So Many Books...

Real life and (an LJ) one for the DSM...

2008-07-16T21:10:25Z

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.

More Sutcliff...

2008-07-15T21:28:09Z

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?

lady_schrapnell @ 2008-07-09T23:45:00

2008-07-09T22:59:00Z

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...

Hold on (With multiple meanings, for greater value!)

2008-07-04T19:48:20Z

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...)

Debbie Harry Sings in French

2008-06-23T09:17:18Z

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?

You know what I said earlier about all the stuff going on? Well, the first couple of chapters take Johnny from a 12 year old living with his parents (mother a paralegal, father unspecified on the road all the time for work) through the death of his dad (obviously depressed, fell asleep at the wheel), which sends his mother into such a tailspin that Johnny takes care of them both for about three years, into a Goth with a severe drinking problem and a best friend who adds drugs to the alcohol and straight into rehab when he ODs on E he didn't take intentionally. Phew. His mother has by that point suddenly snapped out of the grief-coma when her sister sends her a book called - brace yourselves - Good Grief! (it has some sub-title which I'm too lazy to look up). And I mean suddenly, as in overnight, and equally suddenly, it seemed to me, becomes a fundamentalist who tells Johnny he's going to go to Hell when she catches him watching Interview with a Vampire. At 17. I'd used too many of my 'Well, it could happen that way' tickets already, but Johnny's best friend suddenly spouting the stereotypical alienated (Goth?) teen 'Hate them all, wish I'd a gun and could shoot them' line annoyed me. And for a self-described alcoholic to go to rehab for a bit, come out having discovered Debbie Harry and say that drinking didn't make him happy, drugs didn't make him happy, but dancing to her music did make him happy and then once - ONCE - express longing for a beer - well, I certainly wish anyone recovering substance abuse that easy a time of it.

And now - finally! - comes the gender and sexuality greyness. Or supposedly so. When Johnny's mother decides she can't cope with him any more, she ships him off to his uncle (father's brother) in South Carolina. Good thing too, as his uncle Sam is instantly accepting, trusting, and an all-round good guy, in sharp contrast to the mother. (Or at least, as she is now.) More importantly, in the smalltown school, where Johnny is bullied and assumed by pretty much everyone to be gay (not unrelated, of course), he meets Maria. Maria's got issues of her own, as it later turns out, but she's super-cool, in a hot kind of way (haha, yeah, sorry) and most importantly, on a nearly miraculously serendipitous trip to a thrift shop she gets Johnny to answer the question of what he likes about Debbie Harry. He says "I dunno. I guess it's just the whole thing. The music. The band. I like the way they look. I like her style. She's tough, but she's really beautiful, too. I want --" He goes on to say that stupid as it sounds, he sometimes wants to be like that. On the way out, they happen to see a white dress which looks just like the one Debbie Harry wears on the cover of a Blondie album, and Maria buys it.

Next time he's over at her house she plays him Patti Smith and then gives him the dress. He's shocked and thinks she's making fun of him, but she says she did it so he could be tough and beautiful and she just thought it would be fun. And he eventually tries it on, seemingly more out of angry confusion than any independent desire to do so and then has a huge cathartic flood of tears about missing his father and his mother and loving Maria and feeling 'That I wanted to be somewhere else all the time, but I didn't know where or how to get there."

Maria then gets him to enter a drag competition as Debbie Harry, which he does because he wants to earn the prize money to give her, and he later tells his school counselor that it was 'fun', and then is asked if he wishes he were a girl. Here's his answer:

I had to think for a minute. Did I really want to be Debbie, or any woman? Did I want to be myself but with a different set of equipment? Was that the key? It seemed like a whole new set of problems.

"I like - I love women. They're beautiful and - they're just different. Sometimes I wish I could be gentle and beautiful and not be called a queer. But I don't hate myself or anything. I'm doing better, right? My grades are okay. I'm not getting into trouble. So what's wrong with putting on a dress every once in a while?"

"Nothing, John" is the right answer, of course, but I think Johnny asked the wrong question. More bullying happens, Maria's problems (her mother) come up and Johnny gets so badly injured by the bullies that his mother is called to come to the hospital. She plans to whisk him back to Florida because she thinks he's "turning into a gay" and he tells her he's not, but he thinks he's a transvestite. After a shock-horror reaction she suddenly says he can wear whatever he wants as long as she doesn't have to come to the E.R. to find him unconscious again, and lets him stay. (Picture me the kid in Strictly Ballroom looking in bemusement at her pal, saying "That was unexpected!")

