Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

I am fiercely glad that this book was published, because I can relate a lot to adult Scout. I can relate to her frustration with coming home and seeing your racist/sexist family with new eyes, and I can relate to her concerns about getting married and losing her self. It's exactly the stage I am in life, and I am grateful to have Scout keep me company in my rage against what it's like to grow up.

I began reading this thinking, this is a perfectly good book, in line with most contemporary fiction at the time, whatever inspired her to write To Kill a Mockingbird instead? Whatever inspired her editor to think that she'd be capable of To Kill a Mockingbird, when the story of a liberal twenty something's disillusionment upon returning to her small southern hometown might've felt far more relevant and modern? The answer came to me as the story went on, though: I don't know much about the politics of this time, but I wonder if Harper Lee decided that -- instead of writing a novel about a young person's who's critical of racist politics, and being just another New York voice condemning the racial dynamics in Alabama, why not write a novel that logically lays out the social conditions, and ties racial injustice back to the Constitution? Maybe somewhere in the writing process, she did realize that she could make more of a difference deriving proof of human kindness, than expressing her frustration with it.

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is killing it. His second book is ever more impressive than the first, which was already fantastic.

I think Jo's partly writing a satire here: award winning literary book veer towards abundant sex, discomfitting brutality and gore, more sex especially focusing on genitals, pretentious stuff like Balzac and palpitating balls, and characters that are completely unlikeable. And now Jo comes along and shows us you can write a perfectly good book with warm characters (rich with personal dilemmas beyond the realm of the job), good plot, and not much view of anyone's balls (although we can't escape the occasional dick).

The Vorrh, B. Catling

I thought this book was highly inconsistent and, in many parts, lacking.

The first chapter shows the promise of a concise, erudite short story that is unique in its conception and thoughtfully detailed; in other words, I think B. Catling proves himself capable of doing a lot better than he did. Then the rest of the book has great ideas, but they seem lackadaisically executed. Essenwald is a fascinating concept -- a city that feeds on a forest -- but the descriptions of it are highly generic. I wanted to know more about this place that sounds much like something you'd find on Geoff Manaugh's BLDBLOG, but we're not given the kind of specific, thoughtful details that make a setting tangible rather than a vague anyplace. The setting merely seems like feels like a weak mirror of present day or historic social, political and economic dynamics between city and industry. That's how I felt about most of the rest of the book: very interesting ideas, undeveloped.

I found it hard to care about the characters, and I didn't get the sense that the author cared that much about them, either. The cyclops, Gertrude, Cyrena, the frenchman... are all interesting, but that's like reading a miscellaneous piece of news in the papers and going "oh, interesting." I find them forgettable after I close the books. Most of the characters that populate the book seem incidental and not really relevant, which may be the point of surrealist art, but with an omniscient narrator and a story whose rasion d'etre is obscure, what is there to glean from scrutinizing the minute interactions between them? The only character who felt truly fleshed out is Muybridge, and I suspect this is because he is based on a real person. I know from writing fanfiction that it is far easier to write about a ready-made character, than to develop characters yourself to the point where they feel convincingly like real people. And maybe that's the problem here: the author is a better at writing about real events, real people, using real models for a place. It is not enough to imagine an interesting place like the Vorrh and call it done, for a setting to matter, it has to be fleshed out.

Yes, you can have a great novel with a generic setting and incidental characters, focusing instead on exploring a particular philosophy or scientific theory, or a single generic character's rich internal world. But the Vorrh is ostensibly about a place, and if the place is vague and elusive, then it must be through the character's adventures that we learn about it -- and the characters leave us little to learn.

crazy rich asians, kevin kwan

kevin kwan wrote the book that i'd never write, dealing with a topic (asian culture) that i'm super interested in writing about.

guys, i know people like these. spendthrift aunties, sensitive bromance guys, smart girls who go to top schools whose life is incomplete according to their families until they marry.

kwan's world is so rich with stereotypes, references, canto "pidgin" dialect (i love it when writers introduce dialect to english novels), all the secret acronyms popular amongst asians. like rachel, i'm only dimly aware that there are crazy rich asians, but this is the world i grew up in. kwan gets it and shows it so well.

i think a good writer is a good observer of human nature (and culture), and kwan's characters and settings ring true. this book is really a documentary, with the very conventional catty chicklit plot as a vehicle for us to be voyeurs to a culture that is largely undocumented. most hong kongers live these lives that are materialistic, paradoxical, but few reflect upon it (unless they've had some sort of foreign contact) because it's the norm. and kwan has captured it in all its material contradictions, its habits, all the -las and fucky fucks that locals think and talk in.

at times i was frustrated that kwan doesn't go deeper be literary rather than poppy -- he's quite capable of it, just read his sentences, acute one-liner descriptions of a character of full chapters devoted to the shallow Christian aunties -- but i think the shallowness is intentional. crazy rich asians is unabashedly voyeuristic, and i think it works that way. too much self-reflection gets didactic; here we're forced to draw our own conclusions, feeling slightly guilty that we enjoy the details of rich people's lives so much.

it's not a bad thing to write for a pop audience -- i think, now, of how many people more people are made aware of this social phenomenon of the dynastic families and the nouveau rich of asia. the beginning is perfection -- we all have these stereotypes about asians, right? and with Ormsby/Wormsby's racism at the outset, kwan's saying, get ready for a whole new set of stereotypes. a set more intricate and nuanced than you're aware of.

i wonder if, two hundred years ago, Vanity Fair would've been put on the chicklit shelf. if victorian novels of the nouveau rich were just newcoming bestsellers. this book is GOOD. maybe there's nothing wrong with it chasing a pop formula.

