As a young girl I read everything I could get my hands on (sound familiar?) and read at the speed of lightning (again, any surprises there?).  In my opinion reading begets reading.  It’s The Neverending Story come to life – as soon as you finish one there is another hovering in the wings.  You don’t want to stop, you might missing the next adventure.  This is also the place in my life where reading became how I made sense of the world.  When you are a young adult, navigating the confusing new currents of adolescence, processing the end of childhood and the anticipating the looming seriousness of the world of adults, fantasy has special something to offer.  At a time when you feel most impotent and insignificant, confused and lost, stories of seemingly ordinary kids doing extraordinary things is a welcome escape.  Who can forget poor Wart, who doesn’t even know that underneath all those skinny limbs and dirty clothes he’s a KING!  It doesn’t get any better.

There are so many authors that stick out in my mind from that era.  Natalie Babbitt, Susan Cooper, Lois Lowry to name just a few.  Good young adult lit is written today, but forgive me if I wax nostalgic about the ones from my own.  So it was with great pleasure that I discovered new books by two of these steadfast writers.  The Flint Heart by Katherine and John Paterson (of Bridge to Terabithia fame) and Waiting for the Magic by Patricia MacLachlan (author of Sara Plain and Tall).

I can’t remember when I read Bridge to Terabithia but I distinctly remember it was one of the major stories in my childhood that directly dealt with death.  I have the same foggy notion of Sara Plain and Tall – a more distinct picture of Glenn Close comes to mind.   Neither of these books had the staying power of say, Tuck Everlasting, which I will remember clearly for my lifetime, but they are part of the swirling background of my youthful reading.  They helped set the stage for the reader I am today. 

That reader is the one who meanders through the YA section of the bookstore, despite being a 30 something mom.  The one with whom the bookstore owner jokes, when confronted with these titles, plus a nonfiction book about the Romantic poets, and a monster story in the same pile  “I see these books are for a diverse audience”  (nope all for me!).  The one who sits down and reads each of these books in a short afternoon respite while her child is napping.  But first and foremost, the reader who lets it all go and enjoys the magic for a short time, since magic in the real world seems so lacking.

Magic is of course the theme of both these stories.  The Flint Heart is the more obvious fairy tale (it’s in the subtitle after all) with many endearing pixie characters and a classical magical plot.  Waiting for the Magic however, is more subtle.  From my very cursory research, it appears that Ms. MacLachlan’s later books are proving to be more fantastical.  This is interesting, since Sara Plain and Tall, like its titular character, is nothing if not pragmatic and no-nonsense.  She should keep at it though, since it’s a genre she clearly flourishes in.  This book in particular stole my heart, mostly because the mother in the story, upon the departure of her husband, goes down to an animal shelter and adopts four dogs and a cat for her bereft children (and clearly, as a salve for her own sense of loss).  What’s not to love?  With magic and dogs, you can’t lose in my opinion.

Not only does a good fantasy story enliven the tedium of real life, it’s heartening to know that the authors so beloved in my youth are still going strong.  It leaves me hopeful that my daughter will have great reading experiences with them too.  Moreover, if they are still around and writing, it means I can pretend that I am still young.  Because surely none of us has really aged?  Not with all that magic flying around.

Two reasons: 

A) According to the Wall St. Journal, publishers, book sellers, movie producers, marketing gurus everywhere, and (not incidentally) readers, all think that The Night Circus will be the next  Harry Potter!

and

B) I’ve read 49 pages of  Night Circus.  It’s not Harry Potter.

Hold up, wait a minute (put a little boom in it. . .).  This is not a bad thing.  Or a good thing.  It’s just, well, a different thing. 

