don’t know much about history… July 3, 2009

Seriously. This made me snort coffee up my nose. Not cool.

So…today I am meandering through my Goodreads profile, wasting ten minutes while I eat my lunch, and this ad in the sidebar catches my eye, and I nearly choke to death on my coffee.  It’s a bit of false advertising, since when you click on the link you are taken to the Kindle edition (and the only edition) of a book entitled Everything I Needed to Know About Women I Learned by Reading Twilight: A Vampire’s Guide to Eternal Love. (Wouldn’t that be “An Vampire” or is that not cool anymore?)  Apparently this guy teaches men seven principles that Edward lives by, which is what makes every woman want him. Interesting….

the magnolia blossoms fill the air… July 2, 2009

P.S. Look what I made. From scratch. Jambalaya!

Jambalaya

the fire, the fire July 2, 2009

Phew. That last post was more popular than I knew what to do with. My blog hasn’t gotten that many hits since that one time with the famous people and the stuff. (You know, the one that never happened.) I should express my feelings on education more often. Except that I find it hard to be upset about people’s ignorant responses to home-schooling more than once or twice a year, which is probably good.

I’ve been reading. Four books in the last week or so. Startling, I know. Two of them I read because they were brought up in reviews I read of Tethered and I was interested in how the could be so different, yet both reminiscent of the same book.  (Do you see now how clever my post title is? Seriously, I think that if y’all analyzed the music choices as portrayed by my post titles, I would get laughed out of the room…they’re a terrible mix, leaning heavily on Snow Patrol, because I heart them like a high school girl hearts vampires.)

Um. Where was I? Oh. Right. Two very different books.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn is like Tethered without a heart. Everyone in it is broken. Worse, everyone is demolished. Destroyed. Pulverized.  The basics: Broken woman/girl. Check. Camille Preaker is not just broken, she’s shattered, by a screwed up childhood and an inability to equate intimacy with anything except sex. Inner struggle to understand childhood. Check. Although, while reporting on two murders of little girls, Camille’s daily interaction with her childhood is especially disturbing because she does it by living in her childhood home with her mother, stepfather and sociopath teenage half-sister. Standard good cop, who doesn’t seem all that good, or even a little gentle, as this character generally is. Still a check. Standard lapse of judgment between cop and broken woman/girl. Check. In this case, the tension this expected plot device causes does not get resolved, but instead is broken further in the sweeping and deeply unsettling climax of the novel.  Don’t read this book. It hurt my soul. It lacked the redemption that crime stories need in order to set our hearts back in order.

Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey was a completely different feel. It was more an exploration of the paranormal found in Tethered. I’ve read some of Livesey’s work before (The Missing World and The House on Fortune Street) and was impressed with this one. I think it was the best of her stuff that I’ve read. Livesey has the unnerving tendency to throw in details that sound like they should refer to an earlier discussion but that actually don’t, which leaves the reader scrambling through the pages already read, trying to figure out why that sounds important when it isn’t. I don’t like this. However, after the darkness of the last book, the short concise story of Eva, who grows up with two invisible companions who guide and mold her future, is calming. We follow Eva as she tests the boundaries of her companion’s abilities, tries to abandon them and then comes to a coexistence that is almost peaceful. This wasn’t a book to write home about, but it was satisfying.

After those two, I branched back out of the paranormal/crime genres and landed in the middle of the Young Adult section. Jellicoe Road is by the Australian Melina Marchetta is a story that spends what feels like an inordinate amount of time in set-up. For the first 120 pages of the 300, I internally debated whether to keep reading about every other page. There’s so much information, so many side plots, so many bunny trails and it’s very hard to figure out what is the present and what is the past.  And then, you hit the middle running and can’t stop.