Seraphina, Shadow Scale, and Sex-Positive YA Lit

NOTE: Contains Spoilers for Seraphina and Shadow Scale

Rachel Hartman's Gorredd, the quasi-medieval fantasy world that Seraphina and Shadow Scale are set in, is particularly awesome for its sexual diversity, with a full cast of LGQTB characters.  In an interview on The Midnight Garden, she says that "Diversity is very important to me, and I honestly don’t see how one could populate an imaginary world without it."  What I like even more is that although this is YA, she doesn't shy away from sex at all: sex doesn't just come up as romance, it simply is, matter-of-factly, part of the story.  After all, Seraphina is the love child of a dragon and a human.  Raunchy jokes sprinkle the text as part of the fabric of medieval life (very believable, as any scholar will know, read Pantagruel and Gargantua for a start) rather than something written in for sensational reading, and Seraphina, a witty sixteen-year-old, is no stranger to sexual innuendo.

"Banished men, and likely troublemakers?; scoffed Guntard. 'They’re locked in the eastern basement, the proper donjon being full of wine casks for some significant state visit coming up."

"Sweet St. Siucre, which one might that be?" someone asked with a laugh.

"The one where your mother beds a saar and lays an egg. Omelette for all!"

-- Chapter 12, Seraphina

He thought we’d been up to something back here, with the curtains drawn. Tuning each other’s lutes, as they say. Practicing our polyphony. Playing the crumhorn.

-- Chapter 16, Seraphina

“All great houses are near a village and a river. We have a proverb: ‘In highlandts, every man is earl of his own valley.’ Thet means a lot of valleys. Also, means a rude joke in Samsamese.”

"Uh, I don't need that one spelled out."

-- Chapter 11, Shadow Scale

While Kiggs and Seraphina respectively revere and wrestle with propriety almost religiously (a self-imposed standard that we discover is of their own making), amid a conservative cultural background -- one where illegitimate children are scorned and Daanites (gay) are persecuted, and human-dragon intercourse seen as the most revulsive of all -- the characters we get to know are unhesitatingly sex-positive.  Speaking about watching her dragon mother fall in love with her human father, Viridius tells Seraphina, "I'm a Daanite, I don't judge other people's love affairs." (Chapter  The elderly and ailing Viridius cohabits with a much younger, oversized half-dragon.  A decidedly unattractive, bald, white man falls in love with a transgender, dark-skinned ityasaari.  Eskar, though devoted to Orma, apparently has no qualms being non-monogamous: 

"I wonder if Eskar will consent to be mated?"

“She chose Orma,” I said throatily, still coughing.

“Nothing stops her from choosing me as well.” The old saarantras gave me a sly sidelong look. “Sometimes our reason will lead us to the same morality as your empathy and feeling, and sometimes it won’t. I find that …” His mouth formed not-quite words, waiting for his mind to catch up. “Exhilarating?” he offered at last.

-- Chapter 27, Shadow Scale

At the end of Seraphina, Kiggs (remember he's an eighteen year old boy) blushes to think of the mechanics of Seraphina's conception.  At the end of Shadow Scale, Seraphina is unfazed by Dame Okra's learing comments about how Glisselda and Kiggs will produce an heir (Dragons have artificial insemination technology, right, Rachel?).  Seraphina's reply politely indicates that she doesn't give any fucks about what Dame Okra thinks.

So many readers are uneasy with the ending, because it presents a lie, a fabrication not so different from the one that haunted Seraphina's childhood.  I think there is a difference.  Bluffing, wit, stealth, and deviously legal loopholes, have never been a liability in Seraphina's world: falsehoods are not inherently wrong though they have consequences, but honesty is not black and white, not without consequence, either.  The truth that liberated Seraphina was a personal truth, coming-to-terms with whom she is and finding acceptance for that.  A younger Seraphina -- the one tortured by all the rude jokes about dragons -- might have blushed to hear Dame Okra's insinuations about her sex life.  Seraphina at the end of Shadow Scale is perfectly confident in her new role.

Eighty years later, it appears that the people -- or historians -- of Gorredd were not fooled by this subterfuge.  "Is it true that you and Prince Lucian Kiggs, Heaven hold him, confessed your love for each other before the dragon civil war even began?" Father Fargle asks her.  Seraphina, who was so tortured about having to remain discreet in her adolescence, has completely owned discretion now, to a degree that even the historian was complicit in, for he says, "yet I felt and still feel that her twinkling eyes answered, even if her tongue would not."    

I am a cat, Soseki Natsume

At first this cat was tedious, but the relentlessness of the cat's musings, or the persistence of the (presumably) faithfulness in translation, brought me, eventually, fully, into his world.



pg. 104
Cat's paws are as if they do not exist.  Wheresoever they may go, they never make clumsy noises.  Cats walk as if on air, as if they trod on clouds, as quietly as the stone going light-tapped under water, as an ancient Chinese harp touched in a sunken cave.  The walking of a cat is the instinctive realization of all that is most delicate

pg. 223
Even this gathering of gasbags cannot wheeze on forever, and the pressure of their conversation is now fast whimpering down toward exhaustion.

pg. 278
One seeker after inspiration, convinced that the secret of its attainment lay in constipation, assiduously strove for that prior condition by eating a dozen unripe persimmons for fruitless years on end.

