The English Geek

Snobology

Maybe my last post was ill-advised.

Mean.

Snarky.

I mean, I never considered that the author of the book I was writing about would read what I had written. Honestly: I'd be embarrassed to point out just how many hits I get on my blog, because it would be pointing out how few people actually read what I write. Why would an author read my blog?

Of course, I'm pretty sure that she doesn't read it regularly. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) She is a writer and, as such, has put herself out in the world for criticism. Nope: more important to me are the people who do read my blog regularly. My friends, neighbors, family. People I've never met in real life but whom have a place in my heart.

The ones who did leave a comment or send me an email suggesting that my post made me sound like a snob. Plus the ones who didn't, but who might have thought that anyway.

So today I've been thinking about the word snob. I even read about it in the OED. Originally, snob referred to the last sheep left in the pen, the one that was so difficult to shear he was left till the end; then it referred to a person of very low class, and only recently took on the two meanings it has now: Someone who tries to only associate with people based on a certain social superiority, and a person who is proud to show her self-satisfied superiority. Am I a snob? A book snob? Do I think I'm better than other people, simply by weight of my taste in reading?

I don't know. On one hand, I do wish more people read literary fiction. I wish more attention was paid to more difficult books. I wish there weren't 9 bajillion holds for the newest Dan Brown novel while Margaret Atwood's sits, gathering dust, on the New Book shelf. Does wishing that mean I am showing off my self-satisfied superiority?

I hope not.

Because that would be as dumb as, say, feeling superior to someone because your house is cleaner than theirs, or you have more money, or you run a faster mile. Or because you're better at living the gospel, or more slender, or drive a nicer car. Not that I have ever felt smaller, because of those things, in comparison to someone else. Never.

Or maybe we're just all snobs about something. Take rice, for example. I will confess that maybe I am a rice snob. I think Minute Rice is gross, and I don't understand why anyone would eat it, not only because it tastes like small, damp pieces of cardboard but because it's nutrionally bankrupt. Maybe I am snobby about rice. But books?

Really: if I thought I was better than other people, based on my reading tastes, then I wouldn't feel so strongly that wished-for readerly companionship. Because then we'd all be reading the same stuff and how I could I feel superior?

Maybe I am pulling the wool over my own eyes, but I don't think I'm a snob. I have opinions on which books are worth my reading time, and which aren't. Having an opinion doesn't make me a snob, and I don't think I should apologize for my opinions. More relevant, maybe, is the fact that I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of those opinions. I don't think less of a person because her reading tastes are different than mine. I do wish more people---friends, neighbors, family members, and complete strangers---would come to the dark side with me. But only because I love it so much.

So, let it be stated: if you read fluffy murder mysteries, I love you.

If you think the Twilight series are the best books ever written, I still value our friendship. (Even though I happen to disagree with you.)

If your favorite genre is romance novels, complete with heaving bosoms on the covers, that will not affect my affection for you.

If you read westerns compulsively, I will confess that the only Louis L'Amour I've ever read was Haunted Mesa, which isn't really a western anyway, and I will tell you that I have no desire to explore the genre any further. But I will continue to be your friend.

And let me set another record straight: I am rejecting the "snob" label. (Unless you're calling me a rice snob. That's OK. I think you should try real rice.) But if you're simply calling me snarky? Well, OK then. Sometimes I am a snark. I have embraced my inner snarkess, in fact. Although: I'm not realy sure if "snark" is an official word or not.

I'll have to check the OED.

Book Note: Little Bee by Chris Cleave

The jacket copy of Little Bee forbids me from telling you what the novel is about. "Once you have read it," the copy says, "you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds."

Hmmmmm.

I, personally, need more than a vague recommendation before I check out a book. What the subject is, at least. Yet, I also feel like the not knowing helps the novel's joissance. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about it.

Little Bee is the story of Little Bee, a refugee from Nigeria who is stuck in a British Immigration Center. After two years, she manages to get out, and heads to the home of the only people in England she knows. Andrew and Sarah had visited Nigeria two years earlier, where they met Little Bee and her sister, and experienced something horrific on a beach there with them. What exactly happened on the beach is the point the novel unfolds toward, and the movement's tension, sadness, and confusion give the novel its power.

