Two Reads for the Week
231. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People by Susan Orlean
I wanted to finish this book so I could release it at the Texas Book Festival Saturday; Orlean will be there. It is really not a book to be hurried. It is written at a leisurely pace and it wanted to be read at a leisurely pace. That’s probably why I’ve been reading through this book for months.
It would make a perfect Kindle book, a book to read on a plane or train. I especially liked the stories about the potential singing star and the author’s hairdresser. Orlean has a way of letting you into a person life, almost as if you’ve known the person for years.
232. The Gathering by Anne Enright
If you’ve got a shelf where you store your Oprah reads and your Oprah-like reads, add this one. The Gathering is the sad, sad story of a family who gathers together for the funeral of a brother who committed suicide.
After hearing Enright read one of her short stories in Houston recently, I expected this book to be a love-it book. It wasn’t. It was just another sad family story.
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First Cybil Nominees (Nonfiction Picture Books)
Sparkles the Fire Safety Dog by Firefighter Dayna Hilton
The first Cybils book to arrive in the mail was this book, Sparkles the
Fire Safety Dog. Initially, I was struck by its amateur appearance; it
arrived as a soft cover book, with simple photographs used as
illustrations. I decided to set aside these reservations and take a look
at the book with fresh eyes, the eyes of a child reader.
Dogs have immediate appeal to children. There is something about
animals that draws the child in. Sparkles benefits from dog appeal.
Children also love to read about firefighters. Firefighters are heroic
figures to children. Sparkles benefits from firefighter appeal.
The text is simple, perfect for its target audience. The author is a
firefighter herself, so she has credibility. She focuses on teaching two
skills that will save children in a real fire and uses her dog,
Sparkles, to reinforce the teaching.
Don’t let first appearances stop you from reading this book. It
accomplishes its task in a simple yet appealing way.
Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A.
Nivola
Sometimes we adults wonder if there are any heroes left in our world,
any people who act not out of self-interest or greed, but out of love
and concern for others. Wangari Maathai is one such hero.
Maathai is a woman born in Kenya who left her beautiful country to go
to college in America. When she returned to Kenya, she was struck by the
destruction that had taken place in Kenya during the short time she was
away. Maathai was determined to do more than complain or seek blame. She
created a program for her countrymen to work together to restore
Kenya’s natural beauty by planting trees.
I loved reading this simple story of an honorable person. The details
of the Kenyan world the author presents reveal a world both like my own,
but also fascinatingly different. The illustrations are a perfect
companion to the text. The author’s note provides information about
where she obtained her knowledge of Maathai. The appeal to children will be the story of a woman who dared to make the world a better and more beautiful place.
As Good as Anybody: Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom by Richard Michelson
Simple text…great illustrations…and a compelling story I’d never heard before…These all combined for me to make reading As Good as Anybody a wonderful experience. I ended up reading it again as soon as I got to the end. Amazing to think that the magnificent Martin Luther King Jr. would team up with another such magnificent human, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and work together to improve the world.
The book begins with the early life of Martin Luther King Jr., highlighting the suffering he incurred as a black child in a predominantly prejudiced white culture. The story then moves to the early life of Abraham Joshua Heschel, showing the suffering he incurred as a Jewish boy in a predominantly prejudiced Nazi German culture. The early lives of both men neatly parallel each other. The men come together later in life in their joint effort to march for freedom.
The book ends on a strong note, though it is jarringly unusual; the men take their first step on the march and the reader is left wondering what will happen next. The author discloses in summation form the concluding events of the men’s lives. I was unable to find any documentation of sources consulted to write the story, however.
A very powerful book.
Amelia Earhart: The Legend of the Lost Aviator by Shelley Tanaka
This is the kind of nonfiction that I love best: nonfiction that reads like a fiction story. Amelia Earhart covers the entirity of Earhart’s life, with little vignettes about this moving incident and that moving incident in Earhart’s life. The details the author adds to the story bring the story camera zooming in on each individual scene, making the events come alive.