Here's the kicker though - Johnny's Uncle Sam told him about how his dad used to be 'exotic' and how his mother 'made him' cut his hair, get a job, settle down - Sam had thought at the time that Johnny's mother wanted his dad to be something he wasn't. At the end, Sam gives Johnny a trunk full of his dad's clothes from his pre-married days - and it's not entirely clear whether he was just dressing in the glam rock style or whether he actually was transgender/cross-dressing too, but the implication is the latter.

So, after reading, I was quite disturbed about the lack of urgency Johnny has to cross-dress - although it would put him in a very small minority, he might not have experienced the desire to until he was 17 (or possibly one could say that the Goth eyeliner and lipstick satisfied the desire, but I think that's rubbish), but he's actually pushed into it by his girlfriend. This is -- well, I really don't think this is at all likely. And a drag show performance is a completely different thing again anyway. Plus there's his response to dressing en femme - when he's getting ready to go on stage a very nice Cher getting ready beside him looks in horror at the socks stuffed in his dress and provides a spare pair of falsies - he has no reaction to wearing them at all, except calling them 'frighteningly realistic' and then Maria walks in and gasps in admiration when she sees his cleavage. No - don't buy this as any kind of decent representation.

Then I got thinking a bit more about Maria. At first she seemed merely the 'perfect girlfriend': so understanding she knew what Johnny wanted even before he did. I actually had the phrase 'the girlfriend we all want' come into my head, before correcting (for myself, 'natch!) into 'the girlfriend we all want to be'. I didn't actually warm to her that much myself, but that can happen with 'perfect' characters. (Oh, she's not perfect really - she does get jealous and insecure when she finds Johnny dancing with a guy who's giving him a good old ass grab after the competition. But it's only briefly.) And then when I thought about how out of left-field the mother's sudden religious tract, damning behaviour seemed, combined with her even-more-sudden ability to accept his 'transvestitism', and combined that with the father's sadness and the sense that came through that he wasn't living life at all - and then he dies, of course - and it seemed that the book wasn't about Johnny, the supposedly transgender teen, but about women. Who can either be so super-extraordinarily insightful that they know what their menfolk need when the men don't have a freakin clue, or they can be the ones who don't understand, and so are soul- and life-destroying. (Though - thank heavens - there's a second chance if they have children, as they may, just may, learn a little something eventually.) And I know this isn't fair to the book, and I know if I hadn't jumped onto the 'that's how we women are supposed to be' bandwagon I wouldn't be so cross about it now, but I still hold that the book fails to some degree to do what it set out to do, which is portray a teen transgender boy.

I'm certainly not thinking there is one transgender experience, and if it isn't described here, the book fails on that account. All the same, had I read the book knowing little or nothing about the issue, and believing the book to be an informed depiction, then I would most likely have been seriously misled. And had I been reading as a teen who was transgender myself, I think I'd have been either incredibly frustrated that it didn't show anything of the very real need to express the 'other' (non-assigned) gender or left feeling even lonelier and weirder. (Sadly, given society's level of understanding and acceptance of transgender and transsexuals, chances are very good indeed that a teen *will* feel weird and lonely for at least some period of time.) Those are far more serious problems than the narrative flaws.

Here's Wendy's review. Would love to hear opinions - dissenting or otherwise - from other people who've read the book. Or interested people who haven't!

Group read!

2008-06-19T11:43:31Z

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.)

Question (arising from K.V. Johansen's Nightwalker)

2008-06-17T21:58:22Z

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.

People are strange. (You said it, Thomas Lynn.)

2008-06-14T21:25:09Z

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.