Little Bee is an extraordinary character. Because she is foreign, she interprets the British in surprising and unusual ways. The novel opens with her unusual statement: "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl." Her explanation of why---freedom of movement across borders, and everyone is happy to see you, and power. Plus, it speaks with Queen Elizabeth's voice, a voice Little Bee tries to emulate. She figures out that appearing British in her accent and her way of speaking is the only way she can gain any sort of power in her new country. Lyrical, and intelligent, and also made fierce by wounds: Little Bee's character colors the entire novel with courage, humor, and despair.

Because while it's beautifully told, it's not a beautiful story. If you are looking for a sweet, happy ending, this is not the book for you. If you're looking for gentle story, for events that won't haunt you, this is not your book. But if you want a novel that explores consequence, and redemption, and the contrast of the ordinariness of everyday living with the pervasiveness of evil, this is a book you will want to read. If you want to be reminded that our lives in Western culture are a sort of illusion, built to keep out the mutilations of developing countries,this is a book for you. If you need to be reminded that even with that evil, and mutilation, and horror, there is still love and goodness and hope, you should read this book.

Booknote: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

There are some subjects for books that seem to be irresistible to writers. There will always be love stories, of course, but I'm thinking more specific: the holocaust, and the world wars, and the Civil War; any war, for that matter. Or, think about American slavery, and I'm certain you can think of dozens of novels written about it. I think novelists return to these topics over and over because they hold a sort of power over our psyches. We want to understand the bad things that happened in the past because the difficult times are also extraordinary; they are where drama lies, waiting to fill us up with tension. Yet, because we know how events turned out, the reading is also tinged with a sort of learning: I knew there were slaves, of course, but I didn't know this thing happened to them.

It's when a novelist manages to uncover that unknown thing that I am able to love a book. Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Chains did that for me. Set in 1776, it blends both the slave experience and the Revolutionary War into a story full of those I-didn't-know-that moments. Plus, there's Anderson's characteristic fine writing; combined, it's one of my top-five favorite teen novels I've read.

Chains tells the story of the young slave Isabelle. Rather than gaining her freedom at her mistress's death, as she was promised, she's betrayed by the mistress's only relative and sold to a couple from New York. The Locktons happen to be Loyalists, working to undermine the revolution. They also happen to be cruel, both to each other and their slaves and servants. Isabelle fights back against their cruelty by spying on them for the revolutionaries, but it doesn't gain her much since they also see her as just another slave.

As you read Isabelle's story, the knowledge of how events work out---knowing that it will still be almost 100 more years before emancipation---is what makes you weep. The slaves who have been taught to read follow a certain logic: the revolution is based on the idea that people should be free. They are people, and hence: they'll be free, too. Knowing how long that will take, knowing how pointless their hope is, breaks the reader's heart.

In the end, I felt like this wasn't just another book about slavery. It is a book about overcoming obstacles and about finding your own inner courage. "Everything that stands between you and freedom is the river Jordan," an old slave tells Isabelle. "Look hard for your river Jordan." It takes Isabelle a while---and not a few excruciating experiences---to puzzle out the metaphor. When she realizes that Mrs. Lockton only has power over her physical body, the knowledge gives her courage. "She cannot chain my soul," she realizes. "What was one more beating? A flogging, even? I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. . . she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her." She's crossed her river Jordan. And we, slaves or no, are glad to be reminded, too, that the world will try to break our souls but is only successful if we let it be.

Books I Can't Wait to Read,

but will have to because they're not out yet:

The Year of The Flood by Margaret Atwood. Hello. New Atwood? I have been obsessing over this since I learned about it back in March. It's a sort of companion novel to Oryx and Crake , which is a novel I think everyone should read because of the realism in what it posits the future could hold. Aside from being overly excited to read this (I am trying to not get TOO excited because, then, what if I'm disappointed?), I'm feeling slightly obsessed with wondering if her book tour for this one will bring her to Utah. I did get to attend a reading she did for Oryx and Crake, but I made a fool of myself and I forgot a camera. Two mistakes I wouldn't make again if I had another opportunity. Plus, I really, really, REALLY want her to sign my much-marked-up copy of Cat's Eye .

Day After Night by Anita Diamant. I'm not sure she can ever recreate the magic of The Red Tent. But I am hopeful! Tells the story of Jews who fled Europe for Palestine and were retained by the British. . . not a story of the holocaust I had ever heard of before.

Lacuna  by Barbara Kingsolver. I don't even know what it's about but I'm uber-excited anyway. A lacuna is a gap of some sort...hmmmm. Can't wait!