I'm sure no good can come of encouraging a cabbage, that creature born to craven passiveness, to indulge himself in loafing gloomy idelness. ... But bigots such as he would never listen to a cat's advice; so I decided to let him stew in his own dull juice..
 pg. 312

I am a cat.  Some of you may wonder how a mere cat can analyzehis master's thoughts with the detailed acumen which I have just displayed.  Such a feat is a mere nothing for a cat.  Quite apart from the precision of my hearing and the complexity of my mind, I can also read thoughts.  Don't ask me how I learned that skill.  My methods are none of your business.  The plain fact remains that when, apparently sleeping on a human lap, I gently rub my fur against his tummy, a beam of electricity is thereby generated, and down that beam into my mind's eye every detail of his innermost reflections is reflected.  One day, for instance, my master, while gently stroking my head, suddenly permitted himself to entertain the atrocious notion that, if he skinned this snoozing moggy and had its pelt made up into a waistcoat, how warm, how wonderfully warm, that Kittish Warm would be.  I at once sensed what he was fthinking, and felt an icy chill creep over me.  It was quite horrible.  Anyway, it is this extrasensory gift which has enabled me to tell you not only what my master said but even what he thought throughout this dreary evening.  pg. 349

The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews

With my internet block on, I ended up getting distracted by real books and finished The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews last night.  I've read one of her other books, which deals with similar issues: very messed up families.  Her other book, A Complicated Kindness, is about a repressed mennonite family and this one is about a family with a mentally unstable mother.  I suspect these stories come from personal experience.  What's great about her books is that they have melodramatic, cliched storylines but the drama is mostly subtext.  On the surface we get (the fabric of everyday life) ordinary conversations with characters who are lively or moody, funny, and very real, rarely do they get melodramatic: the story is serious but the tone isn't.  People are fundamentally kind, though unhappy, although things get better and worse the characters prove themselves capable of enduring, so it has an optimistic message.  I think this aligns with my own world view.  Cynicism is fun - and funny - to indulge in but I don't actually have that little faith in humanity, while sentimental stories seem to lack self-awareness or self-respect; and although the story deals with difficult issues it avoids either.  I think she's an impressive conversation writer.    

Atonement, Ian McEwan

I was looking at reviews of Atonement, which I'd read over a year ago. I had been very disappointed. It had come recommended as worthy of comparison to the classics, probably in its prose, which was luscious and echoed Jane Austen. But I had felt very ambivalent about the whole book, plot, characters, and structure.

The events were very contrived, and the author attempts to disguise this through elaborate piercing insights into the characters' motivations. But the characters in their turn did not elicit my sympathy. I did not care about them. And I think the fault is that, as this review pointed out, it is more interested in exposing flawed characters than creating sympathy for flawed characters.

I think, as a writer, I would like to learn to create sympathetic characters. A pretense of insight into human psychology is just a means of showing off.

2666, Roberto Bolano

Here are five thoughtful reviews of the five books of 2666, authored by a blogger who – from circumstantial evidence, like a title quotation to do with snow, a penchant for Victorian lit and knitting, and the use of an Emily Climbs bookcover in her avatar – sounds like a kindred spirit:

Part 1: The Part About the Critics

Part 2: The Part About Archimboldi

Part 3: The Part About Fate

Part 4: The Part About the Crimes

Part 5: The Part About Amalfitano

Here is the running list of things I jotted down on the back of a sales receipt during my first reading:

- I think every sentence is perfection.
- The characterization shines.
- I enjoy the summary, even dismissive introduction of Liz Norton: “Liz Norton, on the other hand, wasn’t what one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she didn’t draw up long -or-medium-term plans and throw herself wholehearted into their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious. When she suffered, her pain was clearly visible, and when she was happy, the happiness she felt was contagious.” (pg. (The latter line reminds me of the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead “when she was good, she was very good; when she was bad, she was horrid.”) The lives of the critics, though, which center around Liz, render her a very enigmatic female.
- I was fascinated by Archimboldi’s Lola: her breadth of experience, her whole life story which has panned out because she was seized by passions, and the political and societal ramnifications of the geographic areas she lands in, or the people she encounters
- Bolano’s microscopic eye – I like all the revealing details, descriptions of people, places, thoughts. It is all showing, a presentation of scenes: no overarching analyses or telling. Part I is a series of moments, Part II the minute illustration of Archimboldi’s life. In Part III – juxtapositions of absurd events, Part IV returns to minute documentation. Only in Part V is there a traditional, kind of inverted fairy-tale like narrative pace.
- I can’t help but wonder: what propels Bolano to include certain elements in a scene? Do smaller objects play a symbolic role for a larger them?
- All this illustration is also highly subjective: the character’s emotions, always portrayed, are intimate and incredibly hyperbolic
- There is so much revelation of different characters, different human beings

Here are the quotations I tagged:

Probably the most famous quotation from this book, no doubt resonant with a generation of book-fiend fans:

“Leaving aside the fact tha A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial… and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afriad to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or waht amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle agaisnt that something, that something that terrifes us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” (pg. 277)

Disregarding all the aspersions this casts on the characters’ attitudes towards the killings, this is also a very accurate assessment of (what can be considered) literary “masterpieces.” Middlemarch, Atlas Shrugged, the Harry Potter series, and even 2666 itself are all flawed. Their authors are capable of more minor, “perfect exercises.”

“When poor people make money, they should admit publicly to having made only half as much. They shouldn’t even tell their children how much they really have, because then their children will want the whole inheritance and won’t be willing to share it with their adopted sibilings.” (pg. 249)

!!!

This brutal statement, delivered by Seaman, characterizes the black preacher. Perhaps it does more. I can’t help admiring that this sentence was crafted by the single poetic mind we met in earlier chapters.

“Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You can’t rape that many people. It’s mathematically mpossible. It’s too hard on the body… They might have gotten some results if htey’d been capable o raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren.” (pg. 288)

The theories people come up with, in a drunken tirade!

“A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world,” said Fate, ” a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake.”

“Reportage?” asked his editor. “Is that FRench, nigger? Since when do you speak French?”

“I don’t speak French,” said Fate, “but I know what fucking reportage is.”

