3 Book reviews

I am so bored tonight!  Well, not really, but I feel that feeling that I haven't had in forever: that let down that comes only when I have finished the book I was immersed in for a few days.  After more than a year of what can only be called a reading slump, I have finally arrived.  Or I had until last night when I finished the last one.

It kind of feels like cheating, because I've gotten each of the books I want to review from NPR.  Their summer reading lists published in May and June gave me 3 good books that I read cover to cover in a matter of days. I don't know why I feel like I'm cheating, but oh well.  But, no more talk, let's review!

State of Wonder, Anne Patchett.  This book is hot right now, in fact, it's number 9 on the NYT Bestseller's list (not that that does much for me; there are plenty of James Patterson's and Mary Higgins Clark's that are there all. the. time. but you won't catch me reading or caring.)  But this book belongs on the best-sellers list.  Trust me.

It is the story of Marisa, a former ob/gyn resident who becomes a pathologist.  Her best friend at work has recently been reported as dead in the Brazilian jungle, and it is her mission to find out how he died.  I was amazed at the world that Patchett described: one of giant flying bugs, of muddy rivers that hide giant anacondas and microscopic fish, of hummingbirds and herons and purple butterflies and psychedelic mushrooms.  It was captivating.  It was also interesting to realize that there are parts of the world that are still wild, where people live in huts and braid their own roofs from leaves while wearing the cast off clothes of Americans.  I had never read a book by the author (she also wrote Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant).  I'm not doing it justice, but read it (if you can ever get to the top of your library's hold list, heh heh.)

Matched, by Ally Condie.  This is a YF by a writer from Salt Lake City.  She has done what so few LDS authors have done: transcended the world of religion and wrote a book that can appeal to the everyday, non "solve the problem by baptizing and/or killing off a character" type of reader.  Her first few books were in fact published by Deseret Book (not that there is anything wrong with that!) but now she has hit the big time with Matched.  It is a dystopia where everything is decided for you by society, from where you will live to what you will do and who you will marry.  Cassia goes to her matching ceremony only to find that she is to marry her best friend Xander.  However, when she looks at the information given to her about her match, the information isn't about Xander, but another boy she knows: Ky.

I'll admit it is a little like a lot of the recent dystopian fiction of the past few years - Uglies, Hunger Games, what have you.  But, most importantly, there are no glittery vampires or swarthy werewolves to contend with.  The characters don't often "murmur" or "dance across rooms."  Condie has created characters that are likable and believable.  Cassia isn't your trying-to-not-be-self-absorbed-while-being-completely-self-absorbed character like Katniss and Bella.  She knows who she loves and she knows why and she doesn't allow herself to be backed into a love triangle because she is too afraid of hurting the two boys.

My favorite part was when Cassia learns a poem that has been forgotten by society - Dylan Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night.  I love how the power of language inspires her to stand up and fight.  I also loved a part when Cassia, who doesn't know how to write because everything is typed,  learns to write her name. We take for granted our power to write our own names - a symbol of who were are, a mark that we are here.  I kept thinking of this part of the book when I wrote about my dad writing his name in my copy of East of Eden in my talk for my dad's funeral last week.  Powerful stuff.  Again, I'm not doing it justice, but I loved it.

Before I go to Sleep, SJ Watson.  I'm not much for mysteries, but I could not put this book down and read it in 2 days.  Christine has no long-term memory - everything she learns during the day is lost at night while she sleeps.  She wakes every morning to a man she doesn't know and has to relearn all the painful truths of the past 20 years of her life.  With the help of a doctor and a journal, she starts to piece together her life.  It is so well-written and captivating.  Not my usual genre, but definitely good for a quick summer-time read.

Have you read any of these?  Now that I'm bookless, do you have any suggestions for me?  I have a few holds that I am waiting for, but I'm fishing around.

June/July in review

I'm not loving my old 10 list format, so I'm trying something new. Hopefully it works out.