Few basics: the story opens the summer before Macy's last year of school, as she's seeing her perfect boyfriend Jason off on his way to Brain Camp for 8 weeks. (It is worth noting the fact that Jason's not her 'perfect boyfriend' but her boyfriend, who is perfect. There's a hell of a difference.) Macy lives with her mother, who runs a property-development company alone since the death of Macy's father a year and a half ago. He had a sudden heart attack while out running, and Macy, also a runner, had found him lying on the road with a stranger performing CPR on him. Since his death Macy has been very carefully showing the world only small bits and pieces of herself - never showing her mother that she's scared, angry and miserable, leaving the open display of grief to her older sister, never asking Jason for anything more than the measured dose he gives her, doing her part to keep the house absolutely tidy, and even trading her comfortable 'track-rat' style for a neater, never-a-hair-out-of-place one. Yup, trying to be perfect. When she stumbles into the disorganized catering company run by Delia, with Bert and Wes, and two girls around Macy's age helping her, she takes on the odd job with them As Jason sends her the coldest email imaginable saying he wants to take a break, and Wes turns out to be nice, sensitive, artistic and not at all interested in perfection, it's not going to surprise anyone - or at least any reader, as Macy's a bit slow in this regard - that their friendship has the potential to be a lot more.

It's all pretty standard-sounding stuff written out like that, but like all the other Dessen books, it's got likable characters with some emotional depth, and is intelligent about real life, real people stuff. I think Macy could be less engaging than some of Dessen's protagonists, perhaps, because of that tightly controlled, shut-down response to the shock of her father's death, but her mother's so dreadful, in a well-meaning kind of way, that she might get more reader sympathy for that reason alone. As I said above, I could relate all too easily.

I relate not because of the mother's awful behaviour - not the outward signs of perfectionism - and certainly, definitely, absolutely not the ability to shut down any kind of show of grief. Nope. I was 7 when my father died of a heart attack, not in my teens, thousands of miles away, rather than right there and in the ambulance with him, and to this day I've a terrible tendency to cry in public no matter how much I want not to. I wasn't at my father's funeral, but nobody in the family stopped talking about him or hustled his things away in a flash. These are all the details of the story which aren't in common, but they're not as important as Macy's response.

Criticisms I might have include the plot and some characters being too similar to some other Dessen books and Jason's being - oh please, l hope I'm right about this one! - too awful to be quite credible, but I think Dessen fans will like this anyway, as I did, and someone new to her wouldn't be bother about the plot/character repetitiveness anyway. I'm also very much looking forward to Dessen's latest, Lock and Key, as it sounds as if she might be breaking out of her typical family set-ups and doing something different.

* A short poem from the wonderful How To Be Well-Versed in Poetry which delighted me as I encountered it while ~~wading through~~ studying Wordsworth's "The Prelude" (also the title of this poem).

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

2 X Book snippets

2008-06-11T20:07:09Z

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.

The second book-related snippet is my shock at hearing from the Tories, of all people, the exact line Marcus uses in Little Brother about the terrorists winning if you take away people's freedom in response to the threat of terrorism. The Conservatives. Cory Doctorow might have more justifiable reason for head explosion than I have, but it was still disorientating, to say the least. And my head doesn't need it right now, whatever about his.

Challenge packed away for another year...

2008-06-10T20:09:38Z

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...

48 Hour Wrap-up

2008-06-09T10:34:00Z

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.

Book five and the end for me...

2008-06-08T20:05:21Z

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!

Book four and running out of steam....

2008-06-08T19:55:34Z

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.

The Diamond of Drury Lane

2008-06-08T11:18:40Z

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."

Gah and double gah.

There are five of the Cat Royal books now, I think, but I've done my duty in finishing this one, and they'll continue to get along swimmingly without me.

Sweethearts

2008-06-07T22:21:43Z

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.

Sweethearts is also about abuse, and about unhealthy responses to bullying, and rejection, and neglect. It's got two teens who've been through more than children should ever have to face, and without sufficient help from their parents. Jennifer stole comfort food and Jenna still has a very uneasy relationship with food. But the book neither makes these problems definitive and imprisoning, nor is annoyingly uplifty about everyone's power to rise above the past and its problems - Jenna's effort to do that isn't lastingly successful nor finally what she wants.

I've hit the realisation that I'm too tired to talk about Jenna's mother, or her wonderful, wonderful stepfather Alan, and too tired to try to make this sound a little less sappy, and definitely too tired to talk about the question of identity and how we can tell ourselves stories about our past which may not be the whole of the story and the cost that can have... Maybe I'll manage more of that when I come back to the book and sartorias' post, and try to talk about its appeal for an adult.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

2008-06-07T13:36:18Z

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."

