkins' Gretchen sees during her week as a fly in the boy's locker room at her school.  Or also possibly, it was someone who found her admitted objectification of the boys' bodies she sees there objectionable - she does give grades, and a 'classification chart of the male booty'. But in a way it was nice to have this as a totally unexpected surprise, as I hadn't even realised it was published over here, much less was I expecting to find it when I did my short detour into the bookshop yesterday while restocking on other kinds of provisions...

I can see that some people would find the book offensive - and perhaps if they weren't offended by Gretchen's initial enthusiastically voyeuristic reaction to the naked male bodies she gets to see when she inexplicably finds herself waking up as a (literal) fly on the wall, they'd find the 'gherkins' and 'biscuits' and 'booty' offensive in the other way.  I actually thought at first that 'gherkin' was just the way a teen might talk to herself, though I've no idea if that actually is an equivalent of something like 'willy' over here, but when the boys started using it too, thought it was probably not just that.  But though it could have been annoyingly euphemistic, I thought it was worked quite well as done here. 

 When the first guy comes into the locker room, he promptly strips off, and Gretchen explains how she's never seen a naked guy really, aside from her father, who stopped letting her into the bathroom with him 10 years ago, and flies down for 'close-up gherkin-information-gathering right away'. And after a lot of observing, and some lusting, and a bit of panicking over her transformation and how she'll get back to being human, and no 'close-up' of the guy on whom she has a crush (who turns out to be really insecure about his body), she starts focusing more on the interactions between the guys, and learns something about her best friend - and herself - she didn't expect to.

The first section of the book is called 'life as an artificial redhead' - Gretchen, (whose Chinese father and Jewish mother have just told her they're divorcing), goes to a special arty school in Manhattan, where the only thing you can't do is appear normal, though there's a depressingly proscriptive nature to all that 'difference', which goes from the hair/clothing of the students to the inability of her art teacher to accept Gretchen's comic-book style drawing, to a lot of homophobic talk (more significant in some guys than in others, but finally challenged in a great way by one of them).  The second section, 'life as a vermin', obviously tells of the time she spends as a fly.  The third, 'life as a superhero' covers from when she wakes up in her own bed, no longer a fly, and I thought the way the comic-book theme was brought in to the end was very clever.  Nicely ironic too, and Gretchen's ability to say what she's been wanting to say all along, both in her drawing class, and to the guy she likes made for a funny and cheerful ending.  She's a genuinely nice kid, though she's got a bit stuck into self-absorbed shyness and self-consciousness at the beginning of the book, and I liked her and the guy she likes a lot, and there was that super-intelligent observance of social interactions E. Lockhart does so well, so I was well-satisfied with this one.

11:50 am - The Diamond of Drury Lane

Well, I've read worse.  Far worse.

Won't say much more (oh yes - The Diamond of Drury Lane, by Julia Golding) than that, but I do wonder how it won the Nestlé Children's Book Prize, the Waterstone's Children Book Prize, and was on the shortlist for the Costa Children's Book Award.  (I was stunned to see that Julia Golding had had 10 books published in two years, and I've no idea if that discovery added to my frustrated feeling that she could have done a better job on it had she really worked at it.)

It's all rollicking enough, in a Georgian London sort of way, with our heroine, Cat Royal, living in the Theatre Royal where she was abandoned as a baby.  Add Sheridan - taking delivery of and protecting a diamond - Pedro, a young musician (talented enough to reduce all listeners to floods of tears, or instant emotional state of his choice) who's a freed slave - and Johnny, the handsome young prompt 'with a secret' - the Duke of something or other and his two very broadminded children, criminal gangs, oh, etc, etc...   I'd probably have taken it all much more warmly had Cat not repeatedly been praised for her intelligence and quick wit, and then behaved so stupidly.  Or had she not got time after time into a seriously dangerous situation, realised with a sinking heart that she'd now made an enemy and would no longer be able to go about in safety, only to trot off with whatever highly valuable/incriminating thing she wants to bring somewhere, shaking her red curls in disdain at the idea that the enemy would keep her from going where she wanted to, thank you very kindly!

Funnily enough, a passage which was a big bounce-off was another over-the-head-of-the-child-reader joke about Jane Austen, given that two posts ago I was saying how I'd enjoyed just that very thing in The Penderwicks on Gardam Street.  But this one--  Cat is invited by the Duke's daughter to come to the house with Pedro, to entertain (in an odd between employee and friend status), so she reads to the guests from her writing (implied to be the book we're reading -ish).  The Duke's daughter is 17, his son, Lord Francis, a couple of years younger, the guests all 'young people'.