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. His Maps and Legends is one of my favorite books about writing/reading. Summerland is maybe the only book about baseball I've ever read and loved (probably because it's not really about baseball, but norse mythology, and courage, and intricate maps). Here, he collects essays (yay! for essays!) about his attempts to be a perfect father, husband, and/or man, both the failures and the successes.

Solace of The Road  by Siobhan Dowd. Siobhan Dowd might just be my favorite YA author. She's nearly perfect for my reading tastes: Irish, lyrical, brave. Unfortunately, she passed away just as she was beginning to find her writerly stride. (Damn cancer.) This book was written before her death (well, obviously) but not published until September.

The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt. Byatt's novel Possession is in my top-ten favorites. Her short stories are good, too. I'm annoyed that I really do have to wait to read this one, as it's being released much earlier in England. Not annoyed enough to pay the import fees, but still.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. There's a certain anxiety over reading the second book written by an author whose first book you love. Niffenegger also wrote Time Traveler's Wife , and the concept for that one can't, I don't think, ever be repeated. I'm excited to read her new one, but I also know it will help me understand better if I liked TT'sW because of the writing or because of the story concept. I'd actually like to re-read it before I see the movie, but my mom has my copy. (My mom, by the way, has only just picked up reading. In the past six months or so. I never thought I would ever type the sentence "My mom has my book." I'm proud of her!) 

Catching Fire by Susanne Collins. This is the sequel to The Hunger Games. Since there are currently 68 holds on Catching Fire, and since Jake and Haley and I are all dying to read the second one, I'll just be buying both of them. Then I'll be loaning them out, I believe! Should I start my own hold list?

This is, of course, in addition to the scary books I'll be reading in late September and into October. And my attempts to home school Haley for Honors English credit. (Another lengthy blog post about THAT subject.) And...well, I'll never get around to reading everything I want to read. But a girl can always dream.

What are YOU excited about reading soon?

Booknote: Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

My thirteen different types of adolescent crazy have already been well documented on my blog, but what you might not know is that none of them included an eating disorder. Looking back with a critical eye, I am a little amazed that I didn't, actually, develop anorexia or bulimia. I had friends who were bulimic --- one of my most vivid eighth-grade memories is following them while they sprinted down the hall after lunch, completely baffled at why we were running towards the bathroom, and then listening to them throwing up and still being naive enough to hope they weren't contagious. Like it was just the stomach flu. I had one acquaintance (sorta/kinda on the fringe of my group of gothy friends) with anorexia, but not even her skeletal elegance managed to trigger that particular crazy in me. Maybe my laid-back father's personality counteracted my controlling mother's? Maybe my dislike of puking trumped my need to fit in? Maybe gymnastics kept me thin-ish enough? Or maybe it's just because, deep down, I simply love food, and yeah: I totally eat to comfort myself. Even during adolescent crazy, a great big, icy cold Pepsi and whatever candy bar was my current favorite (it's always switching, my favorite candy bar) made me feel a little bit better. Or, what I really think: my other kinds of crazy kept me too occupied, because probably, had I started down the anorexia pathway, I would have not ever wanted to come back.

For whatever reason, though, I managed to dodge the eating-disorder bullet. But I continue to watch out for it, especially since I've got a teenage daughter in the house. You can't ever be too careful. And when I learned that Laurie Halse Anderson had another new novel, Wintergirls, I of course wanted to read it; the fact that it's about eating disorders made it neither more or less inviting. I read all of her books, because she looks at difficult topics in such a clear way and because I love her writing style; she manages a lyrical feel without becoming difficult. The book opens with the death of 18-year-old Lia's former best friend, Cassie, under mysterious circumstances at a cheap motel. Cassie haunts the story, though, almost as much a protagonist as Lia.

As the story unwinds, you experience anorexia at a gut level, right along with Lia. Everything that goes into her mouth is counted, kept track of, and added to the day's running calorie total. She devises ingenious ways of making her parents think she's eating when she's not. The secret exercising, the stashes of diuretics, the uncontrollable binging, the careful weighing: all of these are something it feels like you live in the book, not just read about. (Again: that's why I love this author.) Lia is fully invested in her crazy, and as you progress through it with her, you start to understand why someone would do that to themselves. It doesn't have anything to do with being thin, really. It has to do with not feeling what is happening to her life: her parents' divorce, her mom's inability to love her for who she is, her loneliness at school, her friend's betrayal. The sum of her agony, which is different from everyone else's sum, but also the same number. Everyone hurts, and everyone has to learn how to live with hurting, and at their very most basic, the adolescent crazies come, I think, no matter their shape, from the desire to stop feeling what you  have to feel, and the way the crazies start to leave is by learning how to feel it all anyway. "It's easier to crawl into a bone cage," Lia realizes, "or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out." But she also, finally, realizes "it's a lie."