The second passage was the end of the father and Aunt Claire's reading The Sailor Dog to Batty, who makes them sing the song, so I went off to bed with the tune of the song I'd made up when reading the book to Becca and Y.D. firmly stuck in my head. (It's a bit monotonous, to be perfectly honest.) Eva Ibbotson and one of Margaret Wise Brown's dog books - any wonder I went to bed in happy reader mode?

The only problem is having far, far too many delights I want to share, having finished now. And then so much of the delight is hard to quote anyway, as it's made up of a lot of little moments which are about how nice these kids are, without being unbearably or unrealistically good. (There's a fair amount of behaviour in the book that decidedly isn't good, although it may be well-meant. Or not so much. But never mean or petty.) There's Rosalind trying to choose one of Shakespeare's sonnets to memorize, knowing that she'll have to recite it to the class, and desperate to find one that nobody will understand at all well enough to know it's about love. Or the play Skye ~~writes~~ is supposed to write for history, Sisters and Sacrifice - and the essay on women in the history of Massachusetts that Jane gets a C on, after writing it about her fictional heroine because she's "more fascinating than old Susan B. Anthony and Clara Barton" - and the one she ~~writes~~ is supposed to write on science.

I have heard (or possibly heard about another book and misapplied to this one) criticism that the book would have more appeal for adults who are channeling their inner reading child-selves than for real children, but I can only say with some certainty that I'd have loved it myself as a child, and with about equal certainty that my two would have loved it. And I'd have had enormous pleasure in reading it to them. The one definite nod over the head of the average child is the woman the father finds himself to date, Marianne. As that's Marianne Dashwood, the adult reader is sniggering helplessly at his reports on her love of walking and dislike of flannel, while younger children wouldn't get it. But though I have some doubt about Aunt Claire's missing the name, I honestly think I'd have been perfectly happy as a child to have had the deception pulled on me along with the girls. And he confesses so beautifully.

Right, so Claire's not spotting Marianne's name, and perhaps a bit of realistic quibbling about the timing of some things in the book. But that's it for the pickiness. And the nice Penderwicks - child and adult - are matched by nice people in other families (Tommy - Nick - Anna and her succession of stepmothers she doesn't bother to keep track of anymore!) and the lovely Iantha, who's a brilliant astrophysicist as well as a - well, read it and see for yourself. I think if nothing else, I'd love this book for the funny and yet real way in which the girls use the word 'honour'. There's 'the family honour', but there's also 'honourable behaviour' - and 'dishonourable' as well - and they care about it, without in any way being goody-goody. Great stuff.

48 Hour Book Challenge...

2008-06-06T21:59:42Z

... 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...

Okay - wasn't that thrilling? In terms of the books to be read - I won't get through many this year, but first up will be The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, which I've been saving for this weekend. After that, I might well reread Sara Zarr's Sweethearts, which I loved and never really talked about (except to tell gair & gerald that it was really good and not just sweetness-and-lurve, despite the title and cover, and to tell steepholm that it had the second - no first, chronologically in reading order - wonderful stepfather in YA literature this year.).

Little Brother

2008-06-04T19:43:45Z

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...)

Marcus's mother is British, though she's been living in the States since she was 'half-way through high school'. She still thinks of Britain as home, and when she gets angry about the way things are going in the States - as she does over the repressive rise of the Homeland Security forces - she feels the US is 'the land of barbarians'. She stands up for Marcus, and agrees with him that what's going on is wrong, but this aside comes in the middle of their conversation.

I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to trash its constitution every time some jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, the Brits don't even have a Constitution. They've got laws there that would curl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. [...]

And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour. The average Londoner is photographed five hundred times a day, just walking down the streets. Every licence plate is photographed at every corner in the country. [...]

But Mom didn't see it that way.

This despite the fact that the mother agrees with Marcus about what's going on - she's just trying to get him not to reject his father for his endorsement of the curtailment of personal freedom in the supposed quest to 'fight terrorism'.

So my problem with this aside is that it's: 1) a good example of a character giving voice to a bit of info the author wants us to have, in a rather clunky way ; 2) irrelevant; 3) misleading to downright wrong; and 4) even if it were relevant, likely to have been delivered to the reader as such by the narrator and were accurate/true, it's really against the whole message of the book.