"Well, it certainly was unorthodox," said a sweet-looking girl with a heart-shaped face. "Though perhaps the subject matter is a little unbecoming for a lady.  I would have expected Miss Royal to begin with some witty general observation, a wryly expressed universal truth, for example, on love and courtship - the usual themes for the female pen."

"Oh, Jane!" protested Lord Francis.  "How can you be so dull? We don't want none of that missish stuff."

09:44 pm - Sweethearts

I know I've already left a proper write-up for so long that I had to reread before writing one - not that rereading was in any way an onerous job - and you'd think that having just finished the blessed thing and having a lot of thoughts about it, not to mention a great desire to enthuse with a probably very wordy enthusing, I'd just write the definitive babble NOW.  But I'm going to leave some of it for later, because sartorias recently asked people why they read YA if they do, and I want to do a better job of answering that question than I did then and there, and Sara Zarr's Sweethearts is a very good book to discuss in the process. 

I wish I could remember whose review(s) of the book prompted me to read it, as I might have been less than totally convinced about it, with the title and the cover (although there's nothing wrong with the cover in itself, it still seems misleadingly pink and fluffy, which it both is and isn't, in reality), and even the description on the inside jacket might have left me a little wary.  It tells of 17 year old Jenna Vaughn, "popular, happy and dating", who used to be Jennifer Harris - a 'social outcast' with just one friend, Cameron, who disappeared when she was nine.  Although Jenna has transformed herself, and believes she's effectively killed off her old self, when Cameron suddenly reappears, both "are confronted with memories of their shared past".  Could have been -- well, it could have been a lot of beverages that might have been some readers' cuppas, but wouldn't have been mine.  In fact, I found it impressive, engaging, moving and a very good example of one of the reasons I read YA.

It's a book that is about memory, for one thing, and as Jenna says, "some memories are slippery".  She can't remember a lot of things about Cameron that she'd like to, though one of her clearest memories - of a terrifying encounter with his father on her 9th birthday - is impossible to shake, and is revealed to the reader gradually, in small pieces.  The build-up of tension doesn't feel at all manipulative though, as it's how Jenna allows herself to connect with her past self, when she does allow herself to.  Her description of the effort it takes to behave like a 'normal' person - to be the friend and the girlfriend she knows she's expected to be - of having observed 'from the outside' how she'd have to behave to be accepted - is truly moving.  Because it comes from her childhood, when she feels so wrong that Cameron's father's abusive comments, aimed at both her and Cameron, make her react like this:

... I wonder what is wrong with me that even Cameron's father can look at me and see the truth: that I'm ugly and fat and no one wants to be my friend.  It makes me feel guilty.  The fact that Cameron does want to be my friend somehow makes his dad act mean like this.  If I were thinner and prettier, if I had the right clothes like Jordana and Charity, then maybe it would make Cameron's dad see him in a different way.  A better way.

sartorias

12:08 pm - The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

I seem to do a great job of keeping the best books for my first read of these 48 Hour Challenges - even if I can only remember that last year's first was -- oh, all right, reviewing time is time well spent, and I shall try to find out whether it was just last year's Green Glass Sea that was a best first...   [few minutes later] - well, hunh.  First book of the 2006 Challenge was Hilary McKay's Caddy Ever After, which was not my favourite of the Casson family books, but I still enjoyed it a lot and it's -- relevant, perhaps -- to this book.  (But then a lot of kids' books are.)

Right, so The Penderwicks on Gardam Street.  I've realised that I never got around to doing a rave write-up about The Penderwicks, and I'm certainly not going to manage to do any kind of job on that now, but it's a book about a family (4 girls, aged from 12 down to 4, their father, and Hound) and it's a book about other children's books and it'll remind you of all your favourite children's family books - E. Nesbit and Enright's Melendys and Streatfield's familes and Edward Eager and The Swallows and Amazons and I'm sure I've forgotten a few.  (The two books inspired in me a mad impulse to reread every children's classic I'd ever read and enjoyed, in order to spot the allusions - was that tomato sandwich in the first a nod to Harriet the Spy? And the black watch Skye nearly buys in the hospital gift shop in the Prologue of The Penderwicks on Gardam Street - surely that's to the Fossils?  Or have I confused it with something else? And so on and so forth.)  I was left after reading the first deeply worried about the eldest, Rosalind, and her loving dependability and taking on of responsibility. This despite the fact that the Latin-spouting, mathematical father is a wonder, not a Victorian broken-hearted widower who neglects his girls.

