Girl Detective

Book 5 in my 15/15/15 project will be The Chocolate War, the young-adult classic by Robert Cormier, when I finish it…

Later: I’m now finished reading Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which I should have read as a young adult, and am glad now to have rectified that oversight.

Cormier was one of the avant garde in the young-adult fiction arena. He wrote complex, dark tales that featured young-adult protagonists. These books appealed to adults, but also to teens in search of more gritty fare than the boy adventures and girl romances that were the norm for the era. Reading Cormier again (here are my reviews of I Am the Cheese and All Fall Down), I’m reminded of how thin many modern YA books feel to me. The Chocolate War is short but dense, with complex characters and emotional shadings. The Newbery-Award winning When You Reach Me was very good, but didn’t mine nearly the depth that this YA classic did, in my opinion.

Jerry Renault is a freshman at a private Catholic day school in New England. He hopes to make the football team, and is struggling emotionally in the wake of his mother’s death from cancer. Archie Costello is the psychologically savvy leader of an underground group called The Vigils. Archie creates and assigns tasks to new recruits, and coordinates the actions of members as he likes. Brother Leon is the interim head of the school who buys 20,000 boxes of cut-rate chocolate for the school fund raiser and uses various means and methods to make sure it all sells. Leon and Archie are frightening characters; they’re smart and powerful. So when skinny little Renault protests, it’s clear bad things will happen. And they do, though not without the characters learning a great deal of unpleasant truth about one another.

Cormier skillfully creates and deftly characterizes an impressively large cast. The opening sentence sets the tone, and the author doesn’t flinch from it:

They murdered him.

He also places great trust and power in the reader. Not all questions are answered in the end, and while many conflicts come to a climax, few end neatly. This book brought to mind any number of other classics on the culture of secondary school, peer pressure, and the violence of crowds, not least of which was its homage to the myth of the death of Jesus. Powerful, sobering, provocative, The Chocolate War deeply impressed me.

What are you reading? Share your books and reviews in the comments.I’m not sure spring is the best time for this project–winter would probably be better for more indoor, inner-focus time. But I’ll plug away. I figured this would be an attempt, not a done deal.

The 4th in my 15/15/15 project is Mercury, a young adult graphic novel by Hope Larson.

I picked up Mercury as soon as I saw it in the comic shop last week. I’ve liked all three of Larson’s previous books, Grey Horses, Salamander Dream,and Chiggers. As do those books, Mercury has sympathetic and emotionally complex young girls, struggling with friendship and identity with a dash of magical realism thrown in.

In modern day Nova Scotia, Tara Fraser moves back the the town she and her family used to live in, before her parents split up and their house burnt down. She stays with her aunt and cousins and is returning to 10th grade, a few years after she left. The town, her burned-down home, and the school, are all both familiar and yet new to her.

Tara’s story alternates with that of her lookalike ancestor, Josey Fraser. Josey’s family lived in 1859 on the same farm, in the same house that burned down in Tara’s life. She’s a young teen when a handsome stranger named Asa Curry comes to their farm, claiming he’s looking for gold. Asa grows close to Josey, then he and Josey’s father find gold, all under the suspicious eyes of Josey’s mother. When things go bad, a series of events unfolds that echo mystically through the years to Tara’s time.

I really enjoyed seeing the parallels and contrasts in Josey and Tara’s life, as well as learning about some of the Scottish-Canadian historical myths of the region. Larson’s story and art easily capture the wide range of emotion in a teen’s life, from joy to anxiety, and it’s easy to sympathize with her characters as they try to make peace with their mothers and find love on their own. I enjoyed the magical realism, but could see how some might argue it’s not necessary. I think it gives an additional layer and a distinction to the story that made it stand out from other young-adult coming-of-age tales.

If you’re trying to finish 15 books in 15 days with me for the 15/15/15 project, put your book and link in the comments.

On day three, I didn’t pull it off. My third book finished WILL by Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. When I finish it, which I hope will be later today. Yesterday got a bit overstuffed. Review to come!