I’ve never read any of Marchetta’s other work, which I hear has a completely different feel than this. Jellicoe Road is about friendship and the bonds of family that extend through situations that are less than perfect. Taylor Markham is the leader of a group of boarding school kids who every year have a war with the Cadet boys who camp near them for the summer and the Townies. What starts off as hostility, with deep undercurrents of hatred between Taylor and the enigmatic leader of the Cadets, Griggs,  and her tenuous relationships with her second-in-commands turns into a exploration of a friendship that brought Taylor to where she is. This book is like an YA version of the deeply disturbing The Secret History or the calmer The Likeness with respect to its exploration of family by choice rather than blood. I’m not sure I can whole-heartedly endorse it to teenagers, but as an adult, I think that it was well-written and sticks with you.

From here, I’m moving on to attempt to finish some of the books sitting on my bookshelves and maybe some Stephen King, since I’m pretty sure I have only read The Gunslinger, and I found the paperback of The Drawing of the Three in my paperback cupboard the other night while dusting. (I know. I can’t even dust without getting distracted by books.)  We’ll see, though. I’m hanging out with Buffy at my parents for a while this weekend, so maybe I will get to borrow some gems from her…

may you build a ladder to the stars June 29, 2009

I read a blog post the other day by a well-meaning woman, a college English professor, who was contemplating her reasons for and against home-schooling. She talked about a college senior who was unable to articulate a thesis statement vs. the perfect grammar of a freshman boy with terrible social skills and “no clue about basic classroom etiquette.” Apparently, this kid monopolized class time and was intolerant of other people’s opinions.

I truly believe that this woman was simply trying to illustrate what she saw as the primary pitfalls of two very different methods of education, but the comments soon snowballed into a gross mis-characterization of a legitimate portion of the population. I mean, really. If every home-schooled child was “excessively dependent on adults and completely unable to relate to their peers” wouldn’t people stop choosing that method of education? My favorite was “All of the adults I have met (family, roommates and friends) who have been home taught for an extended period of time have had big problems in their social and educational development.”

*sigh*

Okay, so I’m sure we all know someone who seems a bit socially inept who was home-schooled. But don’t we also know at least one big-talking, center-of-the-world’s-intelligence public-schooler? I know I do. I had class with some of them. But you know what, I think that the majority of the time you probably don’t ever know which of your aquaintances were home-schooled, especially now that homeschooling has been legal in most states since the early 80’s. There are now a good number of us who were home-schooled who are your peers in the adult world, who are your colleagues in grad school, your companions on the bus, or your coworkers. And you don’t know that we were home-schooled at all, because it never crossed your mind, and no one asks where you went to high school once you’re actually out of high school. (Because it doesn’t matter. Really.)

I tell people that I was home-schooled for the first 18 years of my life, from birth until I went to a private college. After graduating with honors, I attended a grad school where I graduated with an M.A. (also with a very respectable G.P.A.)  So now that we’ve established that I am educationally well-adjusted, I should add that I have lots of friends, am generally liked, and the normal response to the discovery that I was home-schooled is “Wow. You seem so socially well-adjusted!” (Don’t even get me started on how ridiculously condescending and rude that is. I don’t respond to your childhood by announcing “Wow! And you’re not addicted to meth and living in a trailer. Yay, public education worked for a change!”)  I also am very close to my three siblings, talk to my parents often, and have very relaxed childhood memories. I didn’t understand the social structure of school, and I still, for a large part, don’t.

Most confusing of all to me about people’s reactions to my childhood is the fact that public education was never established for social reasons, but for education. So why is it that our culture has so adapted to the twelve years of school paradigm that we are concerned about the social repercussions of not taking advantage of it? I will agree, home-schooling up until college gave me a different understanding of my friendships and relationships than that of many of my peers. I was not as shell-shocked by the transition between dorm life and having my own apartment in grad school as some of my friends, because I had grown up in a culture where friendships required forethought and planning. When you did not grow up seeing your friends everyday in the hallways between classes, you find it easier to adjust to having to make an effort to stay in touch and hold onto closeness.

Home-schooling also gives  you a different perspective on your role in your own education, and often a better understanding of your learning style.  I spent 17 years of my life learning in a large part my own way, guided by my parents. When I got to college, I knew I was a highly visual learner, and amused all of my roommates with my charts and posters of verb forms and conjugations of every language I was studying.  I made flash cards, but knew that color coding was not as helpful to me as associating vocabulary words with English equivalents. I also enjoyed directing my own studying and budgeting time for homework in college, because that was essentially what I did for three out of my four years in high school at home, juggling a job (sometimes two), college courses and general school-work. (Don’t ask about that fourth year of high school, which was the despair of my math schoolwork and the crowning glory of my over-preparation for college English classes.)

