March Recap

Purchased Books:

Drawing for Designers by Alan Pipes

Drawing for Product Designers (Portfolio Skills: Product Design) by Kevin Henry- research/reference bought for Faculty Grant

 Publishing: A Writer's Memoir by Gail Godwin- Gift

 

Library Books for me:

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers

The high mountains of Portugal : a novel by Yann Martel

Ways to Disappear / Idra Novey. /by Novey, Idra, 

Pioneer girl : the annotated autobiography / Laura Ingalls Wilder ; Pamela Smith Hill, editor. /by Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867-1957.

The door / Magda Szabo ; [translated by] Len Rix ; [introduction by] Ali Smith. /by Szabó, Magda, 1917-2007, author. 

Library Books for Hiro:

 Owen Foote, super spy / by Stephanie Greene ; illustrated by Martha Weston. /by Weston, Martha ill.

 Dorko the magnificent / by Andrea Beaty. /by Beaty, Andrea.

Attack of the fluffy bunnies / written by Andrea Beaty ; illustrated by Dan Santat. /by Santat, Dan, ill.

 

Pax by Sara Pennypacker

This was my bedtime read aloud to Hiro for the month.  It had great excerpts of recommendation by Katherine Applegate of The One and Only Ivan fame.  And illustrated by I Want My Hat Back's Jon Klassen.  It’s a story about a boy and his pet Fox.  They are separated and the book goes back and fourth from the view point of the boy and the fox, which makes for an interesting format.

Hiro was not into it as much, the funny parts were not ha-ha funny but, “oh I get it,” amusing.  The author used the word loping, loped too much and it was a hard book to read aloud.  Not sure why, but the words were not easy to read out loud.

Another confusing part of the narrative was that there is a war on.  We are not sure what country the story takes place in, though because of the association with baseball, I am assuming it takes place in the US.  It is not clear if the story takes place in the far away past, or is it supposed to be the dystopic future.  These things are not clear because 50% of the book is told through the fox’s p.o.v., but the boy’s narration is not any better.  One great character that I as an adult gravitated to was Vola, the one legged ex-military EMT, with her marionettes.

If I had to rate this book I’d probably give it a 6/7 out of 10 

  

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers

We have a shop tech, Zach, at Pratt that is a reader, in that he is never without a book.  Lately he has been reading A Hologram for the King, and I tell him that I could never get through his first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- (which was given to be by a co-worker in 2000 when I left my job as a welder at a set building company to teach.) 

Zach lists off all the books by Eggers and tells me this one is a quick read, and that I should try reading him again- as he as greatly improved 16 years later .  

This novel, written in all dialogue between a kidnapper and his handful of kidnapped- an astronaut, congressman, ex teacher, even his mother is indeed a one day read.  It's good, but frustrating.  Similar to having conversations with the Verizon customer service agent, or the annoying injustice you feel while watching the news.  This shows how back-asswards living in the United states can be, and how one man tries to make sense of it all.  

Now I'm on to his semi-fictionalized biography of a Sudanese Lost Boy titled What is the What...just as frustratingly good.

Mid March

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel, was a book filled with small surprises.  He builds suspense little by little, but I did not necessarily know it as I read. The words were comforting to take in and so once I realized something odd was going on, he made me do a double take and I found myself chuckling to at how cleaver he was to have duped me.  You can almost hear him saying, "Wait, wait, wait for it..." before he exposes what is actually going on.
Martel makes lists of adjectives, lists of actions, lists of characteristics.
The way the protagonist walks,
The particularities of the artifact that Tomas is seeking,
The relationship between Agatha Christie and god,
The thread that exists between the three different stories,
without giving anything away.

There is some magic realism, and like the Life of Pi, the author wrestles with religion and god, and the mysteries of life.

However, the ending was a bit disappointing when I was left with the sudden appearance of a Rhinoceros.

Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey

Next I randomly picked up Ways to Disappear because I like the look of the cover with its cut out suitcase full of butterflies. The threads that exist from one book I read to the next are mysterious.  Going from the High Mountains of Portugal, I embark on a story of a Portuguese translator who is on a search for her Brazilian author, who has gone missing. 

From the first paragraph, I am on a hunt for the missing eccentric Brazilian. 

The tone of the book is odd though. 

Is this a romantic novel?

 Is it a Mystery? 

Is it supposed to be Campy?

Is it meant to be so bloody gruesome?

Is it all of the above, or not?