I loved the book, devoured it in a day. But I also kept thinking about Janssen's review while I read it. She wondered "who is this book for?" while she read, and I had the same thoughts. Someone who has overcome her eating disorders might not want to tempt the recovery by immersing so thoroughly into the old way of life; someone who's teetering on the edge of an eating disorder might just be pushed over. Maybe it's perfect for teenage readers who are as close to normal as teenagers get. Or for their moms. Even though I didn't have that particular struggle, I recognized how similar the thought patterns are between Lia's crazies and mine. In fact, Anderson makes the experience so real that I still felt caught up in Lia's crazy, once I came to the surface of my real life. I made a raspberry pie just to exorcize Lia's voice from my head.

In the end, what is the most interesting to me about this book is the question: how much power does a book wield? Can a piece of fiction be the thing that triggers something in someone? (There's an interesting essay and discussion at the NY Times about just this topic.) I have to say this: I believe books can be triggers, both for good and bad. Not all of them, but some books I have read have changed my life. Simply because most of those changes have been for the better doesn't allow me to think that a book couldn't change someone for the worse.  However, I don't think a book can bring you to the edge; good or bad, it can only push you over. A book about eating disorders isn't the problem, just as, really, the eating disorder itself isn't the problem, but the symptom of the problem. And I would never say a book like this shouldn't be written at all, because I also know the edge it could push a reader over might be the good one, the one that isn't a drop at all, but a turn. Just as it might trigger an eating disorder, I think it might also trigger any sort of recovery because it just might get someone to see, like Lia finally does: hard as it is, you have to learn to feel it.

Book Note: Ballistics by Billy Collins

Since in April I only read poetry, or books about poetry, I've got a feeling there'll be tons of book notes about poetry popping up on my blog. And as I am certain that my blog readers wait with bated breath for my book notes, AND you all love poetry too, there is a general cheer going around the blogosphere right about now, correct? ;) Here's my first one.

Ballistics  by Billy Collins

The poet Billy Collins is officially on my List of Writers I'd Like to Meet. (Not that I have, in reality, written down this list. But if I did, not everyone I like reading would show up there, for varying reasons.) (Who's on your list?) Of course, the few times I have meet authors on my imaginary WILtM list have been sort of disasters. Like the memorable day when I met Margaret Atwood, and I told her it was her fault I became an English teacher, and we talked about English teachers in general and one specific one that left an impression on her, but the whole time I was thinking she's got to be wondering exactly how my reading an excerpt of Cat's Eye in eleventh grade turned me into a teacher, and really it's my eleventh-grade English teacher's fault because I never would have found Cat's Eye had it not been for Mrs. Simmons, and surely someone as astute as Margaret Atwood can see my faulty logic and knows that my proclamation---like the first sentence of an essay, constructed with the goal of hooking the reader---was simply a good way to get her attention and actually spend a few minutes talking to her while the rest of the line behind us rustled impatiently. OK, maybe not a disaster, but not the immediate friendship I hoped would develop. (Because, yeah, I know, writers totally make friends with the people who come to their readings. Happens all the time.) Or the time I listened to the poet X. J. Kennedy talk in an intimate group of only ten people, and how when he spoke about all families having their poet laureate, or how they used to, and the way poetry is declining in the eyes of the general public, I wanted to hug him but knew it would be highly undignified to his very dignified grandfatherly self, and then when he opened it up for questions I couldn't think of anything to ask. "Do you know how much I love your anthologies?" isn't really a question he could really answer. So if I did meet Billy Collins, I'm sure I'd either be struck dumb or say something dumb.

But it would still be cool to meet him.

What I would want him to know but be unable to say is how much I appreciate his poems for their ability to be simultaneously accessible (meaning you don't have to know the entire history of everything in order to understand them, nor even aspire to impossible erudition of the English language) and yet, still, intelligent/thoughtful/full-of-that-double-meaning-thing that good poems have. I would discuss the limits of language, and how the word I want to describe his work with---delightful---is so pallid and wrong and yet, at the same time, exactly right. I would tell him that every once in a random while, some image or other from "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"  pops into my mind. That's the sort of impact his poems have on you. You start with one---just open to any one of them---and start reading, and you fall right into the poem; when you come out again, some little essence of the poem or of the poet himself still clinging to you. It'll never stop clinging, and you'll think about the poem at unexpected moments. He manages to get the everyday details of life, the little objects and times, into his poems, but in a way that makes you laugh, or stop to realize: although I have never thought of it that way, the poem gets it exactly right.