My baby daughter has a book called You’re All My Favorites, about three bear cubs whose parents tell them they are “the most wonderful bear cubs in the whole world.”  But the cubs are smart and they doubt this assertion.  How do their parents know?  And moreover, how is it that amongst the three of them there isn’t a favorite?  Some are big, some are little, some have patches, some don’t, two are boys and one is a girl.  They are so different, how can their parents not like one of them better?  Because there is a most wonderful first baby bear, a most wonderful second baby bear and a most wonderful third baby bear, their parents say.  Where am I going with this?  Bear with me (har har).

Harry Potter is a first baby bear. He has wizards and wands and orphans (oh my!).  But does every fantasy story henceforth need be second or third (or fourth) baby bear?  What if they have wizards but no wands?  Or orphans but not wizards?  Or no wizards or orphans at all but just a boy with a scar?  Or (egads) vampires?  The answer, of course, is NO, they do not all have to be baby bears in competition.  Therein lies my first point.  The Night Circus doesn’t HAVE to be the next Harry Potter.  It can just the first Night Circus.  This is not bad.  This may or may not be good (I cannot judge at only 49 pages in).  Which brings me to my second point.  This book may or may not compare favorably to Harry Potter.  But we should never burden an author with such expectations to begin with. 

So far, in my albeit humble introduction, I do not see any similarities between these two stories – besides the obvious.  Except that word I’m beginning to dread – genre.  It’s about wizards and magic, yes.  But when you think about it, such stories have been around since the dawn of humankind.  Sometimes it’s a summer blockbuster movie and sometimes we even call it religion.  In the beginning there was the word and the word was magic. 

So as much as I admire and love Ms. Rowling, she didn’t invent wizards and wandlore anymore than Ms. Meyer invented vampires and brainless teenage girls.  Which is a good thing, because it means no one owns the patent.  We’re all allowed to use the blueprints.  We can build whole cities of our imaginations without copying anyone.  We don’t have to fight for Momma and Papa bear’s attention.  We can all be the favorite.

**NOTE I didn’t even tag Harry Potter in this post.  I mean it, leave the poor woman alone.

Well-intentioned English teachers have for years tried to assign books to their students that they can relate to, which unfortunately leads to books like Catcher, in all its sober and painful adult reflection, getting forced on kids simply because they are about kids. If I had to name my least favorite assignment books growing up, the ones about children may top the list (“Romeo and Juliet,” The Red Badge of Courage, Huckleberry Finn). When I was in school, my favorite assigned books were things like The Iliad because I liked to read about Ajax mowing down Trojans with a giant tree, or 1984 because it seemed to “get” the growing mistrust of systems that had started to take root in my 7th Grade mind. Kids have simple lives, fixed around the poles of school and home and weekends; kids have problems — extraordinary problems — to be sure, but the pleasures and pains of childhood revolve more around needs and wants being met (or not) and fun being had (or not). Kids haven’t yet started to map their vast interior lives the way we adults obsessively do. I think more about my goals and character flaws and life-track setbacks while in the shower any given morning than I ever did between Grades 1 and 12.

This isn’t to say that those interior lives aren’t there; a child may feel what Holden feels but most likely hasn’t thought about those feelings the way Salinger does in the book. And if a child’s thoughts are primarily occupied with what to practically do with their time in any given moment, it seems a lot to expect them to take a break and ruminate on their life direction and society’s dishonesty and false promises, especially when they have to get to football practice.

All of that is a really odd way to lead off a post on one of the most touching and lasting books I’ve ever read, but there you go, and that’s partly my point. Though no kid will ever find a mundane tale of school remotely interesting (even with the tags “dropping out of” and “rejecting social mores of”), as an adult looking back on that time with the acquired skill of introspection, Catcher dawns heartbreaking understanding on whomever is receptive enough to its characters. As an adult, one sees that the first two thirds of the book (which are about and in reaction to school) is Salinger’s necessary set-up to the wallop of payoff in the final bit, which is instead about the small decisions we make that turn our lives into what they are by the time we arrive at them, without our conscious notice. Mr. Antolini — the teacher whom Holden reaches out to in the middle of the night for a place to stay — drunkenly, ineloquently tries to sum this up for him and for us:

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind. . . . It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don’t know. But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?”