“I know what fucking reportage is, too,” said the editor, “and I also know merci and ua revoir and fair l’amour, which is the same as coucher avec moie. And I think that you, nigger, want to coucher avec moie, but you’ve forgot the voulez-vous, which in this case ought to hvae been your first move. You hear me? You say voulez-vous or you can get the fuck out.” (pg. 295)

I’m inadvertently struck by the crude, it seems, but talk about elegant speech amongst intelligentsia!

“Sometimes, especially on his days off, Inspector Juan de Dios MArtinez would have liked to go out with the director. That is, he wanted to be seen in public with her, eat at a downtown restaurant with her, neither a cheap nor a very expensive resaturant but a normal restaurant where normal couples went and where he would almost certainly run into someone he knew, to whom he would introduce the director naturally, casually, coolly, this is my girlfreind, Elvira Campos, she’s a psychiatrist. … The perfect happiness, goddamn it, thought Juan de Dios Martinez. But Elvira Campos wouldn’t even hear of a public relationship. Phone calls to the psychiatric enter, yes, so long as they were short. Meetings in person every two weeks. A glass of whiskey or Absolut vodka and nocturnal landscapes. Sterile goodbyes.”

Interesting, this intimate scrutiny into casual relationships, interesting, the divergence of the lover’s wishes, preferences, and weaknesses.

“She dreamed, for example… and then she dreamed about flying to Paris, where she would rent a tiny apartment, a studio, say between Villiers and Porte de Clichy, and then she would go to see a famous doctor, a wonder-working plastic surgeon, get a face-lift, get her nose and cheekbones fixed, have her breasts enlarged, in short, when she got off the operating table she would look like someone else, a different woman, not fiftysomething anymore but fortysomething, or better yet, just o ver forty, unrecognizable, new, changed, rejuvenated, although of course for a while she would go everywhere wrapped in bandages, like a mummy, not an Egyptian mummy but a Mexican mummmy, which would be something she enjoyed, walking to the metro, for example, knowing that all the Parisians were watching her surreptitiously, some of them even giving up their setas for her, imagining the horrible suffering, burns ,traffic accident, that this silent and stoic stranger hand undergone….and then someone brings a mirror and she stares at herself, she nods at herself, she approves of herself, with a gesture in which she rediscovers the sovereignty of childhood… I’m crazy about you the way you are, said Juan de Dios Martinez.” (pg. 535)

Who comes up with imagery like this?

“Her hands were tied behind her back with plastic cord, the kind used to tie up big packages. On her left hand she was wearing a long black glove, the kind used by the highest class exotic dancers. When the glove was removed they found tow rings, one on the middel figner, of real silver, and the other on the ring finger, workedi n the shape of a snake. On her right foot she was wearing a man’s sock, brand name Tracy. ANd most surprising of all: tied around her head, like a strange but not entirely implausible hat, was an expensive black bra. Otherwise the woman was naked and had no identification on her.” (pg. 575)

“The factory buildings were tall and each plant was surrounded by a wire fence and the light of the big streetlights bathed everything in a vvague aura of hast, of momentousness, which was false, since it was just another workday… Damp, fetid air, smelling of scorched oil, struck him in the face. He thought he heard laughter and accordion music on the wind.”

I like the commingling of loveliness and industrial waste in this scene.

“Hers [life story] had been mostly a disaster. She tried to be a theatre actress in New York, a movie actress in Los Angeles, tried to be a model in PAris, a photographer in London, a translator in Spain. she set out to study modern dance but gave it up the first year. She set out to be a painter and at her first show realized that she had made the worst mistake of her life. she wasn’t married, she had no childre, no family, no projects. It was the perfect moment to return to Mexico.” (pg. 604)

“When hans Reiter was ten, his one-eyed mother and one-legged father had their second child. It was a girl and they called her Lotte. She was a beautiful child and she might have been the first person on teh surface of the earth who interested (or moved) Hans Reiter… As far as Hans was concerned, his sister was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and many times he tried to draw her in the same notebook where he’d drawn different kidns of seaweed, but the results were always unsatisfactory: sometimes the baby looked like a bag of rubbish left on a pebbly beach, other times like Pterobius maritimus, a marine insect that lives in crevices and feeds on scraps, or Lipura maritima, another insect, very small and dark slate or gray, its habitat the puddles among rocks.

“In time, by stretching his imagination or tastes or his own artistic nature, he managed to draw her as a littel mermaid, more fish than girl… but always smiling, always with an enviable tendency to smile and see the positive side of things, which was a faithful reflection of his sister’s character.” (pg. 648)

I love the bizarre, ethereal, mad romance of Archimboldi and the madwoman Ingeborg:

” ‘I hate first editions and pyramids and pyramids and I hate those bloodthirsty Aztecs,’ said Ingeborg. ‘But the light of the stars make me dizzy. IT makes me want to cry,’ said Igneborg, her eyes damp with madness.” (pg. 831)

What I can glean from a first reading is scant. I really like the aforementioned blogger’s analyses of the book’s structure:

“The first three books tighten into an ever-more tense and surreal vortex, narrowing uncomfortably toward the mysterious wrongness in Santa Teresa, Mexico, which is related to the sexual homicides being committed there. Just as the third part reaches a climactic pinhole, the narration suddenly widens, becomes a stark, straightforward descent through a pile of dead bodies, the hardboiled chronicling of the female corpses of Santa Teresa, and of the inability of police, private citizens, detectives and seers to stop the perpetual appearances of more. As opposed to the increasing tension of the first three parts, I experienced the fourth part to be even throughout, tension released and stark reality confronted. Then, in The Part About Archimboldi, the narrative turns a sharp corner into something more like a traditional bildungsroman, in which a young boy grows up, lives his life and finds his calling: a calling which gradually curves toward the literary world of the first part, and a life which, even more tangentially, intersects with the Santa Teresa killings. “

I so love the perfection of the prose, that I will happily read it again and again. I hope there will be many more rereadings.