(In my defense, I am not finding this book as fast or fun a read as I had hoped.)

M at Mental Multivitamin had a very good idea, which is to finish 15 books over the 15 days that were in progress. She wondered whether I’d “allow” that or not. Sounds good to me.

I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss, and have to leave for the bus stop to pick up 6yo Drake in 15 minutes, so I’m going to do this quickly.

I wish Truss’ book had been more of a quick read. Her book on punctuation that exhorts “Sticklers unite!” was longer than it needed to be, e.g., 2 pages of acks + 4 pages of Foreward + 1 page Publisher’s Note + 11 pages of Preface + 34 pages of Introduction. That’s 52 pages before the book even begins! Had this book been more the size of Strunk and White’s , I would have preferred it.

She bewails the current state of punctuation ignorance, offers many examples, and then has a chapter on each major punctuation mark. There is a lot to like about the book. Truss has a good sense of humor, and I often laughed out loud. She’s done her research, much of which was fascinating, and some of which was news to me. In the end, though, I found she was sometimes preaching to the converted, because who else is going to read this book other than people who tend to be sticklers about punctuation? And while I could relate to some of her stickler-ism, at other times I wanted to back away from her slowly, as her crazy was just too much for me.

I’m going to change exactly none of my punctuation habits because of this book. I use punctuation the way I think is right, and in a way I hope conveys meaning as simply and unfussily as possible. Truss notes that much of punctuation is personal style and preference, and that writing is always in flux. Thus the main point of her book seems to be a rant against people who misuse apostrophes, and I think we’re all pretty much in agreement on that already, right?

If you’re reading along, at any pace, in the 15/15/15 project, visit when you’ve read and/or blogged the book, comment on the most recent 15/15/15 post, and include your link in the comment so others can see what you’re reading and what you think.

I’m going to try hard to reply to your comments, either in the comments, via email or at your blog, but probably can’t do them all. I _am_ however, reading them all.

And now, I’m off to read.

Want to share in the 15/15/15 reading project? I’m going to try to finish a book a day till April 30, then blog about it the next day. If you’re interested, share what you’re reading and a link to your blog post so everyone can check it out. Join late? No problem. Can’t finish a book a day? Also, no problem. It’s about the books.

My second book for this project was Nick Hornby’s Shakespeare Wrote for Money. I picked it up because of the title, but, leafing through, I became enamored enough to buy it. It’s the third and final collection of book columns Hornby (author of High Fidelity and About a Boy) wrote for the Believer magazine. He begins by listing the books he’s acquired that month, then the books he’s actually read. Sometimes there’s a high correlation between the two, sometimes there’s not, as for the month of the World Cup finals.

Hornby is a clever, funny, likable guy, and reading his columns was like having a good chat about books with a friend who has far-reaching interests. The critique credo of the Believer is to say nice things about works or nothing at all. He mentions books he’s read and didn’t like, but only names names when he has good things to say. The columns are from 2006 to 2008, and I liked this prescient comment in his take on The Blind Side by Michael Lewis:

There is even a cheesy, never-say-die heroine, Oher’s adopted mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy, whose extraordinary determination to look after a boy not her own is Christian in the sense too rarely associated with the American South. It would make a great movie, althought you’d need a lot of CGI to convince an audience of Michael Oher’s speed and size.

Other than predicting the popular success of the movie based on Lewis’ book and perhaps even Sandra Bullock’s Oscar, Hornby had another connection to a Best Picture contender this year; he wrote the screenplay for An Education, which he seems to hint at in one of the later essays.

One of my favorite parts of these essays was when he “discovered” young-adult fiction after he wrote a book for young adults. He was nicely abashed at all the good books he hadn’t known existed, and now championed:

I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of.

I would definitely read the previous collections of this column, and am sad that it’s no longer going on. At least I got to be in on the end, however belatedly.

Finished on Friday, blogging for Saturday 4/16, this is the first of 15 books I hope to read over the next 15 days, or 15/15/15 for short. Post a comment on what you read, and a link if you have it.