In a sense, though, his newest book, Ballistics, was just the tiniest bit of dissapointing to me. Not because he doesn't do all the magic he did in his previous poems---he does. But because I wanted the magic to be bigger. I wanted it to be the new Billy Collins book: the Collins-esqueness, but newer. Which isn't to say I didn't love the poems. As I read, I tried to decide which one was my favorite---which had left the strongest impression. I wanted it to be "What Love Does," because it is a non-mushy love poem, a little bit edgy, even: "It turns everything into a symbol" and "it may add sparkle to a morning," lines that are almost mushy, but not quite, that build to the unexpected point: "but mostly it comes and goes. . .it will arrive like an archangel/through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before." Or maybe "The Effort," which runs along the lines of "Introduction to Poetry,"  how misguided some attempts at reading poetry are. "The Effort" pokes at the perrennial "What is the poet trying to say?" question that pops up in English classes. (I love poems set in English classes!) "As if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson/had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts---/inarticulate wretches that they were." I especially like the last line: "and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed." When I finished it, though, I couldn't really pick a favorite. So I'm ending with this poem, which is neither grandoise nor particularly poetic in the traditional ideal:

Oh, My God!

Not on in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

But still satisfying, still with that particular Collins-esque zing. I think I love this one so much because it bothers me how often people say "Oh, My God!" Maybe that sounds churlish but instead it goes to the power of language itself. Remember playing with words, saying one over and over and over, until its very sound became something foreign, its meaning a pile of dust? That happens in a broader sense to phrases that everyone uses, all the time, and there are some phrases whose meaning I'd like to keep. But here, like he always does, he turns the idea upside down, making the "Oh, My God!" squeal into something that isn't meaningless, but a prayer. Of course, he's also being sarcastic. Still, when I hear the phrase squealed in a girlish voice in the mall, I will stop to think a bit about how miracles are everywhere, and how maybe those girls are able to see it better than I am. In the end, that's exactly what I go back to poetry for: it helps me see things better than I did before.

Book Note: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks

I love books set in boarding schools. There's something that draws me to the boarding-school concept: all that freedom, all the pressure to succeed, the mingling with other like-minded students. And, of course, the inevitable shenanigans that are bound to happen when a bunch of parentless teenagers get together. (As a parent, I also feel a sense of boarding-school abhorrence for the exact same reasons. In another life, I would like to come back as the daughter of wealthy parents, just so I could attend boarding school, but I don't want to ever send any of my kids to one!) Some boarding-school novels I've read:

• Of course, there's the classic A Separate Peace (which I read in eighth grade, thus kicking off my boarding-school-book affection; I still have my copy of it in some box or another)
• Prep  by Curtis Sittenfield (which I wanted to like more than I did)
• The River King by Alice Hoffman (one of my favorites)
• The Lake of Dead Languages  by Carol Goodman (which also mixes in a bit of gothic creepiness)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (boarding school/dystopia-ish combo)
• Others I am certainly forgetting. (Do you have a favorite boarding-school novel? Tell me!)

In theory, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is a book about a girl's adventures at boarding school. Frankie Landau-Banks was an on-the-fringe freshman during her first year at Alabaster Prep, hanging out with her popular older sister, but comes back her sophomore year having significantly changed: body and attitude. She lands a boyfriend (the Matthew she'd been crushing on the year before). She starts digging into his occasional suspicious absences, helped with a few hints from her father (an Alabaster Prep alumni) about the school's secret boy's club) and the knowledge---especially about the panopticon---she's gaining in her favorite class (Cities, Art, and Protest) and becomes, in her words, "possibly a criminal mastermind." See, I told you: that inimitable prep school mix of romance, knowledge, and hijinks.

