One Giant Leap for My Kind

Not long ago, I said firmly that I would not be using an e-reader. "I'll never use one of those; I can't imagine trying to read from a screen all the time."

I'm not an early adapter (So much so that I'm not even sure if it's really early adapter or early adopter. And these things matter to me.). Today I tried to get across the state using only a GPS, and I ended up adding an extra 40 minutes to my trip. Give me a big, unwieldy atlas any day.

Plus, as regards an e-reader, I love real books. I love the feel of them, especially hardcovers. A lovely dust jacket is so inviting, the feel of heavy paper is satisfying, and even the smell of the ink is heavenly. Plus I like to turn it on end and check how far I've gotten. And my home feels complete only with full (or possibly over-full) bookshelves. Nope, an e-reader is not for me.

Then, last summer, I got on a flight with a bag stuffed with the 8-10 books I thought I might possibly need over 8 days time (ha!). The handles were ripping out, as were my shoulder and my spinal column. I settled in the seat on the plane, then bent over double to dig through the bag between my feet for the book I wanted at that moment. The woman next to me had her purse as a carry-on, and she effortlessly pulled out an enlarged cell phone-like object and started reading. She had loaded all the books she wanted for her trip.

Well, that got me thinking. At the last minute, I added a reader to my Christmas wish list. And on Christmas day I got a Nook. After spending a couple of hours going back and forth to the Barnes and Noble website, complete with a call to customer service (yes, on Christmas day), I finally got a) my account open, b) my gift card registered, and c) my customer rewards card number entered. And I could finally purchase my first ebook. Which was The Art of Racing in the Rain, but I'll write about that book on another day.

And now I have read my first ebook. So what can I say about it? It will be handy to carry multiple titles when traveling. The Nook is not backlit, so it's easy on the eyes, but still requires a booklight if I want to read in the dark. The booklight is easier to clip onto the cover of the Nook than to maneuver around pages, but it does make a glare on the screen. It's much quieter to turn pages on the Nook than with a real book. (I will continue to refer to print books as "real" books, and you'll just have to put up with it.) The one real bonus to me is that I feel like I'm reading faster because each screenful is half a page, so I'm clicking through the pages like mad. And I can search for something I want to re-read just by typing in a couple of remembered words.

On the minus side, I really missed the cover. Yes, I can view the cover on my Nook, but it's not pretty. I know that seems shallow, but there's a reason they make dust jackets so attractive. Real books don't need to be charged every so often. I can barely remember to charge my cell phone. And after spending a good part of each day working on my computer, it's just not as restful to look at yet another screen. One of the selling points was that the library system has a collection that can be downloaded. However, that is the KDL system, not the Grand Rapids library system, and I don't have the correct address. Grrr. I'll spare you my rant on that subject.

But still, I liked it. I will continue to buy real books, no doubt. A book that matters to me needs to be held and studied and loaned out and recommended. And if at all possible, signed by the author. How would Mary Karr autograph my Nook, right? Also, I feel like a traitor to the bookstores that I love. I avoid purchasing books at Barnes and Noble because I prefer to support local stores. I expect to use the Nook for books that I don't expect a lot from, that I won't want to pull off the shelf and push into someone else's hands. Or possibly for really thick books (think Vanity Fair or Anna Karenina) that are not so easy to schlepp around. I can't imagine browsing for a good novel on my computer--I like to stop in at the Literary Life bookstore or Pooh's Corner or Schuler's and finger all the books on the shelves. So, I make the leap, but halfheartedly.

But I will never use a GPS again. No way.

Favorites of 2010: Books, Movies and Music

While my kids look forward breathlessly to a year that includes the final installment of the Harry Potter movies, and I look forward to the new film adaptation of Jane Eyre that I just saw a trailer for, there were some great things to remember from the year past too. Here are some of the things I really liked this year--let me know what I've missed!