Things I want to remember:

1. Doing Ragnar with Shane and Amy and all my friends.  It was better than Christmas.
2. The barbecue we had at my sister's house for my mom's birthday.  My kids played in the pool for 5 hours straight and loved every minute.  My youngest great nephew and two great nieces were there and so it was a little like baby heaven (they were 3, 2, and 1 month, respectively. So cute!)
3. We celebrated my dad's 69th birthday.  Amy fed him cake, my mom gave him a diet coke, and I took pictures while our kids chased rabbits around the courtyard of the resthome.
4. Talked about blackmail photos with my niece Haley.  She apparently has some good ones on me, so I should be nice about her.
5. Turned 36.  Sigh.
6. Gave a talk in church. It was the first time since I've been an adult that I've spoken in sacrament.  I based my talk on Elder Bednar's talk on revelation.  I love the way  his mind works - he explains gospel concepts very logically and I'm all about logical gospel concepts!  I'm now set for another 15 years on giving talks I hope!
7. Found out my bestest friend Rebecca is going to have a baby. I am so excited for her and her husband Steve!
8. Sunday bike rides at the Jordan River trail with the kids.
9. Going to Snowbird to ride the tram look at wild flowers.  The weather closed the tram so we kind of had to kick it and find someway to entertain ourselves.
10. Thomas and Ben finished fourth grade and kindergarten in June, and then started fifth and first grades at the end of July.  I have two kids in all day school - I've reached Nirvana.  I'll let you know when I get more than one day in a row of being home to enjoy it. 
11. A night out with my sister at my work's retreat.  We giggled the whole way through Sundance's Sound of Music.  Someone around us in the audience even farted. It was awesome.
 

Books that took up my time:

1. Cold Sassy Tree.  It took 3 attempts, but in the end I loved it.
2. The Graveyard Book.  I had it on my list for a long time, and finally read it thanks to my lovely book exchange.
3. Til we have Faces. My first non-Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe CS Lewis book.
4. Matched.  This is a trilogy, so if you hate waiting for books for years on end, don't read it.  But it's really good and written by a lady in Salt Lake who has reached the shangri-la of coming from this culture and writing a book that doesn't end with someone dying or getting baptized (or both.) 
5. Spoiled (I heard about this on NPR and it was awesome. It kind of brought me out of my nearly 18 month long book slump.)
6. Currently, I am reading Ann Patchett's State of Wonder.  It is so good!

Things I worried about:

1. My dad.  He is declining, and will probably not last much longer.  I will miss him but will be so glad that he is no longer trapped inside his body.  He is actually home now and we are helping to take care of him.
2. The debt ceiling debacle.  I think it's ridiculous that the greatest country in the world allowed itself to get that close to the edge.  Everyone in Congress should get fired. That would teach them for worrying about reelection when the reputation of the USA is on the line.  I blame NPR for being so awesome that I even know anything about the debt ceiling crisis. I think I liked things much better when I was ill-informed and oblivious to the things going on in the world.
3. Finding runners for next year's Ragnar.  I know, it's a year away. But team Still Chafing Tail is registered and ready to go but still needs some runners.  If you don't sign up right away, you just don't get in.  Now we are in.  I have some people I keep telling that they are running. I think they think I'm teasing, but I'm not.  They'll come to see things my way soon enough (insert evil laugh.)

Stuff I purchased:

1. Headbands from Sporty Girl.  I love them!  I would wear one every day if I could.  I got 3 and wear them whenever I run or go out in the sun. 
2. Some new shoes to replace my broken wooden ones.  I aparently found the only pair of shoes at the Nordstrom sale that weren't one sale.  But they are cute and I'll wear them forever, so it's okay, right?  Right?
3. A couch.  Or rather a set of couches.  I can't wait for them to come in!  I will not miss my hodgepodge 10 year old furniture.  I won't.
4. Admission for the Halloween Half Marathon for me and Shane.  It's all fun and games and costumes until you actually have to run down the canyon 13.1 miles.