But that's just the surface. Because what the novel's really about is how power is wielded, what it means to be a woman, the line between right and wrong, and the way people change, how a person can discover his or her own real self. Of course, that last is what all good teen books are about. What makes this so remarkable---did I mention that I absolutely love this book?---is Frankie's voice. She is intelligent, curious, inventive, courageous. If I'd known about her illicit activities, I'd've wanted to be her friend (in my other life of course, the one with a prep school in it). Plus she's funny, in ways she doesn't realize as being funny. The geekier part of me loved her musings on the "neglected positive," a term she invents that's inspired by her reading P. G. Wodehouse. "Prefixes link "In," "non," "un," "dis," and "Im" make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive world like "restrained," and you add the prefix "un" to get a negative: unrestrained. . . When there's a negative word or expression---immaculate, for example---but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing." Some neglected positives are real words---"maculate," for example, means the opposite of immaculate. Others aren't, and Frankie calls them imaginary neglected positives---inpeas.

She? She's more and more the girl I want to be friends with.

Plus, she's able to study the world she lives in, to try a bit to look at things critically. One of my favorite parts of the book is the midnight party Frankie gets invited to. Despite all the drama---it is a secret party, but she finds out about it; she's not, initially, invited; there are elaborate invitations that must be burned after reading)---once she gets to the party, she realizes it's just about hanging out in the cold, drinking beer. She's able to do this with quite a few of the social constructs at the school: who sits at what table, which girls are popular, the lack of fresh vegetables in the cafeteria. Frankie could come dangerously close to being the teen-novel stereotype of a preternaturally wise protagonist; the author avoids that by writing from the third-person omniscient perspective. She's the all-knowing narrator, in other words; she includes pieces of Frankie's essays, describes her motivations, writes descriptive asides, all of which serve to shift the stereotype out of the text.

I've taken a long route to get to the story's main plot: Frankie's discovery and infiltration of the boys-only secret club at Alabaster Prep. Via email, she wrests control of the club out of the hands of its leader, Alpha, and starts sending them on larger and more volatile pranks than they've ever planned before. In true Frankie form, though, they're not mindless; she creates the pranks and the interpretation of the pranks as she goes along, and then gets annoyed when no one else sees them as anything but, well, pranks.

One last thing I loved: the way the author nails adolescent romance. The unexpected and thoroughly miraculous experience of The Boy, who's previously barely seen you, suddenly seeing you; the way there is both power and a stripping of power in the relationship; how, once you're in with The Boy, you're also in with his friends and the danger that goes along with that "in-ness" (because if you break up with The Boy, you're also breaking up with his friends, and his friends' girlfriends, and his friends' girlfriends' friends, and the whole social group). It's a sort of clear-ish eyed approach to loving someone that I wish every teenage girl could get a glimpse of because it is so true.

I loved, loved, loved this book! I will recommend it without hesitation to nearly everyone; boys might even like it. There's hardly any swearing (actually, I don't think there was any, but don't quote me on that); the word "sex" does appear, but is never described nor even had, for certain. But it's a good book for far better reasons than those: because it might just force a reader to think beyond what is obvious, to dig into motivation and interpretation and thinking.

Book Note: Two by Siobhan Dowd

I sort of have a thing for Ireland. It’s the country I’d most like to visit; I’d like to wander through its mountains, visit its castles and cathedrals, see its cities. It’s a long-held obsession, cultivated no doubt by reading; Ireland seems to pop up a lot in books and poems, and of course there’s James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Yeats, Seamus Heaney. I have an inkling that there is a bit of Irish in our family line, although McCurdy could be Scottish; I’ve clung to wanting a piece of Ireland in my blood for so long that I don’t really want to dig around in family history for fear that there isn’t any. I am all-too-aware that I’m romanticizing a place that is, after all, just a place. But from here, it seems like a magical place, steeped in history all the way back to the Celts.

Plus there’s the accent.

I also have a thing for books set in Ireland or written by Irish writers. Even though most contemporary novels make it seem like a country full of poverty and alcoholics. Siobhan Dowd’s first novel, A Swift, Pure Cry, does that, too. It has the motifs of poverty and alcoholism, plus the death of the protagonist's mother, teen pregnancy, and a mystery involving a dead baby. Lots of dark, sad stuff, but I still read it in just one day. The lyrical use of language, a plot that pulls you along with "what is going to happen next?" and a little corner of Ireland that becomes as important as any character made this novel irresistible to me. It's the story of Shell, whose mother has recently died and whose father has left his job and devoted his life to collecting for the poor. This leaves Shell to fulfill the role of mother to her two younger siblings. She's fifteen though, so she's also got boyfriend struggles and troubles with her best friend. Her mother's spirit has a habit of helping her out every once in awhile, and there's a Catholic priest who helps her, too. One of my favorite spots is when this priest, Father Rose, who's new to the parish, stands next to the alter and gives his first sermon. Shell, who's been feeling fairly non-spiritual after her mother's death, starts believing again. Christ, whom she feels has abandoned her, "stands up from the bar and comes back to me." That gentle sense of faith being reanimated weaves throughout the novel, making you feel like Shell will be saved, even when grace seems impossible.

