From the Boyfriend Brackets

When I set out to read a book by someone I consider a friend, I always feel a great deal of trepidation--What if I don't like it?  What will I say?  I felt the same way years ago when my best friend started acting in community theatre.  I knew everything was going to be just fine when I was able to forget that was Debbie up there (and quit worrying about her remembering her lines) and started to believe she was who she was pretending to be up there.

That willing suspension of disbelief works like magic.

When Alison Kemper's YA novel Donna of the Dead was released at the first of March in eBook format, I decided to download it to read on my trip to Haiti.  While I may be skeptical about zombie lit, I knew Alison well enough to know she'd do something clever and original--and I was right.

The book opens on a cruise ship with the protagonist Donna, a high school girl whose dad's job is tied in closely to the cruise industry.  They are traveling with her dad's girlfriend and her grandson, Donna's best friend Deke.  They get word of a strange pandemic just before an outbreak onboard--and it turns victims quickly into zombies. (Stay with me here!)  Donna and Deke manage to escape the ship, leaving her father and his grandmother on board, working to find some answers and a solution.  All through the adventure, Donna hears voices, particularly when danger nears.  They end up finding their high school has been hit hard, but several students are barricaded in the building, trying to survive together.

At this point, the novel follows a formula that worked for Decameron, Chaucer, Maeve Binchy, and Ann Patchet, to name a few:  put a disparate group of people in close quarters and watch what happens.  There are bossy school leaders, overly perky cheerleaders, a teacher's young son, misfits--and Liam, a boy whose attention Donna's been seeking through the last year or two of high school.

The book avoids falling into formula though in part because of Kemper's use of humor and even more because of the dead-on characterization.  The characters she could easily have stereotyped have more depth to them.  The cheerleaders aren't even interchangeable.  While most of the characters are teenagers, she adds a cantankerous librarian in the mix, along with Donna's father and Deke's mom. Even the victims-turned-zombie are sympathetic. I particularly enjoyed the connections made to the Black Death, the series of plagues that nearly decimated Europe during the Middle Ages.

As I lost myself in the story--the best way to pass time onboard an airplane--I would make notes of favorite parts I couldn't wait to discuss with Kemper as soon as I got back from break, and I thought of readers--some more A than Y--to whom I had to recommend the book.

When Deke made an appearance on the YA boyfriend brackets on Facebook last week, I knew others had already discovered the book too.

From the Boyfriend Brackets

Wiley Cash Excels in the Sophomore Experience

The cliche that "everyone has at least one good book in 'em" is laughable at best.  Most writers will tell you that getting that book outside of you is the real challenge.  For many writers, though, moving on to a second book after the first has proven successful can be most difficult of all.

Wiley Cash's first novel A Land More Kind than Home might have been missed by many readers if not for independent booksellers, who both in an organized and independent way discovered the book and passed it on to their customers looking for a good read.

He sets his second novel This Dark Road to Mercy in North Carolina again, this time in Gastonia, the town where he grew up. While on the book tour with A Land More Kind than Home, he told his audience that this new book had an even more evil antagonist.  I knew that would be quite an accomplishment, to develop a character more evil than a snake handling preacher who'd stick an old woman's arm in a crate of poisonous snakes or smother a mentally handicapped boy and cover up his actions. 

This story too follows several characters, but readers first become engaged by Easter, a  young girl placed in a children's home with her sister after their mother's death, presumably from a drug overdose.  When their father, a former minor league baseball player who had abandoned his family, shows up to reclaim the girls, I was so afraid he would be that evil character.  Instead, their father Wade is a flawed, but complex character.

Cash also tells the story from the viewpoints of Brady Weller, the girls' guardian ad litem, a former policeman who also carries around a heavy load of guilt and Pruitt, a bar bouncer who always wears dark glasses that hide physical scars that run much deeper. There we have him--Cash's embodiment of evil.

In both of his books, Wiley Cash convincingly present the perspective of a young child.  His segueway to the other threads of the story caught me off guard the first time he shifted to Pruitt's perspective, but he balances the telling well.

