January recap

Books I bought:

·      Mansion ofHappiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore (recommended by Christine Lorenz)

·      A Rainbow in the Desert: An Anthology of Early Twentieth Century Japanese Children’s Literature translated by Yukie Ohta (Sherri Machlin introduced me to Yukie Ohta)

·      Storytimes for Everyone!:Developing Young Children’s Language & Literacy by Saroj Nadkarni Ghoting (required text for my final class at QC)

·      Real-World Teen Services by Jennifer Velasquez (same as above)

·      It Came From Ohio!: My Life as a Writer (for Hiro’s research on his topic at school-he’s doing a research paper on Goosebumps books)

·      Drawing Stories from Around the World and a Sampling of European Handkerchief Stories by Anne Pellowski (book mentioned by someone from the storytell listserv)

Books I checked out from the library:

·      My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

·      The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

·      Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

·      The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

·      Low-carb vegetarian cooking (one of many cookbooks for my other new year resolution)

·      Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore

Books checked out for Hiro from the Library:

·      Zeus and the Thunderbolt of Doom by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams (recommended by BPL librarian)

·      Human Body Theater: a Nonfiction revue by Maris Wicks

·      Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe

·      You Might be a Zombie and Other Bad News Shocking But Utterly True Facts by Cracked Corn

·      The de-textbook: The Stuff You Didn’t Know About the Stuff You thought You Knew by Cracked

·      What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall  Munroe

Books picked up for free from random places:

·      Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley

·      The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Often when a Facebook friend makes an inquiry to the social media world for reading recommendations, I take notes.  Not that I need more to read, but because I have an irrational fear of running out of reading material.  I lie to myself and say… “sure I have time….especially on the commutes to school next week”.   Ha! Right!  Keep dreaming!

But that’s how I found the Elena Ferrante novels.  Hey even James Franco is a fan! 

I put my name on the request list back in June and waited patiently.  Even with 50 copies in the Queens library, 97 copies in the Brooklyn library, and 179 copies in the NYPL, it took over 6 months to get my hands on the book. 

My Brilliant Friend. Book One, Childhood, Adolescence, is the first book in a series of four books to date, featuring characters that any psychoanalyst would have a field day with.  The seemingly typical childhood friendship at the center of Ferrante’s narrative progresses to become the most enabling, passive aggressive relationship ever imagined between two girls. By the end of book 1 I couldn’t stand Lina, and by the end of book two I hated her, and by the end of book 3, I saw in her, every person I have ever despised in my life, and yet I keep reading.  The fourth and final book is on my to read pile.

Ferrante and Goldstein (rock star status translator) painted a picture in my minds eye of every Fellini film I’ve watched, and I could also feel the brutality of the Italy that the boy from Cinema Paradiso existed in.  Where a wrong word spoken would immediately get you a smack in the face by your mother.  I saw the blood and bruises as thought watching a black and white film every time a fist or stick was swung in honor of some girl’s virtue.

The book is translated from Italian.  Just like watching foreign films where I have to follow along through subtitles, I was very conscious that I was missing out on a lot of cultural inside jokes and knew I was misunderstanding a lot of what I was reading.  There are a lot of things I realized I have no idea about Neapolitan culture.

So after finishing the first book, I promptly watched Fellini’s Amarcord to satisfy the missing visuals in my head. Then I was at a standstill waiting for the second book to become available from the library.  Fortunately, the second book is not in demand as much as the first, so it came halfway through January.

But there was still the conundrum of What to read next.

You cannot begin a book in sunny Florida then continue reading the same book in a cold 30 deg new york city.  So two books half read and abandoned, Nick Hornby and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s letters, as I instead tried to catch up on the New Yorkers and NY Times.  