I’m being sort of vague on the plot details on purpose, because it's a novel that's best read when you don't know much about it. The tension builds and builds as the story progresses; you want Shell to find a happy, good place for herself but can't see how she'll manage it. There are some heartbreaking bits when I outright cried, and some other pieces that made me laugh. The ending is good---satisfying without being unplausible.

I’ve not yet read Dowd’s second novel, The London Eye Mystery, but I just finished her third, Bog Child. Again in this novel, the Irish landscape becomes a character of its own, but in a different sense. It’s set in the early 1980s, during The Troubles. Fergus, while out with his uncle, discovers a body in a peat bog. At first the girl is thought to be a recent murder victim, but they quickly discover she is a bog child, buried there and preserved for two thousand years. Fergus is in the middle of studying for his final high school exams; he wants to leave the small town where he’s grown up, go to University, and become a doctor. His older brother Joe is in jail for some undisclosed crime committed in the cause of liberating Ireland; Joe’s friend is trying to get Fergus involved in the cause; he’s wanting to hang out around the archeological site they’ve set up around the bog child. Plus he’s learning to drive. He’s got a lot going on, Fergus.

In fact, the book has a lot going on, too. It’s part history (you get the story of the bog child, told in pieces), part romance, part family drama (Joe, in prison, goes on a hunger strike with several of his comrades), part teen troubles, part humor. Plus, Fergus is a runner. He heads out on his ten-mile-long runs across the Irish countryside, thinking as he goes, and I could relate: why did I do this? he asks himself as he starts running. "His legs were heavy. Every breath felt like his last. When people asked him what was the worst bit of a run, the answer was always the same: the first mile." The best part is "the magic middle of things, where moving felt the same as staying still." Running is both the thing that helps him define himself and that gets him in trouble; it’s not so much an exercise as a place for figuring things out. A place where he can think about what courage really is, and a place that is a springboard for acting on his courage.

Like A Swift, Pure Cry, I read Bog Child in a day. I finished it and thought I wish she could have written more novels. Siobhan Dowd died in 2007, leaving two unpublished novels. There’s one still left to come out, Solace of the Road. And then...nothing. Still, it's not her untimely death that makes her an author worth reading, especially by older teens. The writing is just downright good, lyrical without being overly difficult, thought-provoking without preaching. Both of her books I’ve read have made me remember how lovely and good every individual life is.

Book Note: Before Green Gables

During March, I found myself reading a series of very gloomy books:

The Suicide Index  by Joan Wickersham, which is about the author's father's suicide

A Swift, Pure Cry  by Siobhan Down, which is set in Ireland so obviously, it's depressing (a more detailed book note to come on this one)

Before I Die by Jenny Downham, which is a teen novel whose protagonist, Tessa, has terminal leukemia and a list of things she wants to do before she dies

Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton by Linda Grey, which is Anne Sexton's daughter's story about living with her crazy mother.

That last one? Shouldn't have read it at all. Not that I am comparing myself in any way to Anne Sexton (although we do have the same initials, if you ignore middle/maiden names), in either poetic goodness or crazy horribleness, but the kind of crazy she was is something I can relate to in the vaguest sense. I mean: the horrible things she did to her children I have, fortunately, managed to not even consider with my own kids. But the tendency toward melodramatic, egocentric crazy? And the way words can be a sort of healing? Yeah, I get that. I shouldn't have read it because it put me in mind of my own dark places. So when I finished it (after failing to talk myself into just putting down the book), and I considered all the dark/twisty/sad/whatever kinds of books I'd been reading, I decided I needed something cheery and wholesome.