When I finished reading, I wondered what Cash had been reading when he wrote this novel, since he shared those details in his first book. But then again, I don't need any more titles to add to my "must read" stack.

Wiley Cash Excels in the Sophomore Experience

Sisterland

I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Sisterland was being made into a movie.  While I haven't exactly cast the characters in my head--as I usually do--I realized early in my reading that it dealt with so many issues and topics.  The main character Kate is a young wife and mother of two in St. Louis, whose husband is a college professor.  After they are awakened by a light tremor, her husband Jeremy's colleague Courtney Wheeling (a seismologist and the female half of their closest couple friends) is interviewed about the likelihood of a larger earthquake. Kate's identical twin sister also grabs publicity by calling the local station and predicting a imminent earthquake--and she gives a date.

Kate the protagonist--born Daisy Shramm--goes on to reveal that she and her twin had recognize they had what they called "senses" when they were young, successful enough predicting events that they spooked their classmates, who called them "the witches."  After her marriage, Kate has attempted to distance herself from her own psychic ability, while her sister conducts sessions with hers.

Sister Vi's prediction gets the attention of NBC news and she's interviewed by Matt Lauer. The result is a mixture of fear, preparation for such and event, and even mockery.  Attempting to manage her sister's publicity, Kate uses the family savings to retain a publicist.

Through the course of the novel, Kate spends time with her best friend, Courtney's husband, a stay at home father, taking their children to the park together, sharing childrearing tips, and confiding more than their spouses would imagine.

Sittenfeld goes far enough into Kate and Vi's past to see their own mother's unhappiness that spirals into depression. Throughout high school, she retired to her bedroom, leaving her daughters to prepare meals for themselves and their father. By the time of the events of the story, their mother has died and the daughters care for, protect,  and sometimes depend on their father.

The tension throughout the novel comes not only between the two sisters, who have grown in such different directions in adult, but also between Kate and her husband Jeremy, as he fails to take seriously her concern that her sister may be right.

While some of the plot twists are predictable, Sittenfeld manages to write a thought-provoking, clever novel, giving interesting insight into a complex protagonist.  At times, I wanted to shake Kate, and at others, I ached for her.  She even allowed readers to care about her quirky sister, the lightning rod Vi.

Sisterland

Young Adult Novels or Adult Novels: The Round House and Eleanor and Park

I'm curious about the line between Young Adult fiction and any other kind of fiction. S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, written when she was just fifteen, has been recognized as one of the first--if not the first YA novel.  Since then, this particular genre--or target group--has had a huge impact on reading.  As a general rule, these books involve young protagonists dealing with issues common to adolescents--family, friendship, love, heartache, violence.

However, since all adults have actually been adolescents--and lived to tell about it--many of us find ourselves drawn to these books.  Many great books written before Hinton's novel could be included -- To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit, Great Expectations.  It doesn't take much thinking to come up with a long list.  Two of my recent favorites are novels about young people with a more universal appeal.

When our school library ordered a copy of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, I decided I ought to try her earlier hit novel Eleanor and Park  first.  The two title characters, Eleanor and Park, are an unlikely romantic couple.  Park is the son of a former military man and his Korean wife; Park manages to keep a low profile and stay on the perimeter of the popular students at his school, including his next door neighbor and his girlfriend, who thrive on mocking or bullying other students. Eleanor is a ripe target. Not only is she the "new girl" at the school, but she has a headful of flaming read hair and pale skin. She wears outrageous clothes that don't effectively camouflage her weight, not because she is particularly rebellious, but because her mother can only afford to shop for her--when she has any money to spend--at Goodwill and thrift stores.

When the seat next to Park is the only one available when Eleanor gets on the bus for the first time--to the mocking jeers of the other riders--he is anything but friendly. Gradually, subtlety, they not only become friends, sharing his collection of comic books, but theirs becomes a genuine romantic relationship.

