First Reads of 2009

 

 

The first reads of 2009. How did I finish 14 books in one day? It’s an old trick of mine, to get me off to a great start in my reading year. I save the last page of a stack of books for the first day of the new year.

1. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

Clarissa is shocked to learn her father is not her biological father. She travels north of the Arctic Circle to try to find her father, believed to be a Sami, a member of the indigenous population. She is successful in finding the man who was her mother’s first husband, but this man only offers more revelations.

The book has a dreamlike quality that I liked. The end was very satisfying.

 

2. My Jesus Year by Benyamin Cohen

 

Cohen is, from all appearances, a very devout and conservative Jew. On the inside, however, he feels his spiritual life is empty. He longs to experience genuine spirituality. In addition, he has always had a secret envy of Christians.

 

Somehow this leads Cohen to embark on a year-long adventure exploring Bible Belt Christianity.

 

One more thing you should know about Cohen:  He is a funny guy. That explains a lot. For example, it explains why Cohen spends his year visiting rock Christians and wrestling Christians and speaking-in-tongues Christians and healing Christians. He stops in on the fringes. Don’t be thinking Cohen is planning to stop in your little small town Christian church. No, he is looking for Christianity, but he is also looking for a good story.

 

Mixed feelings about this. Cohen assures us and assures us he is not seeking to mock Christianity, that he wants to find the deeply spiritual Christians. But time after time he ends up chatting with another group of people that could have wandered out of the loony bin and, intentionally or not, he mocks. Cohen is very condescending toward Christians, at times, when he sees what he deems misinterpretations of the Law and misapplications of the Law. He says he finds many Christians who are much like him, going through the motions without really experiencing that depth one wishes for, and that is probably true. He also spoke with several Christians who helped him find his way back to his own religion and who helped him grow a little, including a priest who encouraged him to keep going through the motions until he experienced the depth.

 

Very mixed feelings about this.

 

3. Open Your Mind, Open Your Life by Taro Gold

 

Oodles and oodles of little aphorisms about life and its meaning. Most are listed anonymously. That bothered me. Who wrote these anonymous sayings? Was it Taro Gold? If so, what did he base them on?

 

A few thoughtful stories and sayings intermingled with stories and sayings that felt as if they could have been written by my commonsensical grandma.

 

4. Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim by Tom Corwin

 

Mr. Fooster sets off on a traveling adventure. With him, he carries a jar of bubbles. His bubbles can be quite magical. His adventures are quite magical.

 

I was desperate to buy this book at the Texas Book Fair. I was happy when I found it in one of my packages this Christmas.

 

5. I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do) by Mark Greenside

 

Ah! I’ve been dreaming of reading a moving-and-starting-over book for ages and, at last, one arrives. I liked this book, too. Greenside has just the right mix of enchantment and perplexity with the French that makes for a lovely story.

 

Greenside comes to France with a girlfriend but the trip is not a happy one for the couple; they break up and everyone looks set to go home. Yet something about the village in Brittany makes him fall in love with the place and, before he knows it, he has borrowed money from his mother and bought a disaster of a home in France.

 

A few annoyances: Greenside is almost fifty, mind you, and he has to borrow money from his mother to buy his first house. Gracious. And, second, a note to Mr. Greenside: Athough we may long to go live in France, be aware that we nevertheless do not all speak French. Occasional translations and assistance from context clues would be helpful to intermingle with long conversations in French.

 

6. The Traveler by Daren Simkin

 

The Traveler is one of those cute little books that almost could have made the cut for children’s picture book. Instead, it was marketed as an adult book; making it a book for grownups somehow makes it Meaningful and Thoughtful and Philosophical. Please don’t think I’m being sarcastic and mean. I liked the story. I liked the drawings. I liked the message of the text. I wish the Message was a little less of a Message, I say longingly, but I add, Perhaps that’s what people want, though…a Message.