Coincidentally, that same day my name finally came up on the hold list for Before Green Gables: The Prequel to Anne of Green Gables. (In case you were curious: one of the drawbacks to being a librarian is that we have to be the LAST to read the books with long hold lists. So if there's, say, 58 people waiting for a book, the librarians have to wait until all of them have read it. And if more are added to the hold list in the meantime, we're still bumped to the bottom. This usually bothers me a little bit, until someone calls and complains about the length of a hold list, and is certain that it's not fair she has to wait while all the librarians get to read the book she wants. It's nice to be able to assure that someone that no, we have to wait even LONGER. Or, you know, do something drastic like actual buy the book.) Just what I needed: cheery and wholesome. If you read the Anne of Green Gables books when you were young, you will love this book. The author manages to build almost everything you'd want to know into what happened to Anne before she came to Green Gables. You get to meet Katie Maurice (the friend in the mirror), and Violetta (the friend who’s an echo), the Five Sisters (the friendly trees), and all the people who influence her.

Of course, because hard, horrible, and sad things happen to Anne, this isn’t exactly a thoroughly cheery book. But it’s the way that the difficulties are handled that makes it so worthwhile. Throughout all her troubles, Anne manages to find something that brings her happiness. She does that in the original Montgomery novels, too. In that sense, the author manages to capture the original feel of the books while telling a new story that fits seamlessly with the old. It did the same thing that Anne did to me when I was young: reminded me that if you try your hardest, things will work out in the end.

In fact, I decided that when I start reading novels again, in May (more on that tomorrow), I need to reread the originals. And since my old copies are scattered and destroyed somewhere in my mom’s house, I bought myself my own new set. Probably this is indulgent, since no one but me will read them. (They are not Haley’s style at all, and I’m 100% certain that none of my boys will want to crack them open!) But that’s OK. It’s good to have wholesome and cheery around when I need them!

Book Note: Chalice by Robin Mckinley

Yesterday  I wrote about how my internal reader has adjusted to my librarian job. That "who would I suggest this book to" feeling is particularly intense when I read any of Robin McKinley's books. Even though her books are marketed as teen reads, and have some of the markers of adolescent lit, not all teenage readers will love her books. They're sort of challenging. I would have loved them when I was a teenager, but I don't think my friends would. Even as an adult, I love her writing. It's thick and intense, a sort of creamy literary custard. The polar opposite of fluffy, but still sweet. That said, I didn't love her next-to-newest book, Dragonhaven. I felt like it had too much exposition to wade through; once you finally got to something actually happening, you were exhausted at trying to understand the books society. I can almost say the same thing about her very newest book, Chalice. What redeemed it, though, is that all the exposition (I'd say the story doesn't really start until page 50 or so) is woven with the thread of a sweet romance, and it is that thread that pulls you through to the story.

The novel is set in a world that is both pastoral and vaguely medieval. Each "demesne" (like a state, I think) is governed by a Circle, made up of twelve members with different responsibilities and connected to the Master. The Chalice is a member of the circle, closest to the Master; she mixes "cups" for all the ceremonies, meetings, and discussions the Circle attends. In this way she is like the emotional hub of the circle, soothing feelings and binding the circle members together. The Master reminded me of the Celtic king archetype, the leader who is bound to the physical aspect of his country and does what is necessary to preserve it. Then there is the Overlord, who is the most powerful man in the demesne, who reports to the King. In this world, there are "earthlines," which I interpreted as being the sentient threads of the earth---a sort of earth psyche, I guess. It is a wonderfully inventive world---I would like to live there, which is probably the best praise a reader can give to an invented world. It's full of a subtle sort of magic that comes not from dramatic offerings but from intuition and connections.

The main character, Mirasol, becomes the Chalice after the old one, as well as the old Master, are killed. What happened to them is hinted at but never fully explained; you're left with the feeling that the old Master was a man of excess who used his power for his own benefit instead of helping the demesne. Being a Chalice is a sort of gift; you either are or you're not, and Mirasol must try to fulfill a role she was born for but never trained in. The younger brother of the old Master is brought back from his exile as a fire priest, half-human, half fire. Together they have to figure out how to settle the earthlines, make the Circle healthy again, and overthrow the political manuverings of the Overlord.

This isn't a book I'd recommend to someone looking for action-packed fantasy. Not a lot happens, and much of the "goodness" of the book is the language and description, the world building, the sort of metaphysical conceit. I don't think most average teen readers would stick with it long enough to fall in love with the story. But those rare, high-level, romantic-fantasy-loving readers would love it. The romance in it is particulary well-done, because it manages to be sweet and intense without a hint of cloying or mushy. But, as much as I enjoyed it, I also finished it a bit frustrated. There really is far too much hinting-at and not enough story; the reader is left to drawn her own conclusions but without enough information to really know what happened. This world, and the characters who people it, deserve a more developed story to experience.