Homesick: My Own Story, Jean Fritz

This is the autobiography of an American girl, growing up in China in the 1920s, fiercely proud of being American. She is – like so many YA fiction heroines, like Caddie Woodlawn or Patty in Summer of My German Soldier, willfully different, stubborn, full of secret delight in the world. But while I found these traits — best expressed in the yearning for her grandmother, the summers at the sea, the little sister who died– easy to relate to in many novels, and especially inspiring in my favourite LMM characters… I simply found Jean a little annoying. Maybe I thought her bursts of patriotism were a little too immature and grating.

The backdrop for Jean’s childhood is Hankow, during the revolution. Jean’s father, who works for the YMCA, is directly involved in… helping out? But the revolution stays in the background of Jean’s own life and childhood dramas, which I think is effective. Jean’s friends disperse, she notices differences in the attitude of their Chinese servants, and Jean and her mother are forced to evacuate, but Jean’s world remains very sheltered: nothing happens to her immediate family or causes them delay. Instead her concerns are her best friend, Andrea’s parents’ divorce, Andrea’s stylish silk stockings, the loss of freedom in being able to wander all over Hankow, her cat…

The appropriate conclusion is that when Jean gets to her grandmother’s house, and begins 8th grade in Washington – she learns, as she combats the ignorance and insults of her classmates – the China was more a part of herself than she had acknowledged. Jean’s very minor troubles at school are still sheltered by the love and sympathy of her grandmother and aunt, and the book ends with laughter.

Upon rereading, each chapter does function nicely as a short story on growing up – each themed on a tiny grief, or milesone, of childhood, like singing the American national anthem, or the anticipation and death of Jean’s baby sister.

The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Paula Danziger

I found this book lacking, despite the quirky title and a sarcastic teenage narrator. Marcy Lewis, narrating in first person, paints a picture of her crappy junior high life what with obesity, friendlessness, hating gym class, boring writing assignments, and a verbally abusive father. Then a new English teacher comes and changes her world. Unconventional Ms. _________ is a hippy, doesn’t teach by the curriculum, but inspires in her students the aptitude to get to know their true selves and to use the English language with witty metaphors. Marcy’s crush, Joel, begins to notice her and admire her for her intelligence, and their friendship begins with many quick-witted exchanges.

All very promising, right?

Unfortunately, Ms. __________ gets suspended for her rebellious teaching methods and the book turns into a battle for justice. Marcy, Joel and their friends team up to undermine the principal, and Marcy’s “put upon” mother rallies against their father to help. There’s a lot of household drama and too many blatant messages about “I don’t need to be/dress/act like everyone else.” Caring parents (it also bugged me that Marcy and her mother were both weepy, and hugged one another a little too much — not all moments of affection need to be documented in a novel!) tell their children how much they’ll learn from the experience, unsupportive parents are utter jerks. Realistically, Ms. _______ wins her hearing, but resigns out of personal principle. I’m thankful that Marcy and Joel don’t have a hackneyed fairytale ending. Marcy’s mother is empowered to escape her father’s clutches and get a job.

I’m thinking of Budge Wilson’s short story, “The Metaphor”, which is a similar tale of a life-changing English teacher. Wilson’s story, though, is a simpler and more sophisticated — in “The Metaphor,” the narrator encounters her favourite teacher again in high school but is too embarassed to acknowledge her, because most of her friends found the said teacher uncool. To me, that’s a far more tragic and appropriate expression of growing up, change, and self-realization.

Dear Mr. Henshaw, by Beverley Clearly

I think this is a simple story of a tragic contemporary situation, well told.

The premise is unique: a boy writes to his favourite author, Mr. Henshaw, about his parent’s divorce. Henshaw’s replies are terse, but Leigh writes persistently, eventually -at the writer’s suggestion – keeping a journal to “Dear Mr. Pretend Henshaw” to abate his loneliness. Leigh’s character is shown through his writings, and as he journals, we can see Leigh grow, and his voice develop.

In the middle of the story, Leigh asks Henshaw for advice on a story he is writing.
“In a story, a character must grow or change in some way.” Leigh acknowledges the advice: “I guess a wax man who keeps melting isn’t really the kind of change you’re talking about.”

Heeding her own advice, Clearly’s character changes perceptibly: each of three strands of Leigh’s life – school, family, and writing – change and become resolved. As his relationship with his father (whose irresponsible behaviour has always been jarring to the sensitive boy, particularly in his inability to express affection – “Keep your nose clean, kid,” is all Leigh gets when he wants to be addressed by his first name and be told he’s missed) worsens, Leigh’s writing improves: at the climax of the story, Leigh calls his father after a long silence and discovers that not only has he neglected to call his son, but that he has lost his dog, and has a girlfriend with a son. In his incredible pain, Leigh finds that he is able to journal for himself: he finds that he no longer has to write to Mr. Pretend Henshaw, “I have learned to express my feelings on a piece of paper.” When home life falls apart, Leigh has his writer’s epiphany. Eventually, his intelligence – which takes expression in fashioning a burglar alarm for his lunchbox (his stolen lunches has been a source of humour and a way to portray his out-of-place- status at his new school), he finally garners friends who think his skills are all too cool.

Leigh continues to write honestly and wins a prize in the yearbook writing contest. In his composition, he had described a memory of an afternoon with his father, which apparently – according to the jury writer – conveyed the place, and his feelings truthfully. This reminds me of Emily of New Moon‘s trial to write “only the truth” for three years, and her writing improves from illustrating facts. “Write what you know” (although there’s a good deal of writing limited by what the author knows, -> see The Cat Ate My Gymsuit). Dear Mr. Henshaw is also the classic novel-for-aspiring-writers, in which the bookish main character gets their first recognition for their dreams – but for all its perfection in plot and structure it is no Emily, which will always be a true psychological portrait of a writer’s mind, and “alpine path,” for me.