The story really kicks into high gear when Earhart begins to make her attempts to fly first across the Atlantic and then around the world. For children of today who see a trip in an airplane as routine, the author is able to emphasize the life-threatening dangers that Earhart experienced. Earhart comes across as a heroic and brave figure, a role model for girls and women especially.
The book has lots of text and I must question whether it would be eagerly picked up by most elementary students because of its length. However, the author uses sidebars to break up the text in many places and that might help make a reluctant reader find his way through the entire book.
The index and the bibliography are quite extensive, and they add an air of deep scholarship to the book, a quality not usually found in a children’s book.
Read-a-Thon Reads
225. Down in Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky by Kathi Appelt & Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer
I knew nothing about these amazing women until I came across this book. During the Great Depression, the WPA funded a program where woman would travel by horse and deliver books in places where there were no paved roads. These women traveled through snow, rain, the cold, and through the mountains and streams to get books to people who had no access to libraries or books. I am trying to imagine how many lives were changed with this program. Incredible.
226. In a Blue Velvet Dress by Catherine Sefton
Jane Reid (appropriate last name) is an avid reader. She is sent to stay with her aunt and uncle while her parents travel. By mistake, her suitcase and her father’s suitcase are switched and Jane ends up with nothing to read. She is in despair until she finds someone is leaving books for her each night. Who is this mysterious someone? Jane begins to try to figure out who is leaving the books and it becomes clear that it is not a human being. Very fun book.
227. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Love is such a silly game; this play makes that very clear. A woman is in love with a man her father disapproves of…a woman loves a man who does not love her…and then the fairies interfere, with crazy consequences. Fun, fun, fun.
228. Miss Zukas and the Library Murders by Jo Dereske
Miss Zukas is a very proper librarian who is astounded to discover a dead body has been found in her library. And in the fiction section! She must use all her powers of reasoning and deduction to find the murderer.
229. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
I’ve been reading on this book since before school began and the read-a-thon finally gave me a chance to finish it. I see why so many people have read this book and loved it over the years. Action. Adventure. Pirates. Treasure. A deserted island. A bad guy who is not all bad and a hero who is full of courage and conviction despite being a boy. Great story.
230. When Will There Be Good News? By Kate Atkinson
Don’t read this book if you are looking for a sweet story with a happy ending. Nobody has any luck in this story. Anything bad that can happen will happen. In all honesty, I found it a bit much to imagine that a girl who had her entire family killed would grow up to have herself and her child kidnapped. A little too much bad fortune. A good plot, good characters, nevertheless
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Wrapping Up Four Books
221. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
I can imagine reading the encyclopedia. I cannot, however, in my wildest dreams, imagine making my way through over twenty thousand pages of a dictionary. Would anything be retained? Wouldn’t whole sections of words run together? How useful is it really to know words you will probably never be able to bring up in conversation?
Nevertheless, it was great fun to read this book. Shea starts each chapter with an essay about an item of interest to word lovers, including where to read, reading glasses, short dictionaries to read, and the history of dictionaries. Shea concludes each chapter with favorite words from each volume of the dictionary. His comments about the words are a hoot.
Yes, I can truly say it was great fun to read this book about reading the dictionary.
222. Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner
Marie and her brother, Carl, have never gotten along. Not as children. Not as teens. And certainly not now as adults. Carl is not an easy person to get along with. This is something his neighbors say, his girlfriends say, his employees say. It seems clear that Carl is difficult. And Marie is also a strongly opinionated person.
Then Carl is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Marie is determined to establish a relationship with her brother and to help him through this time.
The fascination with this book for me was in listening to and observing Carl. Was there ever a person more intent on putting others off him? Marie explores reasons for her sibling difficulties by examining difficult family relationships in her family’s past. If being difficult has genetic components, this is useful. But if these difficult genes are inherited, can they be overcome? If Carl is our example, we would have to conclude no.
223. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
I am glad to have finished this book, but I am sorry I ever started it. I took away very little from this book. Our main character, Mizoguchi, is troubled by stuttering. He ends up (this is no plot giveaway) setting fire to one of Japan’s most beloved sites, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi, between the beginning and the end of the book, meets other deeply troubled people and sees people he hoped to respect acting in deeply troubling ways. He gets no consolation from his studies or his work or his friends; instead, these seem to lead him farther along the path to destruction.
Why did he decide to destroy the temple? It was beautiful and it represented everything he wanted. Why, then, did he decide to destroy it?
The front cover of this book proclaims, “An outstanding novel by one of the literary geniuses of the century.” Mishima, I learn, later kills himself by using a classical Japanese sword to disembowel himself. And I spent many hours reading a book by this person? His path and the path of his character were inexplicable to me.
224. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Alas. I never would have thought it, but I seem to be just another modern woman. I clearly remember reading this book back in high school and loving its slow pace, its carefully chosen words. Not today. I found myself wishing Thoreau would pick up the pace, leave off all the tedious details of his life in the country, go into town and get some perspective. And then, abruptly, Thoreau would say something so profound and so wise that I would forgive him everything. I seem to have a love-hate relationship with this book.
I would like to ask Thoreau a question or two. Most pressing: If living at Walden Pond was so great, why did he leave?
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217. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee
Lee undertakes a difficult challenge: find out all there is to know about Chinese food. I am happy to say she lived up to the challenge. I learned more about General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies and soy sauce than I thought I ever wanted to know. All in all, it was an entertaining trip through Chinese American dining.
218. Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos
I wouldn’t call this book literary fiction; most people, I suppose, would call it chick lit. But it is a little more than that. The characters are a little more complex than you might think and there are all those multisyllabic words. Yes, it is a little more than your typical chick lit.
But don’t go expecting Tolstoy either. Cornelia, our main character, decides to move from the decidedly high culture big city to the ‘burbs, though she’s not quite clear about her rationale. She and her husband try to fit in and make friends, but their new neighborhood can be disdainful of the bright and clever city dwellers. Cornelia makes an enemy before she makes a friend; her enemy, Piper, seems out to make Cornelia miserable. But Piper suddenly becomes the chief caregiver of her best friend and the new experiences Piper has with her friend’s suffering soften her heart.
219. Various Miracles by Carol Shields
I’ve had this book on my wishlist forever and I finally acquired this copy a good while back, but somehow I never got around to reading it. Then the Canadian Authors Bookbox arrived and I found I had almost nothing to put into it for trade. Thus this read yesterday.
I’ve read Shields before I had no recollection of this kind of Shields, a Murakami-ish Shields, full of magic and mysticism and the odd and strange. I loved this book of short stories where the unexpected always happens, just like in the real world, and who knows why. I loved the first story in the book, the title story, a simple listing of all the miracles in the world, miracles in the broadest sense of the word. “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” takes us through the twisting life of Mrs. Turner, a life that winds and bends, making stops she’d never anticipate, that ends with Mrs. Turner, yes, cutting the grass. A girl who is accidentally locked inside a church, a church used only once a year. A man who writes satire watching his wife slowly die. A couple who receives yearly Christmas cards from a man they met for a few minutes twenty-five years earlier. Very real, very wacky stories.
220. Dewey: The Small-Town Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter
In general, I hate sappy stories. I loathe abject sentimentality. I hate sweet little stories where everything ends happily ever after and the main characters dance off together into the sunset.
Two exceptions: Romances and animal stories.
Dewey is an animal story that, happily, I will exempt from my sappy stories rule. Dewey is a stray cat who is found one icy morning in the drop box of the public library. Dewey wins the hearts of the librarian, the library staff, the library patrons, and, finally, the entire town. And what a cat he is! Somehow he manages to help farmers troubled by a bad economy, disabled children, lonely people, and depressed people, and all by just being a kind and gentle cat.
Yes, the story reeks with sappiness, but I loved reading it.
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