On My List

Here's the Christmas List I made yesterday. Christmas Reading List that is. 

Literary:
Drown and This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Literary Science Fiction:
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Mystery:
Faithful Place by Tana French
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Where should I start?

The Fault in Our Stars: Emotional Sadism

Ok, ok, I just said that to get your attention. But listen:

I love sad stories. I promise. Bridge to Terabithia is my Favorite-capital-F, and The English Patient and Atonement, both films and novels, are to me the epitome of beauty. I raised five years worth of middle school students on Of Mice and Men and Romeo and Juliet, assuring their parents at every Parents Night that their children's emotional lives would only be deepened and enriched, not scarred, by the inevitable tragedy in each of these texts, and now I gleefully teach an eleventh grade curriculum where virtually every text ends in a suicide.

I believe strongly that young readers need to be exposed to these texts. Need to be changed and challenged by the rich and immense griefs which are now an essential thread of our cultural narrative and inevitably part of our own lives. And I indulge, occasionally, in revisiting these texts for some good old-fashioned borderline-masochistic catharsis.

But John Green's monumentally popular, beautifully-titled The Fault in Our Stars is something else entirely.

Now, I say all of this not to disparage John Green or his project. And I am all for anything -- anything -- that gets people to read (I'm talking to you, Stephenie Meyer). And his work is well-written, and delightfully wordy, and his narrative voice is smart and literary and true. So there's that.

And there are children with cancer who need their stories told. And those stories are certainly worth telling.

But I get the sense from TFIOS that Green is not writing for kids with cancer. He is writing for kids who are healthy.

And perhaps it is actually a mark of his success that in so doing, he exposes readers who have never faced real, actual, living, breathing death, either literal or metaphorical (death of a loved one, death of a relationship, death of a dream...I could go on) to Real Death's gaunt and haunting reality.

Readers pick up TFIOS because they want to feel something -- feel something in the way that Romeo and Juliet or Bridge to T. makes them feel. Something real and undeniably important.

In Green's star-cross'd lovers Augustus and Hazel (and they call themselves such, placing themselves and Green's story squarely and self-consciously within that tradition) he artfully builds a new pair of lovers for the ages, lovers who somehow deny and defy their youth through the hospital equipment that literally weighs them down throughout the story and their overpowering awareness of their own mortality and their own legacy.

But Green doesn't just play with the star-cross'd lovers trope. He kills it. And then buries it. And makes it attend its own funeral.

Oh, Hazel and Augustus are likable and smart and all of the wonderful things we hope our protagonists will be. They are Leslie and Jess, Juliet and Romeo, Viola and Shakespeare.

Many people I respect love this book. And I prepared to lose myself within its tragic pages with the total abandon restricted to those most wonderfully sad reads listed above. But, Dear Reader, by the time I was 100 pages in I had to put it down between chapters in order to catch my breath. What I experienced was not the sweet sadness of Lennie's final gaze out into the hills of California or Jess' stoic resolve to live on for what Leslie represented to him, but the actual real pain of facing something truly terrible.

Perhaps this is a mark of Green's success. But as an adult writing for a young adult audience, I wonder about his purpose. Even the adult who has lived the most charmed life has had to face some kind of real loss and the grieving process that follows. A process that sometimes feels a lot more like stasis. TFIOS evoked that kind of loss for me.

By the time Augustus listens to Hazel read his own eulogy, I had to stop altogether.

I don't know. Maybe I just talked myself out of my own argument. But I expected to love this book.

And instead it just brought to mind the real pain and loss I've felt in my own charmed life.

And I can't help but imagine that my seventeen-year-old self wouldn't have known what was happening to her under Mr. Green's skillful hand.

And that makes me sad.

But maybe that's the point.

Am I being hypocritical here?

The Great Gatsby

If you get the ambition to pick up a classic this winter, I'm all for it. And if you're diligent and ambitious enough to get through Anna Karenina in preparation for or celebration of Keira Knightley's bodice-ripper, well, good luck with the mowing scene.

But not just because Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby will be released this spring, Gatsby is without a doubt the classic you haven't read since high school that is worth your time. You'll read it on a Saturday or in a weekend, and you will finish feeling transcendent.