Hailed by many as one of the best books of last year (Publishers Weekly, TIME, New Statesman, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and The Economist), Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, had a long wait at the library. I was surprised when it didn’t make the short list for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. Having read it, I suspect it was excluded because it was tonally similar to one of the other contenders, Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged Everything Burned, which I read and admired, though can’t say I enjoyed. I feel similarly about this book.

Mueenuddin has written a collection of slightly linked short stories, each connecting in some way to the Harouni family in Pakistan. The stories focus on a wide range of characters: the wealthy Harounis, friends of theirs, servants of theirs, and others. Without exception the stories are beautifully written, with evocative language and complex characters.

That winter she had been in London for a wedding, not a close friend but the wedding of the season, the daughter of some bureaucrat who made a crooked pile on the privatization of a steel mill and couldn’t return to Pakistan because of cases against him in the National Accounyability Bureau–”nabbed,” as they called it, almost a mark of distinction. Late at night, after the mehndi, riding through London in someone’s hilarious car, she’d been in a bad accident. She woke at down in the hospital, severely concussed, and watched a rare snowfall from her bed, a thin drift on the sill, perceptibly gathering as the large flakes settled out of the gray first light and pressed against the window. She couldn’t remember anything at first, where she was, why she was there, sleeping all through the day, until it began to come back, but changed, the experiences of another person.

Also without exception, they are filled with tragedy and human cruelty, often with corruption mixed in as well. Any story that begins happily will take a turn. Most often, the turn occurs when one person acts wrongly toward another. The stories are an intricate portrait of a country in transition from feudalism to modernism. The growing pains are wrenching. I appreciate having read about Pakistan and spent some time in the minds of others, but am glad to be finished with the book. The wonders of the title are all too fleeting in the lives of the book’s characters.

ETA: If you don’t already, visit today’s Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon, a wonderful gathering of readers.

OK, my attempt at 15 books in 15 days starts today. I will read a book, then blog about it tomorrow.

FULL RAMBLING DISCLOSURE: My husband G. Grod and friend Blogenheimer thought it was lame and kind of cheating if any of my 15 were going to be graphic novels. SOME of my 15 are going to be GNs that I have had sitting about for a while. BUT I’ll try to read 7 or fewer GNs, and 8 or more “real” books (which can include YA and longer kid chapter books, heck whatever, who’s the police on this? Well, apparently it’s G. Grod and Blogenheimer. Who don’t seem to want to participate, just critique. Sigh. )

My attempt to read 15 books in 15 days and review them in 15 blog posts begins tomorrow, since you may have had to spend today wrangling with your taxes. How serious am I about this? I turned down a friend’s offer of Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

Tomorrow, Friday April 16, 2010: read a book

Saturday, April 17, 2010: blog about it, then come here to the entry for the day and post your link in the comments.

Lather, rinse, repeat for the next 15 days, finishing last book on 4/30, blogging about it on 5/1.

Fresh baby radishes from Wisconsin. I separated the greens, washed them and put them away. Sliced the radishes, put them on a cracker with a schmear of sweet cream butter, then sprinkled with sea salt. Next day, sauteed the greens in an egg scramble.

I loved Darwyn Cooke’s art and storytelling on DC: The New Frontier, volumes 1 and 2. In the back pages of the excellent comic-book series Criminal, I’ve noted Ed Brubaker’s regular recommendations of the Parker novels by Richard Stark, a pseudonym of the prolific Donald Westlake. So when Cooke’s adaptation of the first Parker novel, Richard Stark’s Parker: the Hunter, was published, I wanted to give it a shot.

With shaded pencils and minimal color, Cooke combines Stark’s words with his own distinctive art to create a great new story. The book was less of a whodunnit than about how Parker, a hulking, double-crossed bad ass, is going to take his revenge.

The night air was crisp. Parker was suddenly famished. He headed for his hotel, a hot shower, and a thick steak.

