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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Last Week’s Reads
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.
1 | Comment (0)Reading about Reading and More
202. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Everywhere I looked on blogs, on book lists, on book review sites was this book. Almost every review was a rave. I liked it, too. A solid story, about intriguing people in a little-known part of the world, a bit predictable, with a happy ending that was unlikely but not impossible. The characters were good, but real, and never sappy.
203. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Just as I felt certain things would turn out okay in Guernsey, I felt certain things were going to be bad on The Road. The plot is quite simple: A man and his son are traveling down a road, headed south, away from the terrible cold. Something awful has happened to the world. Everything has burned and ashes lay everywhere in drifts. Death is on every page of the story. If the man had simply been traveling down the road on his own, the story would not have had the power it has. The boy was the only hope of the story, though how the world could ever be restored I don’t know. I hated the story at times, but I also found it very true. It was beautifully written and very thoughtful.
204. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
I’d planned to browse through this book, but once I got started I couldn’t stop reading. I was reading about reading and it was fascinating. Here are some thoughts I want to save and think about:
“While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture.”
“The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering.”
“…by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle-class child. In another study, which looked at how many words children produce at age three, children from impoverished environments used less than half the number of words already spoken by their more advantaged peers….In the most underprivileged community, no children’s books were found in the homes; in the low-income to middle-income community, there were, on average, three books; and in the affluent community there were around 200 books….One of the major contributors to later reading was simply the amount of time for ‘talk around dinner.’ The importance of simply being talked to, read to, and listened to is what much of early language development is about….”
“Some up-front costs, such as transfer errors and substitutions from one language to the next, are less important than the advantages, if…the child learns each language well.” (learning two languages)
“When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years, and that at least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge importance of a child’s development of vocabulary becomes crystal-clear.”
“An enormously important influence on the development of comprehension in childhood is what happens after we remember, predict, and infer: we feel, we identify, and in the process we understand more fully and can’t wait to turn the page.”
‘Recent reports from the National Reading Panel and the “nation’s report cards” indicate that 30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fluent readers with adequate comprehension….the entire school system (has) different expectations for students from grade 4 on. This approach is encapsulated in the mantra that in the first three grades a child “learns to read,” and in the next grades a child “reads to learn.”‘
1 | Comment (0)Brutal Facts: Good News (for a Change)
Less than 10% of Americans read no books last year.
Over 1/3 (37%) read more than ten books last year.
http://www.lisnews.org/node/29745
1 | Comment (0)If You Can Bear It…More Brutal Facts of Reading
- 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
- 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
- 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
- 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
- 57 percent of new books are not read to completion. (1)
Of those who did read books, most read fiction strictly for pleasure. And the #1 selling book genre is “Romance,” which was read by 64.6 million Americans in 2005. (2)
From http://www.blogdesignblog.com/blog-design/
1 | Comment (0)More Brutal Facts about Reading
From an article in The Beacon News:
“According to a 1996 Journal of Educational Psychology study, 74 percent of children who are poor readers in the third grade remain poor readers in the ninth grade.”
“One study says 61 percent of children who come from low-income families have no books at home.”
“Forty percent of students can’t read at their grade level.”
“One statistic prison planners use to determine the number of prison cells a community will need is to find the number of 8-year-olds who are reading below grade level.”
1 | Comment (0)What’s Reading?
I am all about reading.
It’s my job.
It’s my avocation.
I spend hours and hours every week reading. To children, to myself. Talking about reading. Writing about reading.
So what is it? I say I read 165 books this year. And I did, cover to cover, 165 books. Some left no imprint. In fact, I’m sometimes startled to realize that I read a book within the last year and I remember nothing about it.
If I remember nothing about a book, did I really read it?
I didn’t list most of the picture books I read this year. No Gift of the Magi. No The Little Match Girl. No Night Before Christmas, which I read aloud forty times. Forty times reading that book, talking about that book. But it’s not even on the list.
The books I liked most this year were those I thought most about, wrote most about, talked most about.
Some of the books I liked most this year were not on my list of books I read. Book Crush. Varieties of Disturbance. The Lonely Planet book about all the countries. The story I read to all the classes during Valentine’s Day week. Martin’s Big Words. Books I don’t read cover to cover. Audio books. Anansi books that felt too short to list.
What sparked all this thought about reading? The three minute interview on NPR with the author of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. A book I haven’t read.
So how will this change the way I keep track of my reading?
The form I have used the last few years…I want to change it. A list of good questions about the book….I think I will keep a list nearby and use it to talk about my reads, to think about my reads.
I’ll count what I feel like. Even if I read a book from cover to cover, I may not list it. I will list picture books if I want.
I’ll redefine reading. Reading is not just calling words. There is an element of processing, too. Reflecting.
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