The scene could be read as Mr. Antolini encouraging Holden to go back to school because, of course, that’s exactly what he’s doing — the text of his words is about the benefits of education. But a second reading shows that he’s not speaking to Holden the schoolboy; he’s addressing all of his comments to the man Holden will be one day:

“The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

He’s saying that a focus on the immaterial, arguably irrelevant nettles in life is not just a distraction from what matters but a fatal one, a message that’s still true despite the vague pass he makes at Holden a few paragraphs later that possibly undermines it in the teenager’s mind. And in speaking to the falling man, Mr. Antolini gives Holden insight he can’t possibly understand until the moment when he realizes he’s falling. So, reading this at the age when one could be throwing paper clips at stenographers punches hard. Certainly, 30 is not too late to make a change, to make your life about its meaningful parts rather than struggling to define its outlines and architecture (and inevitably failing to find pleasure in that).

To double back a bit, Holden’s reunion with his little sister Phoebe in the prior chapter gives us one of these meaningful parts (one of Holden’s, anyway), and I think it’s safe to say that Phoebe is one of the main reasons the book has such lasting appeal. It’s hard not to tear up when, after all of Holden’s horribly isolated steps through the story thus far, he steps into her room and:

She wakes up very easily. I mean you don’t have to yell at her or anything. All you have to do, practically, is sit down on the bed and say, “Wake up, Phoeb,” and bingo, she’s awake.

“Holden!” she said right away. She put her arms around my neck and all. She’s very affectionate. I mean she’s quite affectionate, for a child. Sometimes she’s even too affectionate. I sort of gave her a kiss, and she said, “Whenja get home?’ She was glad as hell to see me. You could tell.

Giving Holden something so important and then watching him leave it behind at the end is brutal. This makes Phoebe’s last-minute return so relieving, as she stubbornly, resolutely drags her suitcase along to the museum in a heroic attempt to secure her brother with the kind of undeterred nobility only young children have.

Since Holden’s story is about missing the significance of important early steps, maybe it’s fitting that for many of us, the book itself is lost to the mists of childhood schoolwork. But at least it lasts. When Salinger died last year, many personal recollections centered on the book’s final moment: Holden happy in the rain, watching Phoebe going around and around on that carousel. We may have forgotten why it matters, but we’ve never, ever forgotten it.

Aprilynne Pike has her own version of this, but hers is about fairies.  This would be a hard sell if not for her ingenious vision of fairies – they are actually plants, not little flying humanoids like Tinkerbell.  They are human sized, they have human habits and they are - male and female – exceptionally beautiful.  Sounds like a winner for sure. 

There are some obvious parallels between Ms. Pike’s books and the Twilight series, which is to say that all teenage romances are the same formula – girl meets boy and likes boy a lot, girl meets other boy and also likes him a lot.  Boy fights boy over girl.  Sexual tension ensues.  Only now there are the added bonuses – someone gets bitten, someone shape shifts, someone tries really hard not to eat his girlfriend.   But the Laurel Series in many (many) ways are not even in the same category as those vampire books.

Foremost, Illusions (and its predecessors Wings and Spells) are WELL WRITTEN!  I will be the first to say that there are some amazing YA novels out there.  I’m an adult and I read a lot of this stuff.  I wouldn’t if they were all slapped together slovenly.  Not all are empirically good though.  For the most part teenagers are not exactly a discerning audience.  They know what they like and they don’t so much care if the method of delivery is a little shabby (sort of like men and porn). 

Which makes these fairy stories that much better, because these books are well written and, delightfully, kind of geeky in a lot of cool ways.  There’s a lot of science-y stuff in them – In her world, fairies are plants. Not only is this an ingenious idea, the explanation for it is pretty damn cool for a science dork like myself.  I mean the author uses the phrase “thylakoid membranes” and then her characters explain what they are. Really.  And for the book geek in all of us – she references Oberon, Titania, Camelot, Arthur, Lancelot and the “real” fairy story behind them. 