This is classic noir. There’s violence, and unflattering portrayals of women. As with the show Mad Men, I took this as a snapshot of a particular time and could enjoy the book on its retro merits, though some might not be able to.

Westlake died recently, and while his Parker books have been adapted before, most notably in Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as “Walker” and the less successful remake Payback with Mel Gibson as “Porter”, Cooke’s is the only one he allowed to use the Parker name.

Winner of the 2010 Newbery Award, Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me pays tribute to the 1963 Newbery winner, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Like Miranda, the narrator of When You Reach Me, it was one of my favorite books as a girl, and I read it over and over. If you loved L’Engle’s book, you’re likely to enjoy Stead’s.

In 1979 New York City, Miranda is in sixth grade, and discovers pain in friendship when her best friend Sal no longer wants to spend time with her. She befriends another girl, Annemarie, who’s just gotten “dumped” by her best friend, Julia. And she strikes up a tentative friendship with Marcus, who she thought was a bully but now isn’t so sure. Things are further complicated when she starts receiving peculiar notes that contain facts no one should know.

I check the box under my bed, which is where I’ve kept your notes these past few months. There it is, in your tiny handwriting: April 27th Studio TV-15, the words all jerky-looking, like you wrote them on the subway. Your last proof.

I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you’re gone and there’s no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It’s all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

Miranda is surrounded by a nice cast of characters. There’s another new friend, Colin, a smartass, Miranda’s single mom, mom’s boyfriend Richard (or “Mr. Perfect”), Jimmy the deli guy, the crazy guy on the corner, a dentist, Wheelie, and more. Many YA novels have small character lists, or caricatures instead of characters, but Stead manages her cast nicely.

Miranda’s struggles, in friendship and to unravel the mystery of the notes, are engaging and the former is quite believable. I raced through to the end because I didn’t want to wait to see what happened. This is a good read with some depth to it. Recommended.

As part of our pre-long-car-trip buying frenzy, I got Ice Age, since the boys have watched and loved Ice Age 3 several times, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown once, but never the original. Then I forgot to take it on the trip. So on a recent dad-night-out, I made popcorn and snuggled down with the boys to watch it.

Like its sequels, they loved it, especially the action sequences. A mammoth, a sloth, and a saber-tooth tiger reluctantly team up to return a baby to its human tribe, with some wrinkles along the way. There are a few sad moments that aren’t spelled out that my kids didn’t get. Nearing the end, my 6yo exclaimed, “There are only 10 more minutes. When’s the mother coming back?”

“Sorry, honey,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.” He returned to the movie, though, and didn’t ask why. There was also a wordless scene in the middle that told the mammoth’s tragic backstory, but when I asked the boys what had happened, they couldn’t tell me. Probably for the best, for now.

This was decent for me, and great fun for them. Definitely a good family DVD.

At The American Prospect, (link from The Morning News) a celebration of female nerds* on television:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=rise_of_the_female_nerds

*correctly classified as nerds, not geeks, according to this classification, since they’re socially inept

I respect Grant Morrison’s work. But I don’t always get it. I’m fairly certain the deficiency is me, as I’ve read about the zillion obscure-to-me referents he used for whichever book I didn’t care for or understand, like his All-Star Superman. So I approached his take on Batman and Robin, Batman Reborn with trepidation.

From moment one, I was in the driver’s seat, first in the bad guys’ car, then in a Bat vehicle. Morrison tags between these two scenes, and quickly situates us in the Bat-universe:

Robin: I told you it would work. All I had to do was adapt my father’s blueprints.

Batman: I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Damian…

Robin: “Never use real names in the field.” Your words.

Batman: You’re paying attention. Good. You know, I’d have killed for a flying batmobile when I was Robin.

A few pages later, we learn which former Robin is the new Batman, because apparently Bruce Wayne is dead.

I have a passing familiarity with the Bat-universe. I knew who Damian was, and guessed who Batman was, before Alfred confirmed it, though I don’t know who all the Robins have been. This reboot, then, is not only for regular readers of the monthly Bat titles, but also for casual fans of the Bat. It’s quite good, and in the Morrison/Quitely tradition, often gruesome.