The book proper starts the autumn after the first book, with the girls back home, and their Aunt Claire (the perfect aunt, despite what follows) coming to visit, with presents.  I started my 48 hours latish last night, and before turning off the light, had already marked two passages and entered that wonderful state of reading-happiness some books can give. 

So Rosalind handed out the packages.  Jane's was indeed books, six of them by Eva Ibbotson, one of her favorite authors. Skye got an impressive pair of binoculars, army issue and with night vision.  And Rosalind's gift was two sweaters, one white and one blue.

"Two!" she said. "Something is definitely wrong."

"And my books are all hardbound, and two of them I haven't read even once yet," added Jane. These must be Aunt Claire's dying gifts."

09:52 pm - 48 Hour Book Challenge...

... starting now!  I think. I'm having great difficulty figuring out whether there are as many hours between now and 48 hours from now and between tomorrow morning and 48 hours from then.  I mean available hours, so stick the scoffing back into a dark corner, please! And -- get nicer and less scoffy. If you were scoffing.

Anyway, the 48 Hour Challenge is well and truly on, although my participation is going to be quite curtailed this year, due to Younger Daughter's exams.  (3 days and 4 papers down, 11 days and 5 papers to go.  As long as there aren't mumps.  Yes, letter arrived from school the morning Y.D. had left for her first exam - mumps were around and 'your child has likely been exposed'.  The question of immunization is a rather complicated inter-continental one, but I think she's been covered.)

So, here's my challenge to myself.   For the next 48 hours (why not go for default and start when I've posted this instead of figuring out how to cram the extra few minutes' reading?) I will:

-Read only blogs of the other 48 Hour Challenged, and that only occasionally and probably when staring at the screen, wondering what to say in a 'review'. 
-Not visit Ravelry (unless for purely necessary reasons like finding notes I wrote about a WIP) (But I don't think I *have* any of   those which I'd need atm, so pretty much will Stay. Away. From. Ravelry.) 
-Not do any sudoku crossword puzzles or the daily Mensa puzzle which arrives by email.
-Not browse the pretty pretty yarns that fill the online shops, with their tempting soft merino-ness, or their handpainted coloured glory.  Leave those emails unopened!  (Ooh, what if there's a sale that only lasts for a day or two?  Or a store update by one of the Etsy sellers?  No.  Like Ravelry - will stay away.)

Somehow I've just noticed there's very little about books so far!  That's only because I'm clearing away the other things that aren't priorities, unlike the care and nurture of Y.D.'s stressed-out self... Really.  (It is interesting seeing how reading time is eaten away by computer time, though.)

-I will not toss aside the less-than-negligible usual amounts of cleaning and cooking this year as I have in past challenges, in order to keep house semi-habitable, at least.  And brain food! 
-I will plonk myself in front of TV or computer IF it will enhance Y.D.'s crashing at the end of her study day.  Other than that, I'd be much more likely to be on the computer than in front of the TV anyway, and that's taken care of above...

gair

gerald

steepholm

08:43 pm - Little Brother

For anyone coming here for the first time, I said last week that I loved Cory Doctorow's Little Brother - and that's where I'm starting this lengthy booktalk, as it bears repeating. Also I'm going to say some things about it which aren't so positive, and I want the love on record. As this is an intensely message-driven book, I'm also going to do a brief disclosure of my feelings on the political/ideological issues raised in it. I'll start by saying that I'm a US citizen as well as an Irish one, and that I have lived in both countries for very roughly equal amounts of time. If I wander into areas which are crititical of some matters US-ian, I do so as that citizen, who will be voting in November - voting Democrat, not incidentally, (though if there were a party more liberal than the Democrats, I'd definitely be there and happier). While living in the States, I was involved in various political - including Christian political - groups, such as the Freeze, protests over US policy in Central America, Bread for the World, and have had friends involved in the more radical Christian groups like the Ploughshares. If you dislike this type of political belief, you'll probably have little interest in the book OR this post, and that's fine.

Why bother boring people with this? Because, as I said, this is a book which I loved for its message and for the information in it - had there been no message or had it been one I thought trivial or misguided, I very much doubt I'd have had much time for the book. I also think the techno-geekery was fascinating, and delivered better here than it was in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, much as I liked that.