I’m sure it can be argued that these were both also due in part to temperament, but I think they were honed by the educational paradigm I grew up in. Home-schooling worked for me. It more than worked, it shone.  I suspect that this is the case for a lot of kids out there whose families chose this lifestyle. I don’t think that home-schooling works for everyone, but neither does public school. Don’t punish all of us with the stereotype of some of us.

/end rant.

cause you deserve a real nice guy… June 25, 2009

So I was thinking that if I was going to bash Twilight to my greater blog listening area, I should post some books that I thought of as alternatives. These aren’t in any particular order, and are chosen for very different reasons.

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley (I’m going to call this a little closer to PG-13 than Twilight, in case anyone cares), is, I think, the most obvious offering. Interested in the vampire/human dynamic? Want a story that leaves you hoping, but unsure of the relationships formed and broken? Want a real conflict, real struggle and a strong plot with lots to unravel? This is the book for you. The weaknesses of this book lie in McKinley’s struggle, nearly the opposite of Meyer’s, to remember to clue us in about certain elements – sometimes you have to go back and reread in order to figure out what’s going on.  I always think that McKinley’s books are remarkable, but that they would be incredible if we had the insight she obviously has into her characters and their backstories. Sunshine is about Rae (Sunshine) who is abducted and imprisoned with a starving vampire Constantine, who is being left to die of starvation and sun exposure. Rae’s latent  magical powers save them, but where do they go from there?

More realistic love more your thing? Try I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which I still think is the most realistic love story I’ve ever read. Not everyone has a love story that resolves quickly into marriage and happily ever after, and I like the support of that in this story of Cassie and her quirky family. Her sister Rose muddles into love and ends up deeply hurting people who love her and whom she loves. Meanwhile, Cassie struggles with choices between someone who loves and adores her and waiting for someone whom she loves in return. In terms of early love, this book is insightful and sweet, if a bit sad. (Well, not that sad. Love isn’t simple for everyone, that doesn’t make it less precious.)

If it’s the first love and the growing up you want, try Just Listen, by Sarah Dessen. It’s about Annabel, who has experienced an high-school popularity fall-from-grace, and who falls into a friendship with a social outcast named Owen. Owen and Annabel’s friendship grows slowly into a relationship, and this is one YA novel that discusses issues that are pertinent for teenagers who are not living it up on the Upper East Side. Annabel’s sister is struggling with an eating disorder and there is some good discussion of body image and realism. Both teenagers have loving, supportive families and their relationship has a place within the family structure, instead of supplanting it. I thought it was charming.

Need a little more fantasy? I would absolutely suggest The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope. I found this when I was working at the public library during high school, while re-shelving, and I loved it from the get-go. If I’m correct, this is one of the few books I recommended to Rachel before she recommended it to me. This is a favorite re-telling of Tam Lin, where Kate lives during the reign of Queen Mary and is exiled to an old country manor.  She gets embroiled in some strange goings-on with the fairie folk (druids) who still live and worship in the area, and ends up putting her life in danger to save the young master of the manor and a little girl. It’s more complicated than that, really, but it’s good. You should trust me. (When I was at my sister’s recently, I was sad because the copy I gave her wasn’t on her shelf, and I thought she’d abandoned it. I found it later, in the upstairs bedroom bookshelf, closer to where she actually does most of her reading.)

Keep in mind that I’m not much into vampire stories, though, so if that’s exactly what you’re looking for, you should probably ask around in the comments. I’m sure some other folks could give you other suggestions.

i could just watch you in your room… June 20, 2009

So, I read it. Twilight. All of it, every dad-gum page.
And I’m not entirely sure how to review it. So I’m going to give you the positives first and then behind the break, the negatives.