1) and 2) are related and won't necessarily be a problem for all readers - as I said, I've no problem with the large number of informative asides about technology that fill the book. But why is it there if it's not right? steepholm pointed out to me the distinction between not having a constitution and not having a written one, and we both knew that the jailing for a year without evidence is totally untrue - as would anyone who listens to the excellent Radio 4 news virtually any night - the government's fight to get the period of detention increased to 42 days has been going on forever, and they're making concessions now in admission of the difficulty. If the ability to hold a suspect for a year was to be a change that happens between now and the near future of the book, it should be labeled as such rather than stated as fact.

Beyond that, I have a profound distrust for the sort of - patriotism, I suppose, for want of a better word - that thrives on pointing out the inferiority of other countries' systems of rule. It seems more puzzling to find it here when it is very much a feature of the kind of flag-waving, militaristic, leftie-bashing (and everyone's who's not a Republican is a leftie, of course) far Right mindset that's being questioned in the book. Even if Britain were Hell on earth, it wouldn't make the curtailments of human rights in the States under the present administration any better. Not that I'm sure that a careful tallying of the kinds of freedoms being considered in the two countries would really show the balance to be so far in the U.S.'s favour - a lot of points are lost for Guantanamo, no matter how much paper the U.S. Constitution covers. And the Patriot Act potentially makes up for a lot of surveillance excess in the U.K., if there still is the extreme excess indicated. (FWIW, I think London does have one of, if not the highest, level of citizen-photographing in the world, but every licence plate on every corner in the country? No.) And how do you weight factors such as the freedom of the media to grill politicians - even the highest level politicians - which is far greater in the UK? Dammit - George Bush even managed to exclude a journalist from his press conference because he thought she was disrespectful to him in Ireland - while I have a happy memory of the tough, tough questioning Blair got from members of the Women's Institute when he addressed them. That patented cheesey grin was extremely strained by the end of the day! And just listen to John Humphries or Jon Snow going for a Prime Minister if the occasion arises, and think of the control over Presidential Press Conferences.

But even more seriously, I worry a lot about the fact that it seems almost impossible to engage in a serious critique of the administration in the States these days, without making such arduous attempts to prove how much you love your country, how you're not really soft on terrorism, and how you're certainly not over-intellectual and liberal, that you're beaten before you start. Because the argument isn't about those things, but about whether a particular action in the States and/or the rest of the world is both justified and likely to be of any real benefit. I'm pretty sure, from listening to a lot of news on Radio 4, that in the U.K. people (including the media) aren't that insecure about scrutinizing and then criticizing actions of the government if they feel them to be wrong. And 100% sure that the ability to criticize policies you feel are wrong is a good thing.

To return to the most important point about this bit of narrative - its irrelevance to the story, Doctorow is writing a book about the States - about a trend he thinks very worrying and its possibility to destroy everything the States stands for in the effort to make it 'safe'. U.S. citizens have to fight to protect the rights (and responsibilities) enshrined in their own constitution, rather than patting themselves on the back because Britain doesn't have one that's the same.

Doctorow has returned to the UK after a year in L.A., according to Wiki (which he praises highly in the book!). If he wants to write a book about things that are wrong with the UK and possible worrying trends for the future there (and with Labour having shot itself in every limb it has, and the Conservatives looming - what better time for such a thing?!), then write that book. I'll certainly buy a copy. He can then write one about some terrifying Everycountry and I'll buy that too.

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.

lady_schrapnell @ 2008-06-02T21:12:00

2008-06-02T21:45:46Z

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.)

One for the authors (and author-friendly)

2008-06-01T13:54:37Z

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.)

Few belated things

2008-05-31T15:08:48Z

Most important of which is a - now very belated - happy birthday wish to sartorias. I carefully kept the reminder from LJ marked as unread (I find those are set at just the perfect amount of time ahead to maximize the probability of forgetting it on the day) and then ended up not managing to get near LJ until way late the day after her birthday. The wish is sincere, no matter how late!