So, all that out of the way, a very brief over-view of the book, for those who might not have heard anything about it. Little Brother is set in the very near future, in San Francisco. (At least, I read it as the near future, and there was nothing to indicate it was any kind of alternate reality instead - with one possible exception, which I'll talk about later.) Its 17-year-old narrator, Marcus, is picked up in a massive crack-down by the Department of Homeland Security when there's a serious terrorist attack on the city. He and three friends are taken to a secret prison on a small island nearby where they're held without charge, without representation, and without even being allowed to notify their families that they're alive. After his release, he's watched, bugged and followed, more than everyone in the city is watched, but is able to fight back and enable others to fight the repressive and unjust DHS, finding himself most unexpectedly, the leader of a group of hackers, gamers, and geeks of various sorts.

emmaco said she'd wondered from what she heard whether the message over-powered the story, and that made me sit down and think - again - about that. I realised then that the parts of the book I liked most were when the narrative took however many pages it took and just explained the technical stuff, and my least favourite part of the book was Marcus's romantic relationship, which I found over-balanced the message. Okay, not quite. Also this is an entirely personal reaction, and for whatever reason, I really disliked Ange, and found her boring too. That's no literary opinion, though I doubt if anyone would make a claim for the book's greatness on aesthetic grounds alone. (Out of sheer curiousity, I'd love to know if there are others who felt the same way about the relationship, and as a secondary question, whether there's any male-female split over it.)

I have three less personal criticisms to make of the book, which I'll list and then go on about the first behind a cut. One is a narrative aside about the UK, which has no real place in the story, but seems to me to be worse than just pointless. The second is the whole 'Don't trust anyone over 25' thing, (started by Ange, I might add), which makes little sense in the context and seemed to me to be thrown in to enable the Good Social Studies teacher to have a free-and-open debate about civil liberties and personal freedom (after giving an impromptu lecture about the 60s), which of course has Consequences. And that in turn allows the introduction of yet another Mouthpiece of the Repressive Right - as obnoxious as any of them. That's the third criticism: I had no problem with most of the bad guys being unshaded Bad Guys, and think Marcus's dad's carefully-explained reaction to thinking Marcus is dead is extremely well done. But I do think the book would have benefitted from a bit more editing to get some of the speeches on both sides a little more realistic and a little less mouth-piecey. And the one teen who's a Bad Guy is so stereotypically so it's a little painful - wet face and all. (It's a good thing for Marcus he's clueless too, but still...)

( Cut for the odd British quote and discussion thereof )

Despite the criticisms, I still hope a lot of people read it, as I think a lot of people will enjoy it, or find it's got something that's thought-provoking or gripping or at very least, informative. And Cory Doctorow is just the definition of cool.

09:12 pm

Anyone who's enjoyed the perfect weather this Bank Holiday Monday should thank their nearest Leaving Cert student (Junior Cert at a pinch).  And if you don't happen to have one in mind, you can just thank Younger Daughter, who's been spending the last couple of weeks studying like mad.  No money necessary for the thanking, but good thoughts for intelligent exam setting and marking would be nice, not to mention endurance to get through the next couple of weeks.  English Paper I on Wednesday morning.  (Ooh - and a personal essay option on that paper would be excellent too.)

We were having a look at some past exam papers, and I hadn't quite taken on board the horror that is the English higher level Leaving Cert exam these days.  The 'single text' (generally done on the Shakespeare play) and 'comparative texts' (usually on the novels and modern play on the year's course) are fine, comprehension and functional writing variable, but the prescribed poetry is dreadful.  I give you the 2005 paper questions:

1. "The appeal of Eavan Boland's poetry"

Using the above title, write an essay outlining what you consider to be the appeal of Boland's poetry.  [Hard thought went into that 'title'! Nice of them to explain it though.]

2. What impact did the poetry of Emily Dickinson make on you as a reader?
     Your answer should deal with the following:
         - Your overall sense of the personality of the poet (!!)
         - The poet's use of language/imagery [oh, right - might as well devote a sentence or two to that, if there's time.]

3. Write about the feelings that T.S. Eliot's poetry creates in you and the aspects of his poetry (content and/or style) that help to create those feelings.  [Feeeeeelings.  Nothing more than -- feeeeeeelings. Trying to for-get my feeeeeelings of...]

4. Write an article for a school magazine introducing the poetry of W.B. Yeats to Leaving Certificate students.  Tell them what he wrote about and explain what you liked in his writing, suggesting some poems that you think they would enjoy reading. [i.e. - talk about the poems on the L.C. course this year, duh.]

I had thought Becca's chosen question "I like (or do not like) to read the poetry of Sylvia Plath" was just demonstrative of exam-question-writing burnout at its most blatant, but hadn't realised quite how lucky she was in getting such a non-nauseating question at least.  (She did like to read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and knew it very well indeed, btw.)

02:50 pm - One for the authors (and author-friendly)

Found via Fuse #8 - originally from John Green's blog, I think. (The John Green video for Paper Towns there is wonderful too, but everyone may have seen that already.)