I also re-picked up Jill Laphor’s book on the game of Life. It reads like a timeline of human existence, as though you were playing the game of Life.  An Ohio State friend recommended the book after I posted a rant on Facebook of us playing the Milton Bradley game of Life and how the game needs to be less commercialized. It’s the only game where you can lose after getting two Nobel prizes , swimming the English Channel twice and curing the common cold.  It took a while to get into since there is so much interesting information and she is such a great writer.  Every page has tons of footnotes, each wanting research on different tangent topics.  But it’s also frustrating to read because I recognize thoughts I once knew and had forgotten about, and there is still so much more I would like to learn about… After getting through the first two chapters, I ended up buying the book so that I can begin marking up the marginalia.  So it is no longer a pleasurable book but rather an academic text.

I also got caught up on the reading list for Hiro.  Not to brag…but Hiro is now reading at a reading level of T/U…ok, I’m bragging a little bit.  However it is really difficult to find books that a 7 year old with a reading level of a 5^th or 6^th grader.  The topics that he can relate to is hard to find.  He is not interested in dating yet for example.  And some books at that reading level are just not appropriate for a seven year old.  For example: Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is not appropriate for a 2^nd grader.  Hiro’s teacher was really trying to help, when she ordered the book from Scholastic and put it in his book bag.  She knew from the cover that Alexie’s book is an award winning book.  After I read it, I also agree that it is an important book to be read, but it is a book for middle school or high school students.  It has every curse word imaginable, child abuse, drug use, masturbation…the works. So since the “Sherman Alexie Incident” I vet all of Hiro’s books. Thus the list from the library. 

I thought he needs to read something more than what Sara calls “dessert” books.  Big Nate, Bad Kitty, etc…So I looked for good non-fiction books and came upon a slew of them that reads like Ripley’s Believe it or Not!...Unfortunately, the ones published by Cracked is funny but written by a smart ass and not appropriate for 2^nd graders.  The books by Randall Munroe are great but they are not books to be read cover to cover and definitely too dense to carry with you on the school bus.  Human Body Theater: a Nonfiction revue by Maris Wicks, was devoured by Hiro in one sitting, while out to dinner at LaFlor.  The book is nonfiction and written in a graphic novel style which was easy to read.  However, my son informed me that it’s technically NOT non-fiction since skeletons (the narrator) cannot technically sing, dance and talk.  He’s right.

Back in Naples…

I read the second and third books in the Neapolitan series, about the dysfunctional friendship between Lina and Elena very quickly.  By the middle of the second book, I was totally disgusted with the brilliant Elena for not cutting off Lina but it became an undertaking that I had to finish. 

Then while in the midst of a paragraph on Lenu hearing of her friends from the old neighborhood, I received a call from my mother about my “old neighborhood” and got disturbing news about an aunt in Japan- my aunt, the one who is also born monkey year, the aunt who helped my mother bring me up when I was little, is dying. According to the family gossip, she is near death, she has had cancer for over a year and has spread, and how no one but her immediate family knew about it.  My mother is not quite sure who to believe, since this is all hearsay and no one has spoken to an actual doctor.  Japan has a weird relationship with illness and disabilities.  They hide it from the public, and are ashamed.  Sometimes the doctors don’t tell the sick person the truth about their condition and prefer the family to keep it a secret.  How fucked up is that? 

So now I am seeing the Ferrante novels in a new light.  It’s about how one escapes from their old neighborhood, it’s customs and cultures.  Elena knows that her childhood friends have always fought, and now it is more brutal than when she was a child.  It’s about how she escaped the baseness of her family and become educated, living a more comfortable life, with less violence. 

…and I think of my "old" neighborhood in the countryside of Japan, where the old people speak in a dialect so thick that they are hard to understand. and how I'm glad that I've escaped it.  It's funny that the world thinks of Japan as a evolved place, technologically advanced and the customs genteel, but there are still the old inaka type places that still work in a backward way.

There is a word in Japanese: Furusato- which translates to one’s home town, or native village.  But it also has a feeling of nostalgia, and a mystical place that does not exist, someplace of the past.  It has a melancholy feeling to it.  I see Elena’s Naples equal to my Inaka- the countryside of Japan that has no name.

I just checked out the fourth and final book and plan to read it next weekend on my last minute trip to Japan to visit my dying aunt.