The fête went well, though exhausting as usual. In fact, more so than usual - a combination of having fewer people helping on the other book-stall and needing to pitch in and help them out, being one down on the kids' books (Younger Daughter was home studying till she dropped), and the ongoing Headache Saga. But I pushed a lot of good books into enthusiastic hands - even got feedback from other workers who'd pre-bought books from me for their offspring during Sorting Week - and enjoyed listening to Bec do the same out of the corner of my ear on the day. Fun to see friends there too, even if we didn't get a chance to be very sociable.

A quick announcements, which might or might not be of interest: I'm sure everyone but me had already heard about the post-WisCon Horror, but here's a link to a post I thought an extraordinarily positive response - courtesy of marthawells.

There has been reading going on too, if at a much slower rate than I'd like - last-but-one was a reread of The Sword in the Stone, which I enjoyed with a rather bemused wonder at how odd it was, and just last night finished Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I'll have a fair amount to say about the latter soon, and will probably ramble off into matters such as personal freedom in the US, the UK (and Ireland, if anyone cares), public discussion of same, media in .... Yes, many matters on which I'm woefully lacking in knowledge. Maybe the short version could save anyone the bother: I loved it for its passionate and informed - not to mention informative- treatment of the subject matter. It's the kind of love mixed with a little frustration though, because I thought maybe it could have been an abiding classic. (Of the sort Doctorow said Nineteen Eighty-Four was for him.) (So y'all don't think I'm talking about the Canon According to Lady-Schrapnell.) (Which I'm not.) Not sure what to read next, in order to keep just the right books for MotherReader's 48 Hour Book Challenge next weekend....

Mostly just the annual service announcement...

2008-05-19T16:21:13Z

I had planned to entertain everyone with the fascinating discussion I had with Younger Daughter on the topic (among others) of gender & relationships among young people and the depressingly retro aspects of same - with a cheerful quote from classic children's lit to make up for the depressingness. This break in her dedicated exam-studying was occasioned, by the way, by her Last Day of School Ever. (Officially - she's in there for a few extra classes this week, and of course, will be in school for the nine papers she'll be taking in June.)

But, then came Saturday night, and poor Becca suffered yet another severely sprained ankle, which had the pair of us visiting the A&E after-hours on a weekend... Now she's strapped up and feeling pain only when she moves, it's quite a story, as she's definitely the first to appreciate, so that'll come soon.

However, for the moment, it's church fête time again. Oddly, the thought of burying myself up to the neck in often-dusty and occasionally downright disgusting children's books doesn't fill me with glee at the moment. I'll be looking out, as always, for Chalet School books (hardcover for dorianegray and fjm, other for sartorias - so probably there's no room for new requests there), and have been trained to grab old hardcover school books of any variety for whomever. And Rosemary Sutcliff for sartorias. Any other requests happily entertained. Though I have to say, I have a less-than-positive feeling about this year's haul of books, so I don't even make optimistic predictions about finding anything, much less guarantees. (Unless you're dying for the all-too-common paperback Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls, curse them.)

At least...

2008-05-15T18:40:04Z

I feel like crap, I have accomplished so little that they could be classed as negative accomplishments, but I can solemnly promise that I will never, ever cause any of you to fume in the way that Geri Halliwell did Younger Daughter and me the other night.*

We'd watched an excellent Have I Got News for You with Bill Bailey (we love Bill Bailey!), and were all cheerful, when Y.D. switched and happened upon one of the Irish chat shows (can't remember which). She barely had time to say, "Oh, that's Geri Halliewell - what's she doing here?" when Geri had launched into an answer about why she'd felt the need to write her children's book (I'm totally not linking that, as nobody needs the link!). And of course, of course, she had to say that Spice Girls had been all about the girl power (I'm sorry, but the idea of the Spice Girls and girl power makes me nauseated already) and there were no strong female characters in books for young children, so she had to write one herself.

Some day, some celebrity is just going to say that he or she thought it would be fun and relatively easy to write a book for kids BEFORE TRYING, and now he or she realises how very wrong he or she had been --- and members of BACA around the world may get collective concussion from falling off computer chairs in shocked delight.

As I'm not holding my breath for that day, I'll offer a little anecdote of what it can be like living with the other kind of writer.

I'd just told Becca I was heading down to the village.

Becca: Can you tell me a way someone could be killed in a car?

Me: Uh...

Becca: I've already got cardiac arrest, stroke, drunk driver, drive-by shooting [few others I can't remember]

Me: Falling asleep at the wheel?