The book culminates in this awkward scene when Leigh’s father comes back and tries to reconcile the divorce, and we can tell that Leigh’s writing talents have become articulate enough to convey the charged emotions of this moment. It’s a poignant scene, and artful of Clearly to choose to tell it from the limited perspective of a child narrator.

Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot

I had a lovely forenoon eating my grilled eggplant salad and finishing Princess Diaries which, to my surprise and delight, is absolutely hilarious and not teeny-boppery at all.

Cabot can write literature - not just Disneyfied potboilers. Mia is an opinionated ninth-grader and snarky diarist with real teenage problems: I don't mean the princess deal, but a flat-chest, the lack of a date, and a quarrel with your best friend from kindergarten is all truly heartrending stuff in the high school world, not that the book is sappy or cliched at all. All her issues are set in this great hyperbole in NYC, with her activist friend Lilly, and the succession to the Genovian throne, and her mother's bohemian life... not for a moment do you believe it or are swept away by the escapism, but you do laugh your head off because it's just so ironic and fantastic that Mia is handed the royal crown and she thinks it's the most horrible thing that has ever happened to her, and she would take any way out.

The diary format is perfect. As per tradition Mia warns us that she is an unreliable narrator with a penchant to lie, but all throughout her voice is convincing. She uses big words and comments on current events all through the eyes of a teenager who is developing her own opinions. She might despair about her appearance, while being astute enough to notice that her mom is "hot" (comment prior to mom's date), but she completely avoids being a whiny or stereotypical teenager. Mia is very much her own person. Her strong vegetarianism, how readily she confesses how comfortable she is around the Muscovitzes, her immature but oh-so-funny disgust of Mr. G. dating her mom, the dorky Boris, her dad's testicle cancer... etcetera. And the tone of her diary is perfectly complemented by the algebra notes in the margin, and the notes and essays she clips into it. That she does manage to journal so often at school, and in restrooms during a crises, is a little hard to believe, but the immediacy of all her thoughts and situations make the book such an engaging read.

I am such a fan.

I have been a fan of the movie for years, and have a hard time picturing Mia as a tall, short-haired blonde rather than dark-haired Anne Hathaway. And while the Disney movie has very little of the edgy humour there is in the book (of course, testicle cancer, mom's date with the algebra teacher, and Mia's hilarious comments about being brought up out of wedlock had to be censored), I do think they captured the message of the novel and of Mia's character: a princess who is true to herself, who holds fast to her own unique identity.

When I think of Miriam Toews' mennonite novel, A Kindness, I think there is almost the same level of humour. Toews' sarcasm was darker and she had a heavier subject to deal with, but essentially, it's the same theme: teenage girls, coping with family drama and growing up, journalling by request of an adult, to sort through problems. I laughed just as hard in either novel and I think Mia is much more likeable (and worthy of sympathy) than Nomi. I hope Princess Diaries receives more critical acclaim, because it's so easy to dismiss it as a popular teenage novel, just because it has a bright pink cover and a princess theme - when - in my opinion - it really does touch on the deeper issues of growing up without being maudlin.

Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Judy Blume

Okay, i see why judy blume is awesome. Sheila is complex, exactly her age, and hilarious. Her self-denial is so realistic and it makes her very down to earth. What a great character! I love how she admits everything reluctantly, but does come to admit it after all… what a great inspiration for pre-teenage-hood.

Totally digging blume and i can’t believe i missed out on her growing up. I was so close to reading Superfudge. Well, i’ll read more of her sometime.

The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis

So The Witch, the Lion and the Wardrobe is Edmund's struggle, Prince Caspian is - all of the children's, - Dawn Treader is Eustace's and The Silver Chair is Jill's.

Jill, who shows off, and forgets to repeat the signs - or say her prayers, and so, "muffs up" the sequence of things in the story. The children in the underworld, where, like Plato's cave, all is darkness and we can be conned into believing that sunlight and God are imaginary because there is no visible proof. The children brainwashed into this by the Green Lady and her lute and fire, like Meg and Calvin with IT in A Wrinkle in Time.

As always, very clear images. Not as purely symbolic as Dawn Treader, though.

The passage of time hurt me in this story as much as it hurt Eustace. It is one of my least favourite parts about the Narnian series - first, that the time in the two worlds aren't relative, second, that we MUST jump from character to character and to differernt eras. Then, too, we know Caspian as a bright young man, and it does hurt to see him aged - frail - dead. (His "ascension", the thorn and blood and rejuvenation is beautiful and symbolic and joyous, though. And I'm glad Caspian got to visit the world even if he plays a very minor role.) There is SUCH sadness in the Silver Chair, out-rivalled only by the finality of The Last Battle. That's my other point of contention with the Narnia books - the end always has the sadness of farewell.

In that way, The Horse and His Boy is one of the happiest stories of Narnia, although I can't love these characters as well as the Pevensies.

Lewis is a snarky writer. Puddleglum is hilarious and wonderful. His insights into Jill's acting innocent is hilarious, and his comments on the Experiment House are definitely political. He's extremely critical of "modern" ways through Eustace and Eustace's school, and in doing so he sets up this battle between Christianity and Modernity. As for his comment that the "Head... went into parliament, and there she lived happily ever after"... I can hardly believe this sort of snark is in a children's book. Then again these aren't children's books per se... I'm convinced they are family books, meant to be read aloud, therefore full of humour that will enliven the elocutionist's reading.

The landscape is distinctly British.

WELL: project for next month: read Mere Christianity!