What a gem this book is.

The plot is sexy (so sexy!), fast-paced, and devastating. The language is incandescent. The characters are beautiful and damned.

And its lasting impression is at once the building and the destruction of our national myth.

A Post-Catcher World

Emily Temple at Flavorwire proposes these 10 Novels to Replace Catcher in the Rye as the Perfect Teen Book. Looking to pick up something relevant, readable, and new myself, I'm interested. I would also like to add Skippy Dies, Paul Murray's painful paean to teenage angst -- the real kind. It's about ... it's about how "like, people are always going somewhere? Like everybody's always trying to be not where they are?..."

"It's like, you know, inside every stove there's a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there's a grass blade, that's just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there's a tree, and inside every person there's a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there's a totally amazing magical beautiful world."

That's what Skippy Dies is about.

Definitely worth it.

Incidentally, I'm about to teach Catcher in a few weeks to ninth graders. Are we, as Emily Temple and Jessica Roake at Slate suggest, living in a post-Catcher world?

What I Think You Should Take to the Beach

A few people have asked me recently what I think they should pack with them on their August beach trip. I'm only offering a few words on each title, but please, add your thoughts...

Here goes...

Anything by Tana French. Particularly In the Woods. Smart, totally engrossing, psychologically insightful, wonderful characters.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall is epic, hilarious, and deeply moving. And I loved Rusty more than any character since Owen Meany. I'm going to keep recommending this one til everybody listens...

Just had to make myself put down The Art of Fielding to write this post, and it had me almost crying. A good, old-fashioned, compelling novel.

Beautifully written, a little sci-fi, a little mystery, this novel has been on my favorites list for a long time. It's a little bit of a love story, it's a little bit strange, it's totally gorgeous.

Technically a young adult novel, The Book Thief is one of my favorite reads of all time. And it's long enough to keep you busy for a while. Part graphic novel, it might remind you of a more grown-up Number the Stars -- that moving, that pure.








I'd also add Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, The Age of Miracles, and The Name of the Wind (for fantasy fans) -- those are all reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

Happy Reading! May you find that magical, liminal place between perfect awareness and perfect escape that all the best books bring.

Thoughts turn to school...

I just read Amy Pine's post on Nerdy Book Club about Renewing a Love of Reading in HS Seniors. (Check out her blog, AmyLovesYA.) It is absolutely full of excellent ideas and brimming with inspiration for cultivating a classroom where the love of reading lives all year long -- not just in the summer. (It particularly caught my eye because she loves Divergent as much as I do.)

Why is even the most avid reader among us so quick to lose the magic of books, burying it beneath a pile of house work and school work?

Nerdy Book Club once again just reminded me to retain that magic.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is a beautiful book. My favorite of the summer so far.

In the beginning of the novel, eleven-year-old Julia's world changes when scientists announce that they have observed a slowing of the earth's rotation. The cause is unknown, the effects, for the most part, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Slowly, the days lengthen, gravity shifts, the power flickers, seagulls and whales, then grass and eucalyptus become extinct. All the while, Julia and the adults around her struggle to understand what is happening to them and look for ways to keep the world as they know it, one precious moment of daylight at a time.

Walker's end-of-the-world is no fiery apocalypse. It is one where the taste of grapes and strawberries, then even the smell of grass and the sounds of birds, are forgotten, but human life on earth goes on, in its persistence, insensible to the loss of these great beauties.

And before the backdrop of these cosmic miracles Julia's own life unfolds: she takes piano, plays soccer. She is good at math, she loses her best friend Hanna, she eats lunch alone in the library, her birthday is forgotten, she forms a bond with Seth Moreno. Her parents fight. She and Seth visit the ocean to help to save the whales beached there, casualties of the shifting tides and magnetic fields of earth:

We rushed to fill our cups with water and then ran back across the thick band of mud. We looked for the driest whale, the one most in need. We found it at the edge of the group, and we imagined that it was older than the others. Its skin was striped white with scars. I shooed flies from its eyes, one eye at a time. Seth poured our meager water supply over its head and into its mouth. He petted its side. I felt an urgency like love.