Books for Adults:
Lit by Mary Karr: Memoir of trading alcohol for God, with no sugar coating.
The Cellist of Sarajevo (didn't come out this year, but still) by Steven Galloway: gorgeously written novel of life under seige.
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson: Fun romp through the English countryside with a crusty old Englishman.
In the Neighborhood by Peter Lovenheim: Lovenheim spends some time getting to know his neighbors, by sleeping over.
When Metallica Came to Church by John Van Sloten: Pastor Van Sloten gives a new perspective on God's way of revealing himself.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett: Okay, so I read this in 2009, but it bears repeating. Great book. Looking forward to the movie.

Books for Young Adults:
Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr: Honest, lovely fiction of a pastor's kid questioning her own belief.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (only after reading the first two in the trilogy): A futuristic novel giving a very real picture of the effects of war.
Eli the Good by Silas House: Coming-of-age novel set in bicentennial America. Not quite sure if it's for adults or young people, but I enjoyed it!
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine: A girl with Asperger's comes to terms with grief.
Matched by Ally Condie: Add up The Hunger Games plus The Giver plus Twilight, take out the werewolves, most of the lust and most of the poor writing, and you still have a good story.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (again, an oldie, but still): Fabulous autobiographical fiction of a 14 year old boy caught between his tribe and his off-the-reservation school.

Movies for Adults:
The King's Speech: Wonderful treatment of a would-be king struggling with a speech impediment and his unorthodox therapist. Plus the bonus of seeing Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) and Elizabeth Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) sharing the screen again (see the 90s version of Pride and Prejudice.) Geoffrey Rush also fantastic.
Winter's Bone: The story is dark and gritty, but young Jennifer Lawrence deserves an Oscar for her performance as a teenager trying to save her family from the mistakes of her meth-cooking father in the Ozarks.
Inception: Hard to describe, but this creative and innovative movie is mindbending. Worth watching if only for the incredible sequences of architectural design and alteration.
The Social Network: Well-acted and well-timed, the Facebook movie comments on our culture and our connections (or lack thereof). Beware the party scenes.
Get Low: Robert Duvall is a hermit wanting to throw his own funeral while he's still alive. He's looking for a monumental confessional. Wonderful little movie, great music, and Bill Murray in another great supporting role. Might not be one of the best of the year, but I really liked it. And watch how they use light in the scenes. Lovely.
Honorable Mention: Please Give, for trying to address something important (our attitudes towards using people, charity, guilt, etc), even if it couldn't quite do it.
Still want to see: Waiting for Superman, the documentary about the state of public education in our country. I need to see it, know it will matter greatly, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Movies for the Younger Set:
Toy Story 3: Woody. Buzz. Pixar. Another home run.
How to Train Your Dragon: Fun and full of heart. Not for the youngest.
Ramona and Beezus: Sweet, fun, well-made kids' movie that got very little credit.
Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Loved this!
Tangled: Fun interpretation of Rapunzel.

Music (no real description here, you'll just have to listen online for yourselves)
Downtown Church by Patti Griffin
Women and Country by Jakob Dylan
In Feast or Fallow by Sandra McCracken
This Broken Moment by Jessica Smucker and the Sleeping World
Album I know I'll like but haven't gotten yet: Arcade Fire's The Suburbs

Happy New Year!

Lighting up a Dark Path

The Fab 5 convened today for a second meeting about the book Lit. We met last week to choose books for the next 6 months (oh happy day!) and to talk about Lit, but since 3 of us had not yet finished, we postponed the Lit discussion until lunch this week. More on our book selection later.

Mary Karr's newest memoir, Lit, follows her descent into alcoholism, then her rescue by a God she disbelieved, resented and tenuously relied upon in the absence of any other prospects. Readers experience Karr as she was at each stage of the book--she does an excellent job of giving us a look at the workings of her heart, her head and her mouth through each part of the journey.