Becca: No. Doesn't matter how silly it is.

Me: Zombies?

Becca: Not that silly

Me: An aneurysm?

Becca: I'd rather not something else medical.

Me: Tree falling across the road?

Becca: Ooh, I like that.

Me: Like from a hurricane or severe sto..

Becca: A hurricane. I really like that.

Me: Course, a hurricane wouldn't be that unexpected, but a storm --

Becca: [No longer paying attention]

Me: [Proceeds to village, rather than proceeding to tell the story of the tree that was blown across the driveway just after my mother and father had pulled in a few feet farther]

The rest of the evening, Becca kept looking up from her laptop and saying happily "I'm write a story about death".

She very often is writing a story about death, so Y.D. and I perhaps didn't respond with sufficient amazement.

* Yes, it is an easy promise to make as I'm neither an aspiring writer nor a celebrity who'd be offered a book contract on the basis of my name alone, but there's no need to be picky.

Things that go bump in the early morning

2008-05-13T17:24:58Z

Pretty much equals everything. Though it was a lovely early morning when I was awoken by Dougie barking - cool air wafting in through the open window, soft greyish-blue light suggesting a fine, sunny day to come, birds singing.... (And I wasn't too angry at Doug even, as a cat outside in the road really had started it.) The sweet irony of having much trouble sleeping, exemplified by this early-morning worrying jag, while on a double dose of an anti-migraine medication used to treat anxiety disorder, didn't escape me, either.

One of the things I managed to touch on in this worry-fest was why I didn't love Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett, when I felt I should have. Great setting - a running-down but still romantic family-run hotel in Manhattan with a history, whatever about a future. Interesting characters - Scarlett, the 15-year-old protagonist, her three siblings, Lola, her seemingly-perfect older sister, Spencer, 19 and highly talented comic actor, ultra-bratty 11 year-old Marlene and the slightly over-the-hill and very over-the-top actress (ex-actress? Her plans and purpose in coming to New York are unclear, as are her sources of income) Mrs Amberson, who comes to stay in the hotel for the summer. Funny, clever writing - so what's wrong with me?

I do think that was a bit of the problem, actually, after some semi-rational thought at other times: it was a book that brought out my dislike of manipulative behaviour, while making me feel I must be a puritanical kill-joy with no sense of humour for seeing it that way at all. The rather terrible but still likable Mrs Amberson is extravagent and unabashedly involved (i.e. manipulative): she's nosy, gossipy, controlling and even devious. That's fine - fun, even, and she didn't bother me. She's an often-infuriating force that blows into Scarlett's life, rather than the character with whom we identify and sympathize. But there's an awful lot of manipulation and dishonesty floating around by the end, and some of it's done by the two characters I liked most, Scarlett and Spencer. Spencer has three days left of a year his parents allowed him, to prove he can make it as an actor, and otherwise he'll have to go to catering college, where he has a scholarship. As we're so solidly on his side in it - in fact, I found him somewhat more engaging and interesting as a character than Scarlett - at first it seems okay that Scarlett will do whatever she can to help him get what he wants. And the rationale for her and Spencer's being so close, while Lola and Marlene form the other sibling pair, makes a lot of sense.

I found it odd though, that there was so much attention and focus on the relationships between the four siblings and so extraordinarily little on any between one or all of the children and the parents, though the parents were more present than most parents in YA fiction. They seemed to be there just to be got around, or in the grand set-piece last act, to be got out of the way (or sometimes avoided when spotted 'making out' in the kitchen). There was the occasional explanation of their behaviour, as when Lola tells Scarlett and Spencer the parents are just worried about Spencer's security in such a precarious profession, but surprisingly little bouncing off each other. That seemed especially odd when Marlene's 'tragic history' is discovered. (I liked the way that was done a lot, in fact.)

Anyway, everyone else is raving about it, and nobody else is likely to find any lack of love in their hearts for it, even in the long pre-dawn worry hours, so I shall try to let this one go. And maybe just embrace my inner puritan - which honestly isn't just a humorless kill-joy, even if it does protest about a lot of things.