"Hey, kids," someone called from behind us. It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. A gust of wind drowned out what he said, so he shouted it again: "That one's already dead."

The futile beauty of this scene almost made me cry, and as Julia's world's tragedy unfolds, this futile beauty only grows.

And her days grow to 40, then 64, then 78 hours; tortuously hot periods of dangerous radiation followed by frigid deserts of dark.

This is not an adventure story. Nor is it, exactly, a coming of age story. Julia, though relatable, is somehow transparent as a narrator. The plot is simple, but effectively so. Julia's voice invites readers to overlay their own adolescences onto the backdrop of the slow and inexorable end of life as we know it.

And at the same time, Walker asks, perhaps begs, her readers to see their own lives reflected in Julia's, not out of some environmentalist crusade (noble though those may be), but out of something much more simple:

Nothing is certain.

Not the tide not the birds not the sun.

But our world is very beautiful.

Julia's story is an unhurried narrative that becomes, in so many ways, an elegy for the world that we are so lucky to still have hold of. At least for now. Nothing I've read in a long time has made me feel so acutely the beauty and promise of this Earth we still have, and its incredible fragility.

One day, Julia's street is destroyed as repair crews work feverishly to keep up with the damage the radiation storms are wreaking on the power grid. She and Seth leave their names in wet cement. Shortly thereafter, she looses him.

Looking back, Julia remembers:

We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew -- our names, the date, and these words.

We were here.

Reading this novel on a summer afternoon, I emerged from its pages and the coffee shop where I had been reading alongside a friend. The heat index in Baltimore had reached 113 that day, a storm was brewing, and we looked up together at remarkable clouds that she remembered from her childhood as a presage of tornadoes. As we walked down the street and hot wind whipped up the day's dust in front of us, I wasn't quite sure if I was in the real world or back in Walker's luminous pages.

This, Dear Reader, is a book worth reading.

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

In Treasure Island!!! by first-time novelist Sara Levine, our unnamed heroine/pirate swashbuckles her way through a job (that she hates), a boyfriend (who isn't really into boldness, turns out), her sister (fat), a very-expensive parrot named Little Richard (She wants him to squawk "Steer the boat, girlfriend!" but he really only gets as far as "boat!" before she feeds him mac-and-cheese poisoned with prescription meds, and he winds up in her mother's already over-crowded freezer), a best friend (also, like boyfriend, not big on boldness), and possibly one of the major veins that runs through said-sister's right hand. The last of these with a cake knife; the other damages requiring no weapon more dangerous than our heroine's deliciously misguided sense of self-importance.

However, if nothing in the paragraph above struck you as particularly funny, this probably isn't the book for you.

Levine's voice is true, our Heroine (henceforth in this review known as "H") truly abhorrent, and the mayhem that results is a well-spent summer afternoon.

Our tale begins when H's sister Adrianna leaves a library copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island lying around the house, after she decides not to read it with her third grade class ("I hate a book with no girls, sister Adrianna proclaims on the the second page.) H picks it up and decides to cleave to "boy hero Jim Hawkins' best qualities":

BOLDNESS
RESOLUTION
INDEPENDENCE
HORN-BLOWING


(Rebecca Barry's NYTimes review intelligently explicates what exactly "horn-blowing" just might be, but personally I recommend you just leave it up to your imagination. Trust me, you'll come up with a few things.)

To be honest, I frequently find picaresque novels tiresome, but Island!!! is smart, fast-paced, and allowed me to live quite happily within our heroine's warped and thwarted logic. As H plunders and pillages her way through her own life as a 25-year-old person patently without purpose or aim, her deeply misguided attempts at self-actualization may feel vaguely familiar to anyone who has been recently (or ever) a 25-year-old non-hornblowing person without purpose or aim. At one moment, as she sits in a doctor's office in pursuit of anxiety medication, her doctor notes, "You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown," and H replies:

"Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to one-self. It's not as though you do one bold thing and then you are bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep doing it, day in and day out. I don't know, can it ever be definitively accomplished?"