My highest most elaborate praise has to be for Ms. Pike’s responsibility as an author.  Her bio says she’s a mom, and from her acknowledgments it appears she has daughters (Ms. Meyer has three sons – just sayin’).  I can tell, because I would venture to guess what bothers me about YA romance, even before I had my daughter, probably bothers her too.  Here are several reasons why I love her books where I take  issue with some others:

• Her main character, Laurel is the fairy.  The book is not about a human girl looking for a super-man/wolf/vamp to save her from her dull, dreary life.  Laurel has her own life, even before she realizes how special she is.  Though it does get significantly more interesting after she figures it out.
• Laurel does occasionally need to be saved (you can’t be a hero without being in danger sometimes).  But she’s not always get saved by the handsome boy (sometimes it’s a weird woman named Klea),  and she is often the one doing the saving. 
• Laurel loves and respects her parents.  She doesn’t let Tam spend the night, not because she’s afraid to get caught, but because she knows they won’t like it and she doesn’t feel that she can lie to her parents about it. 
• Speaking of Laurel’s parents, they are loving and supportive and open to her – but they are real parents.  One of my favorite lines is from her father (when Tam comes to visit)  ”You look gorgeous, keep your [bedroom] door open.” 
• (My favorite!) when Laurel’s two love interests – David, a human and Tam, a fairy – start fighting over her (literally) she DUMPS THEM BOTH!  No sighing, no whining, no sulking and not eating for several months because she lost her man.  I LOVE this girl!

I was a teenager girl once and I know how stupid they can be – particularly about boys.  Even the smart girls.  Now that I have a daughter I appreciate so much more that there are stories out there that don’t advocate losing yourself, your life, or your sanity over a boy. 

Even if he is paranormally hot.

Which is funny because I really did believe everything she wrote in this book, though the rational side of my brain kept reminding me, as the title drives home (der, it’s “a novel”).  Her snippets of Tower “history” were just kooky enough to be true.  The scientist in me is eager to go read a history of the tower to check, but the reader in me wants to let sleeping ravens lie.

I loved all the characters in this book.  The main Beefeater Barnabas, his Greek wife, her job at the office for things lost on the Tube (which yes, is so impressive that it’s a character in itself).  The vicar who writes (prizewinning!) romance novels.  They are hopelessly endearing, and even the characters you aren’t supposed to like (the nefarious Ravenmaster for instance) are so artfully painted that they are humorous (or rather, ridiculous).  

This book, like the office of lost things (no joke, I wanted a whole book just about it), is a font of surprising, confusing, funny and often delightful discoveries.

Like the rest of the world I’d been hearing about Sarah’s Key everywhere.  Lots of people I knew had read it and were lauding it, but these were all the same people who read Water for Elephants (full disclosure, I read that too, but in hardcover, before everyone was mad about it and before that Twilight guy made a movie of it).  My mother, the mother-of-all-readers, brought it over and put it on my shelf without so much as a comment (apparently option c to get me to read something).   I found it after I spent three days enthralled with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and needed some fiction.  However I wouldn’t call this book, a story about the Holocaust, easy nor fun, but it was in so many aspects, very very good.

So good in fact, that I literally read it in one (4 and a half hour) sitting.  I ignored laundry, chores, work, my husband (my child was already asleep so don’t worry about her).  I spent an entire Sunday evening planted on the couch, under a blanket, devouring this book.   It’s so good you don’t care that you know where it’s going, you enjoy the journey anyway.  It’s so good that it makes you cry, and yes, occasionally smile.  It’s so good that I will admit here, publicly, that I was *wrong* to turn my nose up at it.

So hey, if you’re like me and you need a ‘real’ reader to tell you so, GO READ IT!!!!!!

“This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age.  In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.”

I have one question.  How the HELL does anyone expect a 16-year-old to understand that?