Quidditch Through the Ages, J. K. Rowling

I really do enjoy Rowling's "charity books" more than the Potter novels. She is such a skilled parodist. The factual tone is flawless. The mock-historical accounts of broomsticks for flying, early broom sports, are perfect (and of course, perfectly hilarious) too.

The Giver, Lois Lowry

I have a precise memory of The Giver sitting on the shelf by the carpet in my fifth grade classroom. I turned the book over in my hands many times during silent reading, and considered reading it, intrigued that the name "Jonas" was a character I liked in one of my favourite books. I never did read The Giver, and years afterwords I regretted that I didn't. Somehow I felt that I had missed out on something I would have cherished growing up.

Well, I finally did read it today, hungry for reading material while watching tests. It's a one-sitting thing - although I did carry it with me to three separate sittings. Now that I've finished I don't want to give the book back - it's so well done I want to savour it again, and again.

Such a well-crafted book! In the beginning I had no idea what was going on, and the differences between our world and Jonas's world dawned on me gradually. Then I admired how the author could make us relate to Jonas even though he lived in a limited world. I appreciated how the dystopia was complex, but made easy for children to understand with classifications like the "Nines" get bicycles, the "Twelves" get careers chosen for them. The precision of language is a really interesting point (as are "comfort objects", that get recycled.)

I really like how the plot worked for Jonas's coming of age - all the trepidation over a future career, and then the mysterious role of receiving knowledge, pain, and wisdom. Growing up and a metaphor for growing up. Then all of a sudden he is called to his own act of bravery....

The story is really well paced. The ending, though, leaves me dissatisfied... what really happened to the community after Jonas released his memories on them? What about Fiona? What really happened to Jonas and Gave as they slid downhill?

I'm glad I googled and found that there are sequels!

Twilight

It's actually not bad! A little high-falutin, and certainly on the sappy and cliched scale. I like Bella a lot, though, and can really relate to her: how she's friendless, hates gym, can cook, and has read all the Brontes and Shakespeares. I would have enjoyed this story as a teen and I still do. All the Edward moments are very sweet, but they are overwrought, as are Bella's many admirers. Seventeen is too old for Bella, I think - she would have fared better as a fifteen or sixteen year old.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

HP5 flows much better than HP4, but I still find satire so hard to read. I don't enjoy reading about Umbridge and the tortures she inflicts on students, although her come-uppance by Fred and George is hilarious. There is just too much badness in this book, save for brief moments of laughter. The Department of Mysteries IS a perfectly wonderful bit of imagination. I have to admit - I can't put this book down.

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie

This book is beautifully written and the idea is captivating, but it didn't captivate me. I was bored by it. The things in it have already been done. And that is that.

New Moon

Oh... I really like Bella Swan. She is terribly obsessive, but I am the same way -- incorrigibly constant. The way boys fall for her is completely unrealistic, but what girl's story wouldn't want that? Jacob... in fact, all of the characters.... rely on description from Bella's part, so they aren't very well drawn. I think of rubygillis's classic pattern of a romantic boy and his comic rival, and she does it so much better - so much more lively - than S. Meyer. The climaxes are always extremely melodramatic. I really enjoyed this one because - isn't Volterra the fictional city in Maurier's Flight of the Falcon, which was in turn based on Urbino? I had thought so, but I could be mistaken.

Eclipse

Oh dear. You have to admit this is a pretty good love triangle. I like Jacob, and I like Edward, and I don't despise Bella.

Breaking Dawn

Utter crap, as in, Smeyer's writing needs SO much editing to tone down her language, but still such a guilty pleasure. I'm surprised that Bella really DID become a vampire after all the times and delay. I'm not fond of the half-breed baby as a plot device. Having Bella and Edward start a family right now, it's too soon to think of them as parents. I'm also not sure if the switch to the Jacob chapters were effective.... the book has been so consistently about Bella's voice, and Bella is a decent narrator. I'm glad Bella and Jacob's friendship has been resolved, but

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J K Rowling

If you ask me, I'd say that, as much as I truly enjoy them, as pieces of literature the Harry Potter series is imperfect. HP4 is probably the most flawed.

My main critique is length. I have no problem reading long books; War and Peace is one of my favourites. HP4, though, is unnecessarily long.

Consider a summary of plot points from HP4:

INTRO
- Wormtail and Voldemort make plans for Voldemort's return
- Harry's scar hurts, he writes to Sirius
- Quidditch World Cup: meets Bagman and Crouch, Winky, students from different schools, ogles Krum, Fred and George are trying to start their own joke shop - products and gathering funds

ASCENDING ACTION
- Dark Mark appears when Death Eaters torture Muggles for fun, Harry loses wand, Winky sacked
- Mad-Eye teaches Defense Against Dark Arts (unforgivable curses), Sirius returns
- Triwizard Tournament begins and Harry chosen as fourth champion
- Rita Skeeter begins giving Harry bad publicity
- 1st task - Hagrid tips Harry off that there are dragons, Sirius and Mad-Eye help,
- Hermione starts SPEW
- Yule Ball: Cedric/Cho/Harry drama, Ron/Hermione/Krum drama, Hagrid/Mme Maxine
- 2nd task, Cedric and Dobby help Harry
- accidentally meets mad Mr. Crouch in Forbidden Forest, but he's gone by the time Dumbledore comes
- memories of Death Eater trials in pensieve

CLIMAX
- 3rd task: Dark Lord returns, Cedric killed, Priori Incantatem when Harry & Voldemort duel
- Harry gets away

DENOUEMENT
- Barty Crouch impersonating Mad-Eye is revealed
- Fudge doesn't believe Dumbledore
- Rita Skeeter turns out to be a beetle animagus
- Harry gives Fred & George his prize galleons

compared to HP3

INTRO
- Harry's birthday & presents from friends: Weasleys won the lottery and are on Egypt holiday
- murderer at large on Muggle news