Her story is not a pretty one, and she hasn't whitewashed it for us now. I've read her memoir, Cherry, which deals with her adolescence, and the same could be said for it. This is a woman who has been damaged in so many ways, from early childhood on, that it's amazing she has survived to this point, let alone become a successful writer and professor.

Don't read this book if you are looking for a nice, uplifting and inspirational story that wraps up neatly. And don't read this book if you can't abide vulgar language--there is plenty of it.

Mary Karr is very honest about who she was, who she wanted to be, and how she got so far off track. She writes with darkness and sarcasm, with beauty and humor. The humor is the saving grace of it when she's writing about awful things. Such as when her recently sober mother fell off the wagon just in time to be high for Mary's rehearsal dinner. Mother looked at Mary's soon-to-be father-in-law, a WASPy moneyed New Englander, and "offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote." Her mother is a character beyond belief in Karr's memoirs, and a big part of both the agony and the crazy humor of her life.

Barbara brought up the story of Karr's first AA meeting, where she listens to a gentrified woman explaining how she hid her bottle of vodka in a turkey carcass in the freezer so that her family wouldn't find it. One night "she couldn't midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it. She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don't drink like this." How often do you find humor in someone's fight to be sober, humor that does not diminish the seriousness of the fight itself?

Karr's gift to the reader is her honesty, particularly about her spiritual journey. She describes her struggle with belief, describing each time that a different point of her own opposition to her own fledgling faith gave way. God reeled her in kicking and screaming. Good friends and advisers kept her moving forward in spite of her own resistance. Sonya pointed out that Karr's AA friends were never judgmental; they just spoke the truth as they saw it and didn't let her off the hook. And they pushed her to begin praying, which changed everything for her, much as she hated it.

None of us have read her first memoir, The Liar's' Club, and some of the references to her childhood made us curious. Nancy really wants to know what happened in Colorado. Sort of like the attraction one would have to a train wreck, Barbara says.

Lit is the story of a woman who found God when she didn't really want to, a sinner like the rest of us who had hit rock bottom and had no other way to go. Turned out she wanted to find him after all.

One last note--after weeding out many books we would like to read, we came up with the following list for the next 6 months:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
Sarah's Key by Tatiana deRosnay
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore

Won't you read with us?

Part-Time Indian, Full-Time Fun

Oh, this was a good one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The title says it all. This is an autobiographical novel written by a Native American man who grew up on a reservation but went to high school at a very white town outside of the reservation. The Neland Women's Book Club faced it head on.

As a boy, Junior is a smart runt reminiscent of Owen Meany from John Irving's novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Intelligent, basketball-playing, stuttering, lisping, small and prone to seizures, Junior does not fit in. His best friend, Rowdy, is a big kid who is abused by his father and protective of the smaller, picked-on Junior.

During his first week of high school, one of Junior's teachers pulls him aside and tells him he MUST get off the reservation. Junior's extremely poor parents somehow scrape together the tuition to send Junior to Reardan, where he is the lone Spokane at the school.

This is a book about a young man straddling two cultures, as the title suggests. He sees the pros and cons of both sides, and the author tells truth about both cultures. The novel is full of humor and reality. Any teen who has felt like the odd man out will relate to the character. Parents will be a bit concerned about the all-too-honest treatment of a 14-year-old boy's life--the kind of vulgar humor and curiosity about sexuality that is likely the hallmark of that stage of a boy's life.

Still. This story is so full of honesty. What it is like to be left out. What it is like to have your wildest dream come true, even when there is a price to pay. And most of all, what do you do when you don't fit in at home or away? Alexie's story is at heart an immigrant story. Junior enters a strange new land. He is renamed Arnold (his given name, which no one at home has ever called him); he has to learn new ways and a new way of speaking. He has to learn the expectations and traditions of a completely new culture. At the same time, he must switch back to the reservation, a homeland loaded with its own expectations and alienation. Junior is looked at as a traitor, betraying his tribe.