Can I get a "Steer the boat, girlfriend!"?

Levine's creation of a heroine so totally ridiculous and yet so recognizable is truly an accomplishment, and if the climax feels a little forced, this reader will forgive her, particularly after reading the flawlessly hilarious events of the final few pages. As you might imagine, nothing ends well for H, Adrianna, or the rest of the crew, but the novel will leave you laughing, and yes, perhaps seeking a little horn-blowing of your own, long after the few happy hours you will spend in its pages.

I enter the Blogosphere...

So thanks to Goodreads, this morning I just discovered Insatiable Booksluts...

...and all of these awesome blogs...

and I am both thrilled and overwhelmed by how many people are already doing what The Inattentive Reader is trying to do in so many incredibly successful ways.

Anyhow, point is, you should probably give up on this little nascent project of a blog and just read their stuff.

I probably will.

And these people know what they're doing.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84 is a quiet, introspective, and character-driven thriller. It divulges its secrets delicately, and never completely, and the other world in which our heroine and hero find themselves never fits neatly into the tidy framework that American readers may expect from their dystopias. 

But when it comes down to it, why should a dystopia always answer the questions we readers ask of it?

This is by no means a novel for the reader who hopes to get to the answers, or the end, quickly. By turns lucid, strange, and downright disgusting, the world of 1Q84 is, in all the right ways, not unlike, and yet completely separate from, our own. Its main characters, Aomame, the unlikely assassin, and her childhood love, the long-lost writer Tengo, are beautifully realized from the novel's earliest pages, and even in their diurnal  meanderings, which, I warn you, are extensive, I found them fascinating.

As Aomame is forced to flee after a particularly high-profile assassination, she looks back at the apartment that had been her home:

Standing by the front door, she turned for one last look, aware that she would never be coming back. The thought made the apartment appear unbelievably shabby, like a prison that only locked from the inside, bereft of any picture or vase. The only thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought instead of a goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this place without question or discontent.


"Good-bye," she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.

Rich in allusion and psychological depth, 1Q84 is a book to be lived in, explored, questioned, doubted, and believed it.

But, as is so often the case with self-knowledge, demand reasons or a rapid resolution, and you will be disappointed.

Divergent, by Veronica Roth

Having had a conversation, often in hushed tones, about Fifty Shades of Gray with everyone from my colleagues to my closest friends to my physical therapist, I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes something catch fire (forgive the pun) in the public imagination the way Shades and Hunger Games have recently. It's not that I question the appeal of these texts: epic and dystopian tropes and, well, sex, don't need analysis here.

I understand why Hunger Games captures and entrances us. But why don't more people realize that the feelings these texts evoke are the feelings that any fully-realized and even passably well-written world has to offer?

Having spent two very happy days of summer vacation lost in Veronica Roth's 2011 YA novel Divergent,  I assure you, Dear Reader: Hunger Games is magic. But its magic is the magic of books and stories, nothing more secret or hard to come by, but every bit as sacred.

I enjoyed but never loved Hunger Games. But, despite its imperfections, I loved Divergent. Its heroine, Tris, is real and powerful, and she doesn't take herself too seriously, (At one tense moment she reminds herself: That is all I need: to remember who I am. And I am someone who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near-death experiences stop her.) and to my mind, she quickly becomes comfortable with her own power and agency in an easy manner that Katniss takes forever to embrace.

Divergent is smart, and so is Roth, who describes Tris's world as the result of her desire to write about "a subculture of people who want to eradicate fear using exposure therapy." (Curious? Read it.) When asked about writing Tris herself, Roth explains, "I did set myself a rule that was hard to follow, though: Tris is always the agent."

Stephenie Meyer, eat your heart out.

The world of Divergent yields its secrets at a satisfying pace, Tris's love interest is more worthy than Gale and Peeta put together, her relationship with him more real, and in the first book, Tris upsets the system of her world itself in a way that I longed for Katniss to attempt much sooner than she eventually did.

Tris wouldn't have won the Hunger Games. She would have made her own rules.