Things making us happy (I'm kind of blatantly copying NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour here, but oh well!):

1. Handstands.  My kids are obsessed with them.  I should do a post just on handstands because my kids are constantly upending themselves all over my family room.  It's awesome.  They are getting so good!
2. My new camera.  It does HD video!  It can zoom!  It doesn't take crappy pictures!  I love it.
3. Social Media is making Shane happy.  He's helping some people market their ideas and he's loving it.  They had a lunch meeting to work out all the details.  He is so excited to be helping them. 
4. Being home with my kids after school every. single. day. of the week.  This is a new experience for all of us, and has brought much peace to our evenings.  It's ironic that my kids get into all day school and I start working less hours, isn't it?  but I love it!
5. Self-portraits.  It's the only way I get in pictures with my own camera, so I take them. I'm kind of perfecting the art of the self portrait.  Enjoy the fruits of my labors:

What made you happy in June/July 2011?  Will you remember these months for anything in particular?

The one where I admit to being a geeky talk radio listener.

I have become completely enamored with NPR of late (which I always type as NRP - I'm not sure why.  Self-correction or something.)

Anyway, the past few weeks I've entertained my brain while I do random jobs while listening to back stores from the NPR website.  It's changed my world.  These are the things I've discovered, and I want to share them with you.  You know, so you can be a geek like me.

Beginnings.  It's a feature they are doing on All Things Considered about pregnancy and early childhood. The first episode, about infant and mother mortality in Mozambique, brought me to tears. 

Culture Happy Hour podcast.  4 NPR employees sit around and talk about pop culture and what they do to fill up their time.  They are hilarious and sweet and sincerely entertaining.  My favorite episode was last week's, when they talked about what one does while their time is "unstructured" - like when your sick or on maternity leave or otherwise homebound with time on your hands.  There was this awesome anecdote about a possible link between liking smoking and watching General Hospital that made me laugh out loud.  I'm a tad bit jealous of them all to tell the truth; they are all really funny and have an audience for their humor.  But I listen anyway.

NPR Book Podcast.  NPR does bits about books all the time, but they put 5-6 together in a podcast twice a month.  Sometimes I will hear a repeat of one I listened to already, but I also hear some that I wouldn't have taken the time to listen to otherwise.  I've gotten quite a few book recommendations through NPR this summer and have been pleased with the results.  And listening on Monday inspired me to challenge my kids to a week of reading - Thomas has to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Ben has to read 15 books before the end of the week.  Of course there is a bribe/prize if they meet their goal. It's been awesome - Ben worked his way through The Big Hungry Bear, Head to Toe, and Go, Dog, Go! yesterday, and Thomas is 1/3 of the way through HP.  Ah, the sweet sounds of children reading, rather than watching TV or playing video games.  As they are going back to school next week, I needed to feel like they had actually accomplished some reading, and now I will have.

Last night, I discovered that iTunes has a bunch of podcasts, so I downloaded a few.  This led me to a new story podcast site - The Moth.  I listened to a story this morning about a girl who meets her brother for the first time at their dad's funeral - I had to make an effort not to cry.  And now I'm swooning over their website and their radio hour episodes.  Be still my soul.

So, now I've come to the most important part of this post: the part where I ask what you listen to when your mind needs occupying.  Do you have geeky talk radio proclivities?  What satisfies your cravings?  As I am completely new to this genre, I need your suggestions.  And I can't wait to see what you have discovered!  I'm hoping to immerse myself in geekiness until my fingers are pruny.  What else have I been missing?

NPR topic: Dark themes in YA Fiction

NPR = Swoon.  I am in love.

But I not only like to listen to it, I've recently started getting updates through Facebook, which adds an even more swoon-worthy element to the mix.  In the past two weeks, I've gotten articles regarding reading that have made my whole day.  And now I want to share one of them with you, this article written in response to a NY Times article criticizing YA fiction's dark themes.  (Go and check it out; I'll wait.)