There are villains aplenty, like Pyg and the Flamingo, and a new antihero, the Red Hood. The first trade paperback collects issues 1 to 6, but doesn’t resolve everything. Even if you bought the individual issues, the collected edition is a good investment to avoid the ugly, intrusive ads. I look forward to the rest of the series; so far it’s a wild ride.

Reposting with its own entry:

I want to read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle this summer. Quicksilver, The Confusion and System of the World are about 900 pages each.

With an average of 20 pages a day, we could get through the first two. With thirty pages a day, we’d get through them all from June to August. But 30 pp a day plus other reading is a big commitment, I know.

I had a great time reading Infinite Jest with a group last summer, and enjoyed the accomplishment of tackling such a big project. But that was only 74 pp a week plus footnotes, not 210, so it’s a big difference, though my husband G. Grod assures me the BC is a much faster read than IJ (unsurprising, right?)

What do you think?

Reposting with its own entry:

In honor of the woman profiled in the New York Times last year, who read a book a day for a year and blogged each one, I propose reading a book a day from your shelf starting Friday, April 16 (the day after US taxes are due, so you should have a little more time plus be in a frugal mindset) till April 30, 2010 and blogging a review, however brief, the next day, starting Saturday, the 17th.

I would post my entries the night before, so you could link each day starting the 17th in the comments, through May 1, 2010.

Does this sound good to anyone?

I’m afraid coming up with a logo, spreading the word far and wide, and setting up a group on a site like Good Reads is just too much for me, now, though I’m happy to take advice or help on these from more seasoned book challenge folks.

Via The Morning News, two articles about the dangers of faking it.

One, purchasing knockoff brands increases lying.

Two, Botox interferes with facial expressions, and can make a person slower to empathize, thus alienating others. (Hello, Oprah. Isn’t your empire founded on empathy?)

In the wake of my book-feeding frenzy for the Tournament of Books, I decided to catch up on comic books. While I’ve shifted from buying monthly title to buying collected graphic novels for most books, there are a few I won’t wait for, and Ed Brubaker’s noir and pulp series like Incognito and Criminal are among them. Not only are they on high quality paper with strong art from Sean Phillips, but there are no intrusive ads, there’s an informative author page in the back, and a noir/pulp related article. Neither of the latter are in the collections; Brubaker calls them the canvas goodie bag reward for those of us who buy the single issues, and I’m happy to do so. The quality of the story, art, and back matter is of the highest in comics.

During a break from the ongoing series Criminal, Brubaker and Phillips launched Incognito, about an unhappy guy in witness protection. The twist is he was a super villain, and got his powers taken away and witness protection for giving evidence against his former boss, The Black Death. In a nod to The Matrix, his fake last name is Anderson. In a nod to indie-comics great Harvey Pekar, he’s an angry file clerk. The topsy turvy ethics of the book, along with its dark humor, make it fast, bumpy, enjoyable ride. A sequel series is due this summer, 2010.

After Incognito, Brubaker and Phillips returned to the world of their Criminal series with “The Sinners“, and returning character Tracy Lawless. Tracy’s a killer, but only of those who deserve it. This is a slippery place to be, and Tracy doesn’t exactly finesse it. He’s having an affair with the boss’s wife, can’t figure out who is killing the boss’s peers, and has a guy from his past on his tail trying to drag him back where he came from. Things don’t end pretty, but there’s a lot to satisfy in this story. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Tracy again, at least for a while, but I was glad to consume this story in one fell swoop, having bought the issues but not read them till now, when the story was complete.

These are for fans of noir, pulp, crime, and comics. Violent and dark, they’re not for everybody. But if you like what Brubaker and Phillips do, you’re going to like most of what they do, so check them out, if any of this sounds like a good thing to you.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time defending Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s cheaply made, sexist, homophobic, and rude. It has a preposterous ending. Yet I enjoyed it anyway. The key was to go in with low expectations; that way, they were all exceeded. This is like the 20 year class reunion of the 80’s, where Grosse Point Blank was the 10 year.