Dune, by Frank Herbert

Ever since I discovered Battlestar Galactica last winter, I've been fairly convinced that I missed something pretty big in terms of Science Fiction throughout high school and college. This winter, it was Patrick Rothfuss's incredible Kingkiller Chronicles.

If Lord of the Rings turns you off, and you can't recite most of the lines from The Empire Strikes Back by memory (hint: it's usually "I've got a bad feeling about this...") then don't bother. But if you haven't picked up Dune in a while, or at least one of these titles above gives you the shivers, it's worth revisiting. Like all great epic tales, Paul's obstacles become the readers own.

In Dune, by Frank Herbert,  Paul Atreides faces the perils of life on Arrakis, or Dune, the planet George Lucas used to inspire Luke's home-planet Tatooine. After the assassination of his father, the Duke Leto Atreides, Paul and his mother, Jessica, escape the hostile usurping forces and join the Fremen, the blue-on-blue-eyed natives of the harshest parts of that desert world.

Paul will remind you of Luke, as well he should, with his Arrakian-exceptionalism and his pithy understanding of both future and past, and I found myself similarly moved and compelled by him. In a novel driven by economics, politics, yes, even jihad, (Interestingly, much of the Freman languauge is nonsense Arabic -- fascinating in a book published in 1965 and read today) Paul is at once strong and completely vulnerable. And so, like Luke and Kara and Harry and so many others after him, Paul faces his destiny.

As Paul begins to take his final steps towards fulfilling his fate, Freman tradition dictates that he must challenge Stilgar, friend, mentor, and current leader of the tribe. But as Paul faces his old friend, he asks:

“Do you think you could lift your hand against me?” 
Stilgar began to tremble. “It’s the way,” he muttered.
As Stilgar remained silent, trembling, staring at him, Paul said:
“Ways change, Stil. You have changed them yourself.”

Perhaps the role of these narratives is to remind us that ways change, and yet, they remain the same. We readers love to find ourselves in the role of these heroes who must decide what can endure in times of tumult, perhaps because they are so similar to, and so different from, the times of challenge and revolution in our own lives.

Dune reminds us that what is most important, be it epic narrative itself or something as simple and commonplace as a friendship, will remain, even as we change our lives to meet our own destinies. Paul may be exceptional, but he reminds us that, assuredly, so are we.

The Name of the Wind, The Lonely Polygamist, and Freedom

More cerebral than Game of Thrones, more grown up than The Golden Compass, and with a protagonist with enough hubris to make Han Solo look modest, The Name of the Wind is transporting. And at 800-plus pages with a 1000 page sequel in The Wise Man's Fear, it will keep you busy for a week at the beach or for many delicious late-nights.

It tells the story of Kvothe, son of troupers Edma Ruh, prodigy archanist, and hapless lover, as he becomes Kvothe the Bloodless, building a reputation at the University and seeking to revenge his parent's brutal murders.

I recommend this one to fantasy nerds without exception or reservation. If you run more mainstream give it a try, but only if you're looking to commit some time.

I am telling you here and now: The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall is one of the greatest novels of the twenty-first century. And not because Sister Wives is hot right now. This is, quite simply, one of the funniest, most moving, most gorgeous books I've ever read, and it has been compared to Catch-22 by people who know. It does not serve to expose the strange lifestyles of the Mormon and polygamist. Rather, it paints its characters with deep sympathy and pathos.

And it is devastatingly, heart-rendingly funny.

This book is now at the top of my Must List. It is too good to miss, it will change you in the way that all great books change you, and please tell me once you've read it. Trust me, you'll want to talk about it.

I know, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is no news. But hear me out on this one. I bought it when it came out, and it sat on my bookshelf for ages. But my best friend from high school, who freely admits that she rarely reads fiction, recommended it. I opened it on a Saturday and lost myself. And even though I read it in January, I think of it more regularly than any other book I read this year.

It is so devastatingly incisive about modern life, so vividly written, so horribly funny. And the characters are despicable. If you're not particularly interested in dwelling for 1000 pages in the way literature can reveal sometimes-painful truths about ourselves and the way we live, skip it. But if you want a read that will make you feel something, that will challenge you, and yes, possibly depress you for a while, this is perfect.