Currently physically on my bedtable: Robin McKinley,
The Hero and the Crown
Sharon Creech,
The Wanderer
Her best since Walk Two Moons; nearly as good even. Wonderful.
Douglas Coupland,
Miss Wyoming
Better than Girlfriend in a Coma. He is like John Leonard in his ability to pull together exactly the right cultural elements into a spandy new, frighteningly apropos metaphor.
Sharon Creech,
Chasing Redbird
As good as Bloomability, much better than Absolutely Normal Chaos. Whew.
Avi, The
True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
This is one of SLJ's most significant why? Because it's a strong female heroine? Are there so few?
Brock Cole, The
Goats
I fail to see how this is an important enough book to be on the School Library Journal's list of 100 most influential books for children, but it's damn good. A very simple plot with unexceptional children, absolutely true to life, and harrowing. SLJ says it's sparked discussion of adults' roles in children's lives, and here indeed are two children who cannot rely on their grownups at all (although possibly through their own misunderstanding of them).
Christopher Paul
Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
Curtis cracks me up. I was laughing before I read about the Wool Pooh in The Watsons Go to BIrmingham, 1963; the Wool Pooh slew me and rendered me helpless with chortles. He even got me laughing with the oldest joke in the history of specie: one boy says "Heads I win, tails you lose," and our intrepid hero Bud says, "Okay."
Ian MacEuan,
Amsterdam
I couldn't tell you why this won the Booker, but I liked it.
Louis Sachar,
Holes
Katherine Cushman,
Catherine, Called Birdy
Again, the diary format doesn't allow full immersion. I like Birdy, though.
Robin McKinley,
Spindle's End
A realistic fairy tale with a heroine who is a heroine. No Princess Buttercup here.
Irving and Amy
Wallace, The Two
I heard about this from Jessamyn and knew I had to find it. I had to find it because I, like every other wholesome, private person, just had to know how these men fathered 21 children between them. This book was so poorly written I only skimmed to find the good bits, though, and even then, the Wallaces admit no one knows exactly how the twins and their wives (sisters) comported themselves. They speculate on what was possible given physical limitation and an inescapable companion but alas, no graphic details. In fact I was so diappointed by that lack and by the poor, sensational (hellooo lisa, and why did you pick it up?) writing that I forgot to skim through the end to read about the autopsy. What comprised the band that bound them? I have no idea.
[I have no idea what came between these two. Maybe someday I'll remember.]
Sharon Creech,
Absolutely Normal Chaos
Diary format. A mistake.
Robin McKinley,
The Blue Sword
Wonderful! Splendiferous! I wish I were Roald Dahl so I could use polysyllabic adjectives and not sound like a goof!
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Below the Root
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, A Fabulous Creature
Griffin is like Ivy in The Changeling, so I liked it; and I like that
ZKS is pro-environment; but the ending was too easy. I know Diane (subtle name
for a hunter!) had to learn that Guns Are Bad (which David already knows in
Blair's Nightmare) but it reads like ZKS knew she had only 10 more pages
and had to wrap it up quick.
000430
Sharon Creech, Absolutely Normal Chaos
Not Creech's strongest. She wrote Walk Two Moons, which no author can
expect to do twice in a lifetime, but Chaos is also contrived: no 13-year-old's
diary reads like that.
000428
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Blair's Nightmare
In the interests of reading everything by this author, I read this. Eek! It's
the third in a series! I know I've read The Headless Cupid but I don't
think I've read The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case.
000426
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Witches of Worm
I never read this. When I've seen it on every children's room shelf, I must have assumed that of course I had read it before and just not liked it as much as The Egypt Game. Last week I decided I should reread it. And indeed I never did. Snyder does a much better job of presenting the psychology of a character than Alcott, unless maybe I'm judging a C20 book favorably with the same C20 perspective that condemns Little Men.
I don't care if A.S. Byatt uses C20. I prefer 20thC: it's clearer.
000425
The
God of Small Things
I'm still reading this on the bus, damn it, but I have to read
it somewhere else because there's something about the print--I've nearly beat
my reading-induced motion sickness but this brings it back.
000425 finally
I understand why everyone loves Little Women. Although the four sisters
are cookie-cutter out of an impossibly idyllic family (yes, even by C19 standards),
they're all likeable and real enough. The twelve boys of Little Men serve
no purpose besides pedantry.
The death of John Brooke wasn't like Mark Antony's. He didn't say, "I am
dying, Egypt, dying..." His death was a lot like Beth's, which always makes
me cry.
Actually it's just before, when Beth finds Jo's poem, that I collapse:
"Have I been all that to you, Jo?" she asked, with wistful, humble earnestness.