The fact is, course, that they can’t.  They’re sixteen, mere emotional fetuses.  They read John Knowles beautiful words, but they don’t digest them.  They hear but they don’t listen (isn’t that typical teenager behavior?). They don’t get what this book is really about, which is deeply sad, because there is so, so much to “get.”

I know this, because I was asked to read this book when I was sixteen and I even I, a practically professional reader, almost forgot about the third protagonist – the war.  What I remember most was wondering idly which of the boys I would have liked to date (Finny of course!).   In that way I am (or rather, as I like to think, was) no better than the scads of Twi-hards in their Team Jacob and Team Edward tshirts.

So again I think with dismay about how such a wonderful, almost perfectly written and executed book is lost and devalued by an often hostile captive audience of students.  It’s tantamount to literary abuse (to the book, not the students). There are so many layers that can’t even be explored in the context of a class.  The best we got was the more enlighted students, thinking they were “deep,” pondering whether Finny and Gene were gay (I still think Gene is and really, who could blame him!).

So why is it taught to high school kids?   Well for one it’s about World War II, and so it is be default deemed “educational” to a generation of kids who have no cultural knowledge of such a thing.  Second it’s about a 16-year-old boy.  But interestingly it’s not narrated by Gene’s teenage self, not really, what we’re seeing is the “old” Gene’s filtered memories of his adolescence.  But even if it was narrated by his younger self, does that meant the story is appropriate to teenagers?  Do we teach Room to kindergartens because a 5-year-old narrates?  If we’re smart we don’t.

I wonder if this book is still taught in schools anyway, seeing as it was written in 1959 and would seem an impossibly ancient text to the kids of today.  There is also an arguably helpful movement to introduce more “modern” and “interesting” and “fun” reading into curricula these days.  I’d be curious to see.  Regardless, readers will hopefully continue to find this gem of a book.  Adult readers most of all, since this book is not a cautionary tale or handbook for how to survive adolescence (or a war). Instead it’s a tribute to those who have survived.  And that includes all of us.

While it may not look like I’ve been reading much at all by the total lack of posting, you’ll be surprised to know that my lack of posting is due to two things that aren’t that:

1. The “L” key was stuck on my keyboard.

2. I’ve been too busy reading!

I know — not exactly as solid as Jessica’s “I spent the last year creating and raising a human being” excuse, but it’s a start.

As for the reading, what has been going down is that, inspired by David Denby’s classic Great Books project, I decided to, well, not to read all the great books necessarily, but to spend this year reading the books I personally should have read by now. Books most other people read in high school that I managed to avoid by taking extra Latin classes (Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird). Books I know I love from reading passages and visiting museum exhibits that I still haven’t read all the way through (Lolita, Catch-22). Books all my friends have said I should read and, in fact, are shocked — SHOCKED — that I haven’t yet (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fortress of Solitude).

To keep my sanity I have a couple rules for this effort.

1. No Reading Books I Don’t Like — Each book gets 20 pages of my undivided attention before I bail. If I don’t want to turn the page then I stop no matter how highly recommended. A couple titans have fallen to this one already. (I’m looking at you, Adventures of Augie March!)

2. No Need to Read Fast — Time-limit reading challenges bore me. So do massive-amounts-of-reading challenges. You read 200 classics in 10 months? Yawn.

3. It’s OK to Take Breaks — As much as there are books I have to read there are also those I don’t but still will. This weekend I read three issues of the New Yorker and five issues of Howard the Duck, so there.

I’m already several books in so I’m going to try and go back and fill in some of the lost posts here and try in vain to capture some of that spirit of discovery. But the whole entire point of this post isn’t about me (surprise!). It’s about you! Why don’t you read some Books YOU Should Have Read Before? And please tell us about it, won’t you?

It also goes against my general beliefs that one should not read a book after seeing a movie, but after many years of wanting to do this and stopping myself I finally relented (it’s my