Once Meyer gets into her stride (say…150 pages in, when we finally get into the Edward/Bella goo-mance) she drops into a more comfortable swing and shows us the majority of her talent. Setting her vampires up in a new and original way, we are as intrigued as Bella as she falls in love. Mind-reading, seeing the future, controlling people’s emotions – who knew that vampires were each special snowflakes? I thought they were just blood-sucking soul-less mammals. I found Meyer’s version of Dracula much more entertaining and less whiny than Ann Rice. I enjoyed the “family” dynamic of the Cullens, the backstory about where they had been and how they lived.

Meyer also was very good at getting her audience caught up in the all-consuming passion of those first months of falling in love. We feel as obsessed as Bella. We want to know all the answers to her questions. We’re frustrated with her about his unwillingness to answer our every query. And hey, who doesn’t wish that their significant other wanted to know their favorite color and favorite gemstone and favorite childhood memory. I literally devoured the book once I hit page 200. We find ourselves completely consumed with Bella.

Which brings me to the other side.

comatose or pretty close June 19, 2009

(No, the lyric title can’t really be tied to the post this time – I couldn’t find an appropriate song about computer programming, oddly enough.)

I think this is a sign that I have been far too long in the land of computer programmers and code, but I got this picture in an email today at work, and I laughed, outloud, and then cried when I realized what I had just acknowledged as funny. (Okay, so I didn’t really cry, I watched a little bit of my soul tear off and fall away.)

Cache code is only funny on cakes, kids. Elsewhere it's serious business.

What? You didn’t immediately laugh? That’s a bit of code used to call today’s date. The 60000 is today, 6/19/2009, as a DAT. Hilarious, right?

Oh.

It only comes out as a multiple of 10,000 once every 27 years or so. Still not interested. I see.

Nevermind, then.

always red in the rearview June 17, 2009

Irish novels. Novels about Ireland, novels by Irish authors, novels about Irish people, whether here or across the pond. Is there a reason they’re so depressing?

This past weekend (before I even started Tethered if I must be honest) I read The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry (I didn’t think that could be his real name, so I just wikipediaed it. It is. Hmm. I like the name Sebastian, from the Greek, meaning “venerable” or “worthy of honor.”) I guess I enjoyed it well enough, but why did it have to be so depressing? It reminded me of two books, for completely different reasons, and so I’m going to review it in light of that. To set it up in context, The Secret Scripture is about Roseanne McNulty, a woman who has spent a great majority of her life in a mental asylum. As the asylum prepares to move to a newer, smaller facility, one of the doctors takes the time to talk to her and try to discover if she is, in fact, sane enough to live out her days in the free world.

This book, short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker prize, reminded me of the Man Booker Prize winner of 2007, The Gathering by Anne Enright, which I somewhat detested. They are both written by authors born in Dublin in the mid-20th century, both deal with Irish families with deep secrets and both are narrated by women with problems keeping their memories in order. I recall specifically a passage nearer the end of The Gathering where the narrator suddenly informs us that this horrific scene between her brother and the landlord we have been swerving around the whole story is kind of fuzzy. Maybe it’s actually her? Maybe she doesn’t remember it at all? Maybe she thinks that it’s her because she feels guilty for not helping? This is the way I felt the whole way through The Secret Scripture.

Roseanne tells her story in a way that seems so straightforward and to the point, and yet, every time the doctor’s narrative interrupts, we are presented with conflicting information and jarring incongruities. The story is very dependent of the reader’s decision about who to believe. Another review I read said that the writing was “whimsical” and that it was obvious that Barry is also a poet. Um. Okay. “Whimsical?” Really? *Alright, I just looked up whimsical, and while it can mean “lightly fanciful” it can also mean “subject to erratic behavior or unpredictable change” which I guess could describe the narration to some degree. I just found it confusing. Especially the old woman’s narration, which would start at one point and then suddenly launch into an “Anyway, I turned around and he was standing right there…” that made me turn pages back, thinking, when is she talking about? Did she set this scene at all? only to discover that no, she hadn’t, she was just starting out in media res of yet another unspecified situation. I found this irritating.