This is the same sort of experience that many others experience--mission kids who switch between the "home culture" and the mission field, children of poverty who want to get higher education, or immigrants who come from poorer countries and somehow have to straddle the expectations of people back home and the realities of a whole new culture.

One part that was hard for us, as a church book club, to read was the short description of Junior's thoughts about Christianity and what it has done to Indian culture. He describes how the whites brought Christianity and intolerance; that the missionaries brought expectations of how the Indians should behave in all areas of life, which in turn made Indian culture less tolerant. Given that our denomination's mission agency was once called the Heathen Mission Board, and it originated in Native American missions, we don't have a lot of self-righteousness to stand on. We have been part of the problem in trying to make everyone look and act like white Europeans, even as we try to bring the news of all-encompassing love and forgiveness. So it behooves us to have some humility when we look at the not-so-lovely view of Christians in the book.

Thankfully this is a brief moment in the novel. Like the rest of the book, it is honest.

I ended up listening to this one on CD because all the library print versions were out. In some ways this was wonderful, as it was read by the author, and I completely enjoyed his cadence and personality. On the other hand, the actual book has great illustrations that illuminate the story, and I will probably re-skim this book just to see the illustrations.

In fact, I fully expect to buy a copy of this book in spite of the fact that I've already listened to it. I look forward to sharing it with my son. I'll also be looking for more work by Sherman Alexie.

Perfect "Match" for the "Hunger Games" Fan

Mix the best friend vs. soulmate romance triangle of Twilight, the evil, controlling government of The Hunger Games, and the futuristic society of The Giver, and you've got Matched by Ally Condie. Derivative? Perhaps. In this instance, I tend to think of it like my 8th grade science fair.

See, in 7th grade, I did a nondescript science project for the science fair. I got a decent grade, but no awards. Looking around, I noticed that all of the awards went to projects having to do with plants. So. The next year, I did a project about plants. And I won the one and only trophy I have ever won in my life. Original? No. But that doesn't mean my project was a bad one. I did a good job on it. I just had a little help in the inspiration department.

Back to the book, Matched is a good book all on its own. I couldn't put it down. The writing isn't quite up to par with The Giver, but it is good. It's less lust-filled and certainly better written than Twilight (though there is plenty of longing of a more innocent variety), and it lacks the violence of The Hunger Games. The novel makes its own points, mostly having to do with freedom or a lack of it, and what keeping the status quo means for the invisible in society.

In this Society, every aspect of life is monitored. Dreams, garbage, food intake, exercise and relationships. On her 17th birthday, Cassia Reyes celebrates her Match Banquet. This is the banquet at which her future husband is revealed to her. She is shocked and happy to learn that her Match is her best friend, Xander. Soon, though she is unsettled to find that there may have been some mistake--she might have been matched with another friend, Ky. And so begins both her angst-ridden romantic life as well as her slow discovery of individual freedom.

This book could be used as a parallel for any sort of freedom-limiting society--communist China, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or a future U.S. where the government makes too many choices for us. It could also foster conspiracy theories, if you are so inclined! Who knows but that the proposed ban on unhealthy Happy Meals in San Francisco is the first step to having our food portioned out and delivered to us in our homes?

There are a few moments where the romantic longing gets a little thick. As my late friend Amy said, on reading the classic young adult romance Seventeenth Summer, "Oh just kiss and get it over with, for goodness sake." But I'm okay with that.

Likely not for the boys, but if you have a female Hunger Games fan in your home who is at loose ends now that the trilogy is over, wrap this up, put it under the tree, and check another gift off your list. Warning: the book will leave her hanging, and it seems likely there will be a sequel! And I will be watching for it.

Help! I'm Stuck in the Wrong Family

Many, many books for young people have to do with orphans or young people who have been adopted. The attraction that these plotlines hold make a lot of sense to me. What tween or teen, looking around them with newly worldly eyes, doesn't wonder how they ended up in this family? No one in the family understands them, no one makes any sense, no one "gets" them. Perhaps there is someone out there who does.