Park's adolescent challenges are the usual ones: His younger brother is bigger and more athletic.  Park's father is also determined that his son must learn to drive his truck--a stick shift--before he can get his driver's license.  This conflict is blown out of proportion in part, Park feels, because he doesn't live up to his father's expectations.  While he has the normal parent-child conflict, though, his family is a solid, loving one.  Eleanor's is anything but.  She and her siblings live with their mom and her new husband, whose addictive behavior leads to fear and abuse.

While her relationship with Park offers her some solace from her home life, she has to keep it a secret, pretending she has a girl school friend who invites her over.  While she keeps her misery secret from Park, he--and his mother--recognize the symptoms of a bad home life.

What is most refreshing about the book is that Park sees her just as she is--unusual, anything but the high school ideal for feminine beauty--yet he finds her beautiful.  Rowell  characterizes the adults--the teachers and counselor at school, and especially Park's family--more realistically than in many YA novels. (Often in YA novels, the adults all come across as nondescript as Charlie Brown's teacher:  Wah Wah Wah Wah). Park's mother and father are flawed but genuine and loving.

In the other novel that seemed to land alongside Eleanor and Park, Louise Erdrich in The Round House, also presents a huge family crisis through the eyes of a young teenager. Joe is a thirteen-year-old Chippewa boy whose mother is raped by a white man. While a couple of his friends live in much poorer circumstances, Joe has a stable, comfortable home. His father is a tribal judge, a career the son is obviously headed toward in the future.  His mother also works on the reservation--handling issues related to tribal enrollments.

Because his mother was blindfolded when the attack occurred, taken some distance away from the tribe's spiritual landmark The Round House, she is unable to say without question whether the crime was committed on or off the reservation, complicating the legal process.  For a time, her mind and body shut down, refusing to let her remember enough to report details to the police.

Erdrich, herself from a Native American family, sets most of her major works on the reservations.  She also writes convincingly from the point of view of a young male. The crude humor, the mischief and worse that Joe and his friends drum up, are hilarious, frightening, and always believable.  In many ways, the narrative reminds me of some of the best of Sherman Alexie.

Both Erdrich and Rowell included strong families and complicated community relationships.  Joe, Park, and Eleanor have--to varying degrees--a network of adults capable of helping them, yet they often lack the maturity or trust to accept that help.  Even with mothers as victims in both novels, the young protagonists remain central; as a reader, I found I most identified with the boys in each of the novels.  Both authors left me genuinely concerned about what would happen next in their characters' lives--much longer than I remember or care about the characters in many of the novels I read.

Young Adult Novels or Adult Novels: The Round House and Eleanor and Park

The List: My 2013 Roll Call of Books Read

I read somewhere that singer Art Garfunkel has kept a list of the books he reads since he was sixteen. I wish I had thought of it sooner. As it is, I have maintained my list for quite some time. My wall calendar (which will never be replaced by any online version) bears the month-by-month record of books I finish. Then when the new year rolls around, I transfer my list to a "Book-woman" journal my mother gave me awhile back. The first entry is dated 1997.

If my "What to Read Next " list represents my bibliophilic New Year's resolutions, then the following reflects as least one part of my accomplishments. Please keep in mind that all the while, I am reading the material I assign for classes--from freshman comp papers to Brit lit assignments. (Technically, every year's list would include Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Utopia, two or three Shakespearean plays--at least--numerous short stories, poems, and plays, and--most time consuming and least fulfilling of all--numerous drafts of hundreds of student essays.)

Without further ado, here's my 2013 list:

Karen Thompson Walker, Age of Miracles
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
B. A. Shapiro, The Art Forger
Jo Barbara Taylor, Cameo Roles (read twice--once for a review)
Malaika King Albrecht, What the Trapeze Artist Trusts (likewise)
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
Tina Fey, Bossypants
Joshilyn Jackson, A Grown-up Kind of Pretty
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood
Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore
Chris Cleaves, Little Bee
George Saunders, Tenth of December
Walter Bennett, Leaving Tuscaloosa
Alan Bradley, Speaking from Among the Bones
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer
Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements
Wiley Cash, A Land More Kind than Home
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Kate Atkinson, Life after Life
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys
Fannie Flagg, Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Therese Ann Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
William Landay, Defending Jacob
Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin'
Kent Haruff, Benediction
M. L. Steadman, The Light Between Oceans
George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones
Jeanette Walls, The Silver Star
David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
Ron Rash, Nothing Gold Can Stay
Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Unaccountable Weather
Jess Walter, The Financial Life of Poets
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Jennifer Pharr-Davis, Becoming Odyssa
Joseph Mills, Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet
Kathryn Stripling Byer, Descent
Bob and Emilie Barnes, 101 Ways to Love Your Grandchildren
Jodi Piccoult, The Storyteller
Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
Irmgard Al Hunt, On Hitler's Mountain
Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam
Margot Livesey, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
John Green, Paper Town
Robert Hicks, A Separate Country
Wilton Barnhardt, Lookaway, Lookaway
Tammy Foster Brewer, No Glass Allowed 
Robert Lee Brewer, Solving the World's Problems
Irene Gut Opdyke, In My Hands
Amy Franklin Willis, The Lost Saints of Tennessee
Carl Hiassen, Bad Monkey
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath
Louis Sachar, Small Steps
Tracy Chevalier, The Last Runaway
Jeanette Haien, The All of It
Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor and Park
Lane Kaaberbal and Agnete Friis, The Boy in the Suitcase
Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow!
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Allan Gurganus, Local Souls
Alex and Brett Harris, Do Hard Things
Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

There you have it:  The explanation for where some of my hours were spent this past year.  In case you're wondering, I do include audiobooks because (1. with a 25 or 30-minute drive to work and then back, audiobooks keep me sane; (2. I honestly sometimes can't remember if I listened to a book or read the words on the page--unless the reader was remarkably memorable, as many are; (3. I sometimes will read part and listen to part.

In case you don't recognize some titles, much poetry is included in the list.  There should probably be more. I have a huge collection of poetry books and chapbooks, especially since I am exposed to so many good poets each month at Poetry Hickory.  I plan to follow this list with several review, and I will certainly mention some of the poetry I've loved this year.

Please feel free to share your lists with me.  Where do you think I get some of my best suggestions?

The List: My 2013 Roll Call of Books Read

Goldfinch

      Donna Tartt seems to publish a new novel about every eleven years or so.  I was just about to dive into the first (that I know about) The Secret History, when I kept reading about her latest The Goldfinch. I was hooked by the reviews.
     The novel is told as a flashback between bookends of almost the same scene.  I had to go back to the beginning to discover that everything that was going to happen had been revealed.  (Nothing new there--Harper Lee does it on page one of To Kill a Mockingbird.)

     The main character Theo is about eleven when the actual story begins, living with his divorced mom in their New York apartment, setting out for a parent conference after his suspension from school.  On the way, though, nauseous from the cab ride, they hop out ahead of their destination and because of the rain and time they have to kill before the appointment, they go into a museum with a visiting exhibit of European artworks from around the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer. The Anatomy Lesson is there, along with a small painting by Fabritius, The Goldfinch, a small painting of a bird, its leg held by a barely visible wire.

     Along with a number of school groups, Theo also notices with interest a red-haired girl there with an elderly man he assumes is her grandfather.  While the two make eye contact, they never speak, yet he is intrigued by her.  As they get ready to leave, standing near the gift shop, his mother decides to go back for one more look at The Anatomy Lesson, but Theo decides to wait for her, hoping for a closer brush with the girl.  Instead, someone rushes in, there's a huge explosion, and he comes to later to find himself in the middle of the destruction of a bombing, presumably an act of terrorism.  The old man, seriously injured near him, gives him a ring and a package.  Unable to find his mother, Theo picks his way out of the museum to the chaos outside and finally decides to follow their established emergency plan if separated:  he goes home.

     The story from that point takes him to the antique shop where the old man had been co-owner, to Las Vegas for awhile to live with his alcoholic, gambling father and his girlfriend Xandra, where he meets Boris, a Russian immigrant in his class who becomes his closest adolescent companion until he leaves and returns to New York.

    Tartt weaves a long, beautifully told, even painful story as Theo reaches adulthood, taking the old man's place as a partner in the antique shop, but also dabbling with  art fraud and caught up in illegal drug use.  As important to him as his friend Boris, his partner Hobie and the mysterious red-haired Pippa, are the wealthy family of a classmate that took him in for awhile after the loss of his mother.  His life bears the indelible but inescapable mark of the tragedy at the museum, which he sees reflected in Pippa, also a scarred survivor.

     As a lover of museums, I find myself drawn to fiction--even nonfiction--about art and artists.  Reading this novel, I just assumed the work--like The Girl in Hyacinth Blue--was a fictional work of art, so my discovery after finishing the book that it exists, that my friend Carol, another voracious reader, had actually seen the painting at the Frick, means that now I have more research to do, another artist, another painting about which I must know more.  Maybe I'll figure out a way to visit the Frick Museum before the painting heads back to its usual place.
   

Goldfinch

Time to Read; Time to Write

Through this most hectic of holiday periods, I have found myself woefully behind in book posts, for which I apologize. I have, though, found time to read, even when everything else in my life has been frenzied and hectic.  One drawback of a teaching career is that I hit that grading/posting deadline twice a year, not just once.  (Think of April 15 for CPAs or December 25 for Santa and the elf crew).

The first year I taught was particularly stressful, and I had the foolish misfortune of having research papers due right around the end of the first semester.  That year, as many of my students may remember, we still didn't have a tree the Saturday before Christmas and might not have had one at all had not three of the boys from the senior class delivered on  they said they had cut themselves to my driveway. It was beautiful-- at least twelve feet tall, perfect for the out high ceiling in the living room. Recently, in a Facebook conversation with the goodhearted tree givers, most of them pled the fifth or asked if the statute of limitations was up.  Enough said.

This year, though, I've read a wonderful variety of books the last three or four weeks, so I can't wait to share some of them.  I will also be taking down my wall calendar for 2013 so I can transcribe a list of everything I read in the past year.

For now, though, I want to mention one I'm not quite through reading, Ann Patchett's recent collection of essays and other nonfiction pieces, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I've been a Patchett fan for years, ever since I read Bel Canto. That book captivated me for many reasons. It's one of those books that has stuck with me in ways some books don't.  I remember tiny incidences, specific characters, impressions from the book.  I've had the chance to hear her speak three times--once with Allan Gurganus, one of her professors and a gentleman I have grown to admire for his writing and for his generosity of spirit, one at the NCTE convention in Nashville several years ago (in which she reinforced her support of assigning the classics to high school students), and recently at UNC-Asheville.

Reading through this recent collection, I sometimes feel guilty for presuming to think I know an author simply because I've read her books, for even daring to think I could breach her wall of privacy.  She comes across as both private and approachable, a confusing mix.  Since I always visit Parnassus Books, the store she co-owns, when I'm in Nashville, and because she lives in a city I've loved since my own college years, I am always overwhelmed by the sense of the familiar when I read her essays.

I also feel a particular connection when she touches on topics of interest to me.  Case in point:  She has one essay explaining the controversy that arose when Clemson selected her memoir Truth and Beauty as their freshman read, after which an alum decided the book was vile, as must be its author.  She also publishes the speech she wrote and delivered at Clemson (accompanied by a bodyguard provided by the college.)  My overwhelming takeaway is the need for students--especially college students--to see their educations as something in which they engage, not as something done to them.

When I make reading assignments in my classes, I try to do so with conscientious purpose.  I would never choose something prurient for the sake of shock; however, I sometimes find a book or a story worth reading together, even when I find some ideas or language or situations objectionable.  Teaching English and literature, I've always believed, is about teaching people to think.  I don't know if it's possible to teach anyone HOW to think, but I certainly try to encourage the process of critical thinking. Already, I'm considering ways to interject some of these pieces in my upcoming composition  course, where I hope to engage my students in thinking, talking, and writing about their own learning, their educational goals, the development of their own system of values, perhaps shaped by their families, but adopted intentionally.  I don't think they'll find any of that in Spark Notes.

Time to Read; Time to Write