The second book I was reminded of is somewhat cliche. Of course I would relate the two. Their plots are set up nearly identically. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace also deals with false/faulty memories of a woman deemed insane and institutionalized. Grace’s story is also punctuated by the musings of a doctor who is trying to discover whether she is the innocent victim of circumstance or perpetrator of a violent crime.

Oddly, I found the doctor’s interludes about his own life in The Secret Scripture much more frustrating and rabbittrail-ish than I did in Alias Grace, perhaps partly because Atwood is a supremely talented writer, but mostly I think it had to do with the fact that with Atwood’s Dr. Jordan’s interactions with the women in his empty bleak life obviously could be tied to the themes of the larger plot (and, actually, most of Atwood’s fiction) – “Woman: Temptress or Maiden?” With Barry’s Dr. Grene, I felt confused about what his disintegrated marriage and his wife’s illness had to do at all with the themes about Ireland’s civil war and the impact of religion on one woman’s life. I felt like it detracted from the main plot, rather than supporting it.

So now that I’ve written this, oddly enough I’m not as sure that I liked this book. I guess I feel that while Barry is worth another read, this might not have been his finest hour.

black and white has never been my thing June 16, 2009

This morning I was sitting on the couch checking my email before work, and finger-combing my hair. Naturally, a whole handful comes out (hey, it’s not as bad as some points in my life, but yeah, it’s not good either) and as I pulled the strands out from their weavings around my fingers, I noticed one of them in particular. It’s silvery white.

I have always guessed I would go grey, since my Dad was pretty salt-and-pepper before he ever turned forty. Part of me really likes the idea, since I think that silvery-grey hair is really beautiful. This one hair certainly was. It’s grey at the root, but the older part is still golden, as if it caught a worry at its very conception.

I’m always a little miffed when hair dressers pull the grey hairs as they cut and style. “I just got that one for you, dear.” Did I ask you to cull my hair? No. Please leave it alone. That grey hair is meaningful to me. It’s hard-earned. I’ve lived a third of my life, most likely, and I deserve the credit and proof.

On the other hand, I would have liked to have had the chance to have children and a family before the descent into gravitas. Seriously.

a pulse, your pulse. June 15, 2009

*Warning, this book was tragic and sad. It was really dark and not very hopeful. Unless you normally handle psychological mysteries well, I wouldn’t suggest this.*

Tethered was not what I expected. It’s a first novel by Amy MacKinnon, and it’s very well-written. Frankly, though, the cover art is deceiving. This book is in no way a gothic, romantic tale. There is darkness, and light. There is a great struggle between good and evil. However, this is all within the context of a thriller, about a race between predator and prey. (I’m sorry, that last phrase made even me crack up a little. It’s a crime novel. Obviously people are chasing other people.)

This book has elements that are obvious, that are cliche in something of this genre. There’s a broken woman/girl, who must come to terms with horrors in her own childhood in order to reach out to a little girl who needs her help. So there’s internal struggle. (Think Cammie McGovern’s Eye Contact and the struggle to understand the little boy’s autism.) This broken woman/girl sometimes doubts her sanity as she struggles to communicate about this particular crime that hits close to home. (Think Abu Jaber’s Origin, and the struggle with memory.) There’s the standard good cop, who wants to save broken woman/girl, who has secret pain of his very own deep down inside. (Think French’s In The Woods and everyone’s favorite mistreated Sam.) Of course, in due time, good cop sleeps with broken woman/girl, which brings yet another layer of complexity and emotion to the broken woman/girl’s processes, which is dealt with in the same sweeping blow as the story’s climax and resolution. (Think all of the above novels. Seriously. I’m telling you it’s not original.)

And yet. There’s a sweetness and sincerity to MacKinnon’s characters I wouldn’t have expected in a first novel. The grief of each of the characters is so real, so true. The awkwardness of the reaching out, each character’s attempts to comfort another seemed very authentic and charming. I really didn’t remember that this was a first novel until I had completely finished and sat down in order to type this up. Never once do I doubt MacKinnon’s characters, or her storyline. It is flawless. So I forgave a little cliche because she made me cry. I am eager to see if she can follow this up with another as heart-striking.