ASCENDING ACTION
- Harry blows up Aunt Marge by accident, runs away and travels by Knight Bus
- Fudge does not punish him, encourages him to stay in Diagon Alley
- sees Firebolt in shops
- Hermione purchases Cruikshanks, pet cat that keeps harassing Ron's rat
- Harry faints from Dementor on train, saved by Lupin
- Hermione takes too many subjects and has a ridiculous time table
- Malfoy is hurt in Hagrid's class by Buckbeak, Buckbeak put on trial by Ministry
- Divination: Harry begins to fear that the black dog he keeps seeing is "The Grim", an omen of death
- Lupin is sick every month
- Black gets into Gryffindor tower
- Harry gets Marauder's map and sneaks into Hogsmeade, overhearing the story of how his parents were betrayed
- gets a Firebolt mysteriously for Christmas, after his last broom was destroyed
- Snape finds Marauder's Map
- Trelawney makes a real prediction

CLIMAX
- Harry, Ron and Hermione try to help Hagrid through Buckbeak's execution
- Dog drags run through Whomping Willow tunnel
- discover Black is an animagus, Lupin appears, Snape appears, Wormtail caught
- Lupin transforms, Wormtail escapes, all are in danger, Black caught and turned over to ministry/dementors

DENOUEMENT
- Harry and Hermione use time turner to help Black and Buckbeak escape
- Harry produces a patronus
- Lupin's identity as a werewolf revealed to the school
- Owl post from Sirius, owl becomes Ron's new pet

As you can see, the plot of HP4 isn't any more action-packed than the previous books. I'd argue that it's far less dense, probably because it is so long. The plot doesn't merit its length.

The problem with this book is, that it overdoes the mandate "show, don't tell." The first chapter is a slow-motioned description of the circumstances of Frank Bryce's death. The description does very little to enhance our knowledge of Frank Bryce or the Riddle house. This strategy of an alternate setting, and a portrait of the "other side", was done with more humour and suspense in HP6 and HP7. The second is inconcise language, and, bad grammar. I'm a snob when it comes to style in novels: I think it's unprofessional when published authors have bad grammar.

The plot is weak, too, in my opinion. I'm not that well versed in the Potterverse, so maybe I'm picking up on contradictions that have already been clarified, but the contradictions are still there.

Why did they have to use a muggle campsite for the World Cup? Why couldn't they simply summon the egg for the first task? How do people with such age difference and interests get together (Krum is 18 and a star athlete, Hermione is 15, nerdy and doesn't like sports)? Fifteen and Eighteen are huge differences when you're that age. If Hermione couldn't dig up any spells for the second task, why did the other students find means to deal with breathing underwater? Is two month's dating really enough to make Hermione and Cho be the things their boyfriends miss the most? Those bonds are of a different nature than Harry/Ron's friendship, or the Delacour sisterhood. Why couldn't Sirius pretend to be Harry's pet, if no one knew he was an animagus? If Barty Crouch imitated Mad-Eye with such skill that even Dumbledore was hoodwinked (not to mention that he overcame a skilled Auror), he must be a very skilled wizard. I find Crouch's story the most unconvincing and unnecessarily complex. Why not simply have him run away at the World Cup? What does Wormtail and Voldemort coming to rescue him add to the plot? Too complex.

Other Voices Other Rooms, Truman Capote

Even since I found out that Harper Lee is a character in Truman Capote's novel, I simply *had* to see how he rendered her. There is so little biographical information about Harper Lee that I was - well, curious. Besides, there is one wonderfully nostalgic paragraph in Mockingbird saying that "summer was Dill... stealing kisses when Jem wasn't looking," so I *had* to see what love there was between Lee and Capote, Capote who turned out to be gay. Perhaps it's prying, but it's without malice. I'm very fond of Scout. I can't help wondering.

The book is beautifully written. The language and the portrait of life in the south, lazy and redolent and slightly creepy, really draws you in. I don't know about the "intensity of Capote's writing" lauded on the cover of my book, because I didn't find it intense, I found it detailed and poetic. The conversation and turns of phrases are reminiscent of Mockingbird, so I'm sure Lee was influenced by Capote's novel, which got published first. I had fun deciphering the transmogrification of names - it's "Noon City" here for "Meridian," no doubt, and there's a homestead called the "Landing" too. I recognized Capote/Dill at once in Joel: the short boy with britches too small for him, sensitive and a hand at hatching lies. I LOVED our first glimpse of Idabel/Lee, a really ferocious tomboy whom the sensitive (and gay) Joel is intimidated by. In Mockingbird, through Lee/Scout's own perspective, we know that Scout is a tomboy but her manner is much more aggressive described from the outside. She has a ladylike sister to compare against - Lee, I remember, had a sister, too. Idabel and Joel go skinny dipping in the creek and Idabel makes no qualms about it, so I'm sure that was only a proprietary reference in Mockingbird when Jem and Dill tell Scout she can't come cause they were going in naked! Joel and Idabel try to run away.

I'm hard pressed to see how Idabel shows Joel "the closest thing to love" (also quoted from my bookcover). Joel does long to show her affection after he becomes her friend, but she fights him when kissed. (So yes, there must be some germ in the Scout/Dill romance, too!) The ending also loses me completely. Why is Joel suddenly indifferent to Idabel, if she is his only friend? That disappoints me. Also, although Joel is very sensitive, I thought the novel was supposed to be an exploration in homosexuality, and the only reference I have is Joel seeing two men kissing, and being puzzled by it. Is it because he faced female temptation (via the circus midget lady) that he's scarred? Does he withdraw from Idabel because he's come to terms with his sexuality? Is Cousin Randolph gay?

I am probably really lost.