Choosing John Cusack as the lead was key. He made his bread and butter on the 80’s teen flicks this movie both lampoons and celebrates, such as Better Off Dead, 16 Candles, The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Stand by Me, and most famously, Say Anything where he became the go-to everyman heartthrob, Lloyd Dobler, for a generation. (I recommend all the previous films. He was in tons of others, like Class, Grandview USA and One Crazy Summer, that sucked.) That Cusack plays a washed-up guy whose best days were in the 80’s is a nice use of deliberate irony, or art imitating life.

His buddies are Craig Thompson, Darryl from The Office, and Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show. Clark Duke plays his nephew, and is a chubbier, dweebier basket of Michael Cera mannerisms; the two collaborated on a web site comedy series, Clark and Michael. Thompson is especially hilarious in the dry, quietly reactive style of The Office.

Don’t go if you’re easily offended, or if you don’t have nostalgia for the 80’s. But if kooky cameos by 80’s faces like Chevy Chase, Crispin Glover, and the mean kid from Karate Kid make you smile, then lower your expectations and go for it.

I committed to reading Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife because my friend Amy was reading it for an online discussion at In Our Study, and because I was CERTAIN I’d be done reading the Morning News Tournament of Books books. That was before I faced down Wolf Hall, however. Thus I found myself reading Anne Frank:tBtLtA alongside Wolf Hall as March rolled into April.

AF: tBtLtA pulled me in quickly and drew me through, hardly what I expected of a book of literary analysis. I have fond memories of reading Anne’s diary when I was a girl. But the last time I remember reading the book was in 5th grade for a book report; I’d have been 10 or 11. I had read it at least once before. Its details were vague until I started reading Prose. Her careful reading of the book and thorough research into its history immediately brought back many particulars.

The myth of Anne, begun with the publication of her diary and fueled by a later play and film, is that she was a girl like any other, writing in her diary while hiding in an attic from Nazis in WWII Holland. The group was caught by the Nazis, sent to camps, and all but Anne’s father died. Most teaching plans for the book focus on Anne as a typical teenager in a unique situation. They don’t usually deal with her intelligence, her skills as a writer. They don’t often study the reason she was in the attic, and how racism and genocide are alive in today’s world.

Prose has immense respect for Anne, not only as a person who was killed in the Holocaust, but as a writer and skilled editor of her own work. Anne’s diary, we know, survived. But what most don’t know, and Prose tells carefully and compellingly, is that Anne’s diary isn’t one simple thing. Near the end of their time in the attic, she heard a broadcast by an exiled politician urging Dutch families to document their experience in war, so others would learn of it afterward. Anne started then to edit her diary in longhand on loose sheets of paper. Both the diary and the loose sheets survived, and her father edited them using mostly the revised version, with some original entries added back in, and some passages about Anne’s tempestuous relationship with her mother removed. (Extensive handwriting analysis has proved that Anne was the author of the documents, her father only an editor.) So there are really three versions of Anne’s “diary”: the original diary, the revised diary, and the edited compilation know to most people.

Prose divides her book into four sections. The Life deals with the historical details of Anne’s life. The Book is about her father’s struggle to find a publisher for the book. The Afterlife is largely about the play and movie based on the book, and the critical problems they raise: that Anne is presented as a silly, flighty girl characterized by hope, and that her Jewishness, and thus the reason for their internment in the attic and later deaths, is largely effaced. A segment on teaching the book in schools ends the book.

I recommend this book highly to anyone who ever read Anne’s book, and even for those who haven’t. I plan to watch the PBS production of Anne Frank this weekend, and hope it presents a more nuanced, complex and Jewish heroine than have previous adaptations of the diary. Prepared by Prose’s excellent book, I also very much look forward to reading a version of the diary again, which will be done by the group at In Our Study.