 

7. The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers

 

Oh, what a great story!  Henry loves eating books, but he discovers that things work out better if he reads them instead. Will definitely be a hit at my school. Why have I never read this book before now?!

 

8. Where Fairies Dance by Michael Hague

 

Old and new poems about fairies with beautiful illustrations. Sure to be a hit at my school.

 

9. The Reading Zone by Nancie Atwell

 

I loved this book. I want someone to finance a trip for me to Maine to visit Atwell and see her ideas in action.

 

Atwell believes all readers need to become good at reading is good books and time to read. A simple idea, but one that is backed up by research.

 

I want to push this book into the hands of every teacher I know, especially junior high and high school teachers. I want to give it to administrators and to politicians. I want to talk to parents about it. I want to try it. I think I can.

 

10. Wabi Sabi Simple by Richard Powell

 

Wabi Sabi is the beauty, the power of the imperfect and the natural. It’s a simple idea.

 

The book is titled Wabi Sabi Simple. I suppose I expected a little less Wabi Sabi and a little more Simple. Powell talks more than I do. He goes here and there, in the natural world, the gardens, everywhere, with wabi sabi. I had just read The Reading Zone which includes the Reader’s Bill of Rights. I found myself citing right number two here and there, the right to skip pages, while I read this book.

 

11. Better Than Life by Daniel Pennac

 

Unexpectedly, Better Than Life picked up where The Reading Zone left off. Better Than Life, like RZ, includes the Reader’s Bill of Rights; in fact, it is Pennac’s creation. Pennac looks at readers from the eyes of their parents, their teachers, and their society. You can see that Pennac and Atwell are philosophically one.

 

Pennac focuses in this book on his own experiences with his son as a teenage reader. He is frustrated with his son, but, more, with the reading assignments his son is given.

 

The book reads like a novel, yet Pennac has lots of opportunities to jump up on the lecture stand and talk to those of us who work with readers, warning us of the grave consequences of trying to force people to read and to read what must be read instead of what one wants to read.

 

12. The Moonlight Chronicles by Dan Price

 

Price is an old hippie. He is also a husband and a dad. Most of all, he loves to draw.

 

His drawings make me long to pull out a drawing pad and pencil and set to drawing. Price makes the process of drawing look easy and fun and meditative.

 

13. Plotting for Beginners by Sue Hepworth and Jane Linfoot

 

A fifty-ish man and his fifty-ish wife agree to go their separate ways for a year, he off to Thoreau it in Colorado and she to write her book.

 

Scary and here’s why:  My fifty-ish husband bought this book for me, his fifty-ish wife, for Christmas. I’m still worrying a little about the deep psychological implications of this.

 

A pleasant little read, as entertaining as an evening sitcom.

 

14. Personal Days by Ed Park

 

I kept thinking, Is the author of Then We Came to the End suing Park?  Personal Days, like TWCE, is told in plural first person. Personal Days, like TWCE, takes place in an office. Personal Days, like TWCE, is inhabited by characters who have no grounding in reality, who are deeply neurotic, sometimes psychotic. Personal Days, like TWCE, consists of the slow and mysterious departure of staff and the gradual dissolution of the company. Personal Days, like TWCE, is both funny and sad.

 

The similarities between the novels bothered me for the first few chapters, then I got enmeshed in the story and forgot about it through most of the read. I liked this book a lot. If I hadn’t read TWCE first, I would have said I loved it and I would have raved about the startling originality of the writer. Nevertheless, despite my irritation at the imitation, I liked this book a lot. A lot.

 

(One more small irritation:  Reading the one, long continuous sentence/e-mail that filled the last forty pages grew very, very tedious. Please, Mr. Park. We readers must breathe.)

 

Here’s a quote that is representative of this book:  “Most of us are in therapy. Occasionally one of us will quit for a while, laughably convinced we are better, before realizing there’s no such thing as better. Haven’t we learned that by now? Nothing will ever get better; nothing will ever be fixed. Fixing is not even the point. What is the point?”

 

 

 

 

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