Waiting for Normal

2008-05-09T16:22:46Z

I've just got a new award category, thanks to this book: book I loved which made me most deeply relieved not to be a professional in the book world. Loved it, but boy, would I lose sleep over the younger age limits and this book, or the kid with a parent suffering from bipolar disorder who doesn't have a stepparent from heaven, or the kid whose life is a little unstable and has someone close to him/her suffering from cancer... I do know that the fact that I literally did lose sleep two nights in a row after reading was entirely due to my experience and not any child's, but still... (Age range given as 8 to 12, sometimes. The idea of handing this to an eight year old kind of does me in a bit.)

This is one that really needs a bunch of quotes in order to get across how lovely the voice of the narrator, Addie, is. She's in the most unenviable position - separated from her stable and loving stepfather Dwight and her two younger sisters (half-sisters, really) by her mother's and Dwight's divorce. Addie and her mother move to a tiny trailer home on a busy city corner, underneath an over-pass. Her mother is anything but stable - though the word bipolar isn't used in the book, Addie's description of her mother, as having an 'all-or-nothing' approach to life is a great way of presenting it to younger readers. I suppose my adult-reader-self worried a bit about the fact that Addie's mother was never sent to a psychiatrist, even when -- keeping this spoiler-clean for now -- there was a situation which ought to have resulted in psychiatric help. But, as I said my adult reader self doesn't have to take a lot of responsibility for this one. Thank goodness, as I'm not even sure when I'd have thought it right to read to my own kids, let alone handing it out to hoards of unknown ones.

Addie's optimistic, capable, loving, heart-breakingly unaware of how great a kid she is and that it's NOT HER FAULT. None of it. I kind of gulped when I came across the reading disability on top of everything else, but at least Addie's teachers were understanding and caring. She's also friendly, and - again, at least, her friendliness is met with returning friendliness, from kids in her class and most importantly, from the wonderful Soula, who owns the minimart across the road, and the equally-wonderful Elliot, who works for Soula. Soula has cancer, though Addie doesn't know what's wrong for a while. It's pretty clear, at least (here I go again) to an adult reader, that Soula and Elliot come to care deeply for Addie, and are deeply concerned about her mother's increasing neglect of her, though Addie is, unsurprisingly, unaware of their feelings for her. It is an overload of tragedy, decidedly, and yet it's not done heavily at all, because of Addie's character and the humour with which she's sometimes able to view her situation. And Dwight is so wonderful that you know he's going to do anything and everything to take care of Addie as much as he can. But - despite that knowledge, I caved the first night and looked at the ending, just to be sure...

There's a great review at A Fuse #8 Production, which is well worth reading. I have only two things I'd love to chat about with Fuse: one is the description of Addie's mother as a 'selfish, self-centered nutjob'. I know what she means, but still. The other is a slight spoiler, so stop now if you don't want to read it. I doubt it'll be a huge surprise, though you may hope against hope, as I did, that it wouldn't happen. The pet doesn't get it, which is delightfully against generic expectations, I agree - but Soula does. And I know many kids are infinitely more able for tragedy than I am, but I did worry that the combination of mother as mentally ill and totally unable to provide support for Addie, and newly-found mother-substitute dying, was a hell of a double-whammy. Especially for the many kids in the world who don't have anything like the wonderful Dwight to provide when the mother(s) are lost. (I've thought about it quite a bit, and want to say straight out that this is not me trying to suggest that the book is misogynistic in any way. It's not. ) (Oh, third thing - I love the cover.) Hannah was great on paper, but somehow was never as alive for me as Soula or Addie or Elliot or Dwight.

The obvious books to compare are Hilary McKay's Casson family books. But though I really think Waiting for Normal is wonderful and would recommend it to any other adult readers of children's books, I would be much more inclined to recommend Hilary McKay to a child than Waiting for Normal. Both have unstable families, and vulnerable people of all ages. Both have happy endings, which are really feel-good in the best sense. But something about the end of Forever Rose made me feel safer. I'm still not totally sure why, but think it has something to do with the way the ending was won through to by a complex weaving together of a lot of many kinds of behaviour by all the characters: selfishness, loyalty, love, neglect, avoidance, stubbornness, giving... In Waiting for Normal, it seems more a case of luck, in a funny way. Not that Addie doesn't deserve to be loved and taken care of, but every child does that, and somehow the mostly-happy ending left me thinking a little of all those who don't get it.