The book is written from many different character’s perspectives, with no quotation marks when people speak.  It goes from the Pittsburgh translator to the daughter of the Brazilian, to the gay publisher, back and fourth, so it takes a beat to get your mind into each chapter.  Once in a while the short chapters cut to an email sent by the boyfriend of the Pittsburgh translator or a DJ from Radio Globo.  Because of this last occasional interlude, it has the feeling of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs- without the snappy, cleaver dialogue.

This book also had an unsatisfying ending.  It ended abruptly.

When a book begins with a zaftig woman smoking a cigar, climbing a tree, exposing her fraying unsexy underwear, I expect a light comedy, but the blood and the gruesomeness of what happens to the characters is unexpected and unsettling.

February Recap

February Recap:

Purchased books: 

HarryPotter and the Deathly Hallows

(for Hiro- we have the hardbound copy but you can't carry it on the train with you, so we like to have a paper copy to cut in half to make it lighter...wasteful I know, but the kid wanted to finish the series...and unfortunately the Scholastic book order came after we finished the series, so now it sits unopened on the shelf until he rereads the whole series in a few years)

Library books for me:

The Story of the Lost Childby Elena Ferrante translated by Ann Goldstein

The Martian: a Novel by Andy Weir

Library books for Hiro:

Pax by Sara Pennypacker

The Sasquatch Escape

The Rain Dragon Rescue

The Fairy Swarm

The Griffin’s Riddle

The Order of the Unicorn

            By Suzanne Selfors illustrations by Dan Santat.

The Schnoz of Doom by Andrea Beaty illustrated by Dan Santat

 *******

I started and finished off the last of the Ferrante novel on the last leg of the trip home from the deathbed visit to my aunt.  It’s an undertaking to read about the entirety of one’s life from age six into their sixtys in one month but I can now cross that series off my list.  I felt a bit disappointed at the ending…and as I closed the book, thought… "Really?  This is how it’s going to end?”  I suppose it was a conclusion, though one I felt was a bit weak.  Lina still had the upper hand in the relationship and though never found, I know that she can return to torment at a later date if Ferrante decides to continue the series years from now.

I was in a quandary as to what to read next.  Even though I was sick of reading about the two women in Italy by the 4^th book, it was a place of comfort to have something to read without having to choose what to read.  I asked around once again on Facebook and got a list of similar themed books as the Ferrante.  But I wanted to leave that world…the world of Italian chick-lit. 

Fortunately, I binge watched movies on my 30 hour trip to and from Japan when I was not reading.  One of the standout entertainments was TheMartian with Matt Damon.  And extra fortunate was that it was a book first by Andy Weir.  So I checked it out as soon as the library opened the day after my return.  It’s a sci-fi book but steeped in math and science that is believable, most people would probably call this a guy book.  But it was so refreshing to read it right after the 4 Ferrante novels. 

I’ve been thinking about "boy books" and "girl books" lately since the online course I’ve been taking had us reading about  these labels.  Discussions about what topics are meant for boys vs. girls, and the stigma associated with labeling a book one way or another. Jon Scieszka has done wonders for the reluctant boy readers with his Guy's Read campaign.  We went to a book launch, signing last Halloween for the latest Guy's read publication.  There were 6-7 authors on stage reading from their short stories and I was happy to see that half of them were women.  The audience was also a mixture of girls and boys.  But, by labeling books,  Scieszka pigeonholes the boys into reading books about sports, war, battle, robots, etc... it would be great if we could find a better catchier term for "reluctant readers read" as an updated motto for his campaign, and find topics outside the stereotypical for these boys to read.  I wholly agree that librarians and teachers should call books by their topics such as a book about fashion or video games...instead of "boy" books and "girl" books.  But even in adult Novels, there is definitely a divide.  Harley read half a page and could not get through the Ferrante “girl” book.  The  Martian, “boy” book however I could see being appealing for both men and women alike…having a film made of the book starring Matt Damon doesn’t hurt a bit either

Unlike the previous series, I was enjoying this book so much that I refused to read it quickly, to savor it for as long as I could.  I began to read the newspaper and New Yorkers in between each chapter. 

What is so great about this book is that I can parallel some of the problems astronaut Mark Watney is going through on Mars with what my students are doing in class.  I know we are only making models of seating structures and templates for head sculptures and there is no threat of death with every obstacle, but the concepts of problem-solving are the same: identifying the problem, working through the problem, doing tests, having tenacity and follow-through, completing repetitive tasks to finally solve the problem.  In one passage where Watney is determining how to make his sleeping tent on mars:

Problem is (follow me closely here, the science is pretty complicated), if I cut a hole in the Hab, the air won’t stay inside anymore.  I’ll have to depressurize the Hab, cut chunks out, and put it back together (smaller).  I spent today figuring out the exact sizes and shapes of canvas I’ll need.  I need to not fuck this up, so I triple-checked everything.  I even made a model out of paper.