Honestly: this article had me at the VC Andrews reference, my personal go-to author in 7th grade.  When I told my mom I wanted to read Flowers in the Attic, she bought me a copy (it was the .  I devoured it, then moved on to Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and the prequel, Garden of Shadows.  Was I disturbed by the gratuitous incest, adultery, and cruelty within? Absolutely.  I even banned myself from serial readings of the books after I read If There Be Thorns because it felt sinister and (for lack of a better word) devilish.  But I finished the series, and a few others written by VC (the name Troy Tatton will never not make my heart skip a beat!), stopping only when her name became a brand rather than an actual author.  To me, those dark and twisty books jived with my own dark and twisty tendencies, and so we were a perfect fit.  That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy reading something less dark (I did go through a phase of Jack Weyland, and can still tear up at the thought of Charlie sleeping by the bedside of her infant son), but I wouldn't turn away a book just because it contained themes and subjects that were on the darker side of life, such as The Silence of the Lamb, violence like Lonesome Dove, or overtly sexual books like the Earth's Children's series by Jean Auel.  They all broadened by literary landscape and affected the reader I am today.

As a parent, I have allowed my 9-year-old to read books with swear words in them (I know! But it's called Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson.)  He's read a book about a youth only a few years older than him who died in the Civil War, a historical fiction-type book based on an actual young soldier in the northern army. When Thomas was 6, I read Charlotte's Web to him, knowing that the spider would die and he would be sad, but also knowing it would prepare him in a small way for losses of grandparents and uncles later in life.  I think that reading allows children to be introduced to ideas that allow them to grow in ways that they wouldn't in their real lives. True, they might not have thought of these themes themselves. But I like what the author says:

'Surrounding them with books full of joy and beauty is fine, but confining their reading to those things because we are afraid that they cannot tolerate being exposed to the things they are already so often exposed to does them a terrible disservice. It's difficult to say to a teenager, "We don't even let you read about anyone who cuts herself; it's that much of a taboo. But by all means, if you're cutting yourself, feel free to tell a trusted adult."' 

And yes, I realize he is not a teenager, and I keep his reading level to an appropriate age level for him, but I also see what will be coming down the pike in the next few years when he will be choosing his own reading material, and more importantly, when his english teachers are requiring him to read literature with mature themes (A Separate Peace, Julius Caesar, even Beowulf).  And while total immersion in books that are evil or gruesome or graphic is something I will steer my child away from when that day comes, I believe there is a maturity that is learned from books that is less invasive than a similar depiction in a movie or video game.  If he is to experience it, I'd rather it be through his own imagination than through the (literal) lens of someone else's.

So I applaud this article.  I wish I could quote almost every paragraph in the article, but these are a few of my favorites.

And with younger kids, like 13-year-olds? If they're interested in dark themes, they're going to find them, whether it's in YA novels or something else. Curiosity about death or illness or suffering doesn't have to be grafted onto 13-year-olds by fiction writers. The ones who seek out dark themes are the ponderous ones, the ones who like the idea of things feeling Very Very Serious, who like the idea that they are doing something daring when they open a book. Yes, some of them are depressed. But some of them would be depressed anyway. You could give them books about uplift and clean living, and it wouldn't cure them of depression, because depression is chemical. If depression were treatable with copies of Cherry Ames, Jungle Nurse, they wouldn't make medication for it.

It's a lovely thought that surrounding kids with fun books about beauty will bend their perspectives toward beauty like a plant growing toward a sunny window. And certainly, it would be bad if everything always were murder and death and misery.

But adolescence is a dark time for a lot of people. Not a fake-dark time, because they got a pimple, but a real dark time, because they have a friend who drinks too much or is abused at home or has a mental illness and wants to kill himself. It's sad, but keeping books away from them doesn't make it any less true. Yes, it's always possible that someone will get the idea to cut herself from a book about cutting herself, but if she's in a position where cutting herself seems like a good idea, she wasn't just fine before she opened the book. The odds are she is already familiar with brutality and loss at some level; kids who aren't don't pick up a book about cutting and decide to slice into their arms.

And this one:

Much of this concern comes from a very well-intentioned place, I think. Parents hate the collision of their children with unpleasantness. Everyone wishes life as a teenager were irreconcilable with having an interest in angry, psychologically complicated, perhaps violent characters. Nobody wants to think their kid can really relate to a teenage protagonist who considers suicide or gets beaten up at school or feels crushed by pressure to be perfect. It feels good to make those "adult" themes, but that doesn't make it so.

What do you think about the article, or about darkness in the youth fiction arena? Is it escapism or a way to cope with reality?  Or, more simply: does NPR make you swoon, too?