"O Beth, so much, so much!" and Jo's head went down upon the pillow, beside her sister's.
The deaths:
"As Beth had hoped, the 'tide went out easily' [source?];
and in the dark hour before the dawn, on the bosom where she had drawn her first
breath, she quietly drew her last, with no farewell but one loving look, one
little sigh." (Everyman, p. 373)
cf
"...and Daisy and Demi were in his arms as he fell asleep on Aunt Meg's
breast." (Little, Brown, p. 282)
Maybe it's just palindromic page numbers and breasts they have in common. Can anyone explain to me why anyone who is in his 30s and--as far as the reader has been told--has never been sick, can die both in only a few hours and "peacefully" and "cheerfully"? And how a reader who comes to Little Men without having read Little Women first could know who John is, have developed any affection for him, or understand why he meant anything to the boys, when he hasn't so much as seen his own two children in the whole course of the novel?
One other particular obvious weakness, starting at the top of page 232:
"'All right!' answered Dan, who was a boy of few words, and off they went."
For the next seven pages, who dominates the dialogue? Dan, expounding
on his own and natural history.
Overall, the tone was the most off-putting. For what age did LMA intend Little Men? Did she intend it to be taught in EDCI [Education--Curriculum and Instruction]? If she's so fond of the little plays and frivolities that children the age of the boys and her audience indulge, why does she gently mock them, intrude continually on her story to take the reader under her wing and point fun, as if the reader weren't quite bright enough to notice it on her own?
I hereby excuse myself from Jo's Boys.
Caroline Ryle
Brink, Baby Island
Too girly for me to have read as a child; too girly for me to enjoy now. Except I would have liked building the hunts and constructing baby fences.
Donald
R. Hettinga, Presenting Madeleine L'Engle
I've never read critical analysis of L'Engle before.
A bunch of dead plants: another thing for me to feel guilty about.
Martin Amis,
The Information
It's off to a strong start.
Susan
Cooper, The King of Shadows
I assume the title is from a play. Maybe even A Midsummer Night's Dream. I shamefacedly confess I know not.
I started it Monday: all this house stuff means I must admit it took me parts
of three days to read a children's book. I thought Cooper did a good job with
ensuring that Nat had a contemporary vocabulary even though he was a wimpy drama
geek who would get beat up in the halls. Her editors missed a couple of Britishisms,
though: one I forget and then the description of his Brit foster family watching
a tv show that "makes them fall about with laughter." That's not a Yank phrase.
It must be much easier to describe 16C England through the eyes of a 20C Yank
than 20C England through those of a 16C Brit, with so much beyond his comprehension.
There's one point Nat has to stop himself from saying "okay," and that shows
a flaw in the premise: that's only the most obvious of several turns of phrase
folks at the Globe would notice. One of the proofs that that supposed Stone
Age tribe in the Philippines isn't SA is that they have agrarian terms in their
language. Ernt, thank you for playing. Oh, and she works in a few Shakespearisms
that are now current speech, plus one Lewis Carroll: she has the boys
galumphing somewhere. That's from Jabberwocky.
5 April 2000
Simon
Winchester, The Professor and the Madman
Naturally, Winchester discusses the history of dictionaries in English. Of
course, Samuel Johnson merits individual attention. Both Bryon and Winchester
cited Johnson's most famous definition, of oats: a grain that sustains horses
in England and people in Scotland. I fail to find that funny, since it's the
same Brits that took every morsel of wheat Ireland successfully grew during
the Potato Famine to feed its horses. Maybe I would have found it funny if,
say, I were a Brit.
I love this book. Bryson was good, too: the history of the language is
always fascinating and his humor was wry and ever-so-slightly Yank-centric.
Winchester and Bryson are little alike in style or subject; both discuss dictionaries
(and Johnson) but otherwise they have in common only that I read them intermingledly.
I like Winchester because of his literary detective work; it's what made Possession,
fictionary literary detective work, so compelling.
6 April 2000
Bill
Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Pop etymology and he tells some good jokes too.
The problem with library books is that you can't write all over them. Some people
feel very strongly against writing in books; I myself, in the purest state of
persnicketyness, want three copies of everything in three libraries: One to
write all over, one to read without such distractions, and one to sit pristine
and untouched on the shelf. Usually I recognize that that's stupid. Besides,
it's democratization of the text to enable the reader to respond to it, and
for reader's remarks to become part of that ms. in the future.
So I did what I always do with provacative library books: I peppered this with
Post-Its. Naturally I never remember enough Post-Its so I dilute the pepper
with a bunch of torn strips that have only the slightest bit of stickiness.
Of those that survived, this is what they marked--and I need to use bigger Post-Its,
both for sufficient stickiness and to note what I wanted to remark:
000401
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