OK? This is what we are doing in class right now!  Making models out of paper to figure out what we need to build life size. I also enjoyed the smart ass, sarcastic tone of Watney’s speech, and found myself trying to emanating him in class. There is another part in the book where all the fancy modern navigation methods and computers just won’t work, so Watney fashions a jury-rigged sextant, a 16^th century tool to navigate on Mars.  Lesson to students: no matter what fancy computer programs and 3-D printing tools are available, unless you understand the concepts of the object you are designing, your project will be shit.  So one needs to understand the basics to be able to excel with the advanced technology available.

Since this book being a “boy” book, I tried to get Hiro interested in it as well, especially since at times Watney sounds like a smart ass tween boy.  And even though there is a lot of “shit”, “fuck”, etc, some of the parts were so great that I translated them for the PG ear and read Hiro passages out loud:

            The rover batteries have 18 Kilowatt-hours per sol. You know what?  “Kilowatt-hours per sol” is a pain in the butt (ass) to say.  I’m gonna invent a new scientific unit name.  One kilowatt-hour per son is…it can be anything…um…I stink (suck) at this I’ll call it a “pirate-ninja.” 

I need only three liters of water per sol, so my supply will last 206 sols.  There’s only 100 sols after I leave and before I’m picked up.  Conclusion: I don’t need the water reclaimer at all.  I’ll drink as needed and dump my waste outdoors.  Yeah, that’s right, Mars, I’m gonna pee (piss) and poop (shit) on you.  That’s what you get for trying to kill me all the time.  There. I saved myself 3.6 pirate-ninjas.

Other passages that a kid can relate to:

            The Hab is a shell of it’s former self.  I’ve robbed it of all critical components and a big chunk of it’s canvas.  I’ve looted that poor Hab for everything it could give me, and in return it’s kept me alive for a year and a half.  Its like the Giving Tree.

I really wish this book would come out with less profanity so kids could read it too, not just for the entertaining story but for the science. 

I was sad to finish it and asked Hiro, "Don't you hate finishing a really good book?"  

His reply:  "Yeah, I know, that's why I read series."

Anyway, now I have nothing to read besides the newspaper on my commutes and it’s depressing the hell out of me. I’ve requested a bunch of books from the library…I wish they would hurry up and get to me.

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.

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine....a week late.

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine 

Alexander McCall Smith

Checked out from the library.

 I have spent years with Precious Ramotswe, 16 years in fact.  I became enamored with her when I devoured her early books while pregnant.  When Hiro was born, I found two books written about Precious as a girl solving her first mysteries of the missing cupcakes. 

The most recent book I finished is the latest installment of the series written by Alexander McCall Smith.  This is the book I should have brought to Florida.

There are so many wandering ideas, tangents of images from one thought to the next humorously being uttered at the wrong moments.  In this installment, Mma Ramotswe is coerced by her co-detective Mma Makutsi to take a much needed vacation.  But she finds it is very difficult to leave her business and relax when so many people need her.   Oh how I wish sometimes my life were like the slow thoughtful existence of a life in a magical Botswana.

New Year On Reading

The stack of New Yorker magazines that fill my going out of town suitcase is always daunting.  How can I possibly read over 10 weeks of this magazine during a 6 day vacation is math I never do in my head.  Sitting in a cold house in Queens, I delude myself that somehow, time goes by much slower in Florida, and that I will be able to plow through 2 magazines a day while lying on the beach.  And just in case I finish the 10 plus back issues, I also pack a novel.  A nice long one. This trip it is Ragtime by Doctorow. I am delusional.

The second I hit the warm sand, the last thing I want to do is read about depression era NYC.  So I flip through the New Yorkers.  But this is also not satisfying.  

In retirement communities like this one, everywhere you go, there are stacks of books for the taking.  Most often they are Danielle Steel for women, and Scott Turow for the men.  Occasionally there will be children's books for Hiro in these amassings.  In the elevator lobby of our rented condo complex, there is such a take-one-leave-one library.  There are three Harry Potters for Hiro none he needs to finish out the series.  

 

I pick out two books. Nick Hornby's monthly articles for a magazine called Believer and the collected letters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Only in the sand strewn lobby of a Florida condo will you find these two books keeping company next to Danielle Steele and Agatha Christie.

And here I make my third New Years Resolution.  (First being eat less meat, second- to wear more fun necklaces) To read and record what I read.  In the same format as Nick Horrnby, I will record in list form what I buy, check out and then what I read.  And give some thoughts on them.
Happy New Year!