Caroline B. Cooney's newest young adult novel, Three Black Swans, fits right in. This is territory that Cooney has successfully covered before, notably in her novel The Face on the Milk Carton, in which young Janie sees a younger "missing" photo of herself on the side of a milk carton in the school lunchroom, setting off a search for the truth. I lost myself for a day or two in that story almost 20 years ago, and so I picked up Three Black Swans at the library last week.

If you think about it, orphans or adopted kids figure heavily in literary history--think Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables, or Harry Potter. And for Christians, the idea that we don't really belong here, that we are strangers, aliens, not of this world, is a comfort. We don't feel comfortable, things aren't right, and that's okay, because we really belong to someone else, in another relationship.

In Three Black Swans, two cousins attempt a hoax, pretending to be long-lost identical twins. It turns out that they are on to something, and when the video ends up on YouTube, it opens up a whole world of possibilities that they had not anticipated.

While this is not Newbery-award-winning material, it is an interesting plot and a well-rounded exploration of the motivations of all of the characters involved. No one is innocent, but there are ways to feel sympathy toward every character. One of the clunkier aspects: while the author intends to show an awareness of the use of technology (texting, internet, etc) and the generation gap in that area between parents and children, sometimes it feels too self-conscious.

As a young teen, the thought that someone out there who looks like me, thinks like me, and was still considered beautiful and talented would have been a pretty good fantasy! This book feeds that fantasy, but it goes a step beyond it to meditate a bit on love and forgiveness. It may not be great literature, but it is worthwhile entertainment for its target audience.

"The Cookbook Collector"--Modern Jane Austen?

The Cookbook Collector was a title too good for this book collector pass up. In spite of the fact that I don't have a strong affinity for cookbooks or cooking, I love food and books, so it seemed like a natural. Add to that great reviews on NPR and in magazines that mentioned the similarities between Allegra Goodman's newest novel and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and I couldn't possibly resist!

Emily and Jessamine Bach are sisters living in Berkeley, California, and they are nothing alike. Emily is the "sense," and Jessamine is the "sensibility." Emily is a dot com executive during the Silicon bubble, and Jess is a tree-saving, philosophy-loving vegan who is also attracted to Jewish mysticism. Emily is engaged to Jonathan, a bookend match to her executive life, while Jess moves from relationship to relationship. While there are similarities to Austen's novel, this book only borrows a few structures. Goodman's story is her own.

Jess, pursuing yet another degree, works at an antiquarian bookstore. The owner, George, is doing everything in his power to win a collection of cookbooks from a mysterious seller. Emily is all responsibility, running her high-powered business, putting off her marriage until just the right moment, whenever that will be.

There are many things I like about this novel. For instance, there are many allusions to poetry. How many contemporary novelists allude to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? (Though I suppose the question could be asked, how many people care? Well, I do.) The cookbook collection itself is intriguing--I want to run my hand over the spines of these books and explore the color plates and tissue pages inside. And George, the bookstore owner, has a house I'm dying to tour.

In my last blog entry, I said that A Reliable Wife was like a classic gothic novel, HBO style. Well, The Cookbook Collector is Jane Austen, "Modern Family" style. Rather than love and lust repressed under 19th century maiden facades and respectability, the characters of the book move toward consummation long before any actual commitments have been made. After reading so much, well, sex in A Reliable Wife, and then moving on to this novel, where characters don't bother to leave the one they are living with to start up new liaisons, I'm ready for a book with less of a moral void. I could really use another Peace Like a River right now. But that's beside the point, sort of.

The rise and fall of the dot coms is an interesting enough subject, and 9/11 figures into the story as well, though not nearly as powerfully as in my recent read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In the end, Jessamine is my favorite character, and the portion of the book where she and George explore the cookbooks is the best. Still and all, I prefer the original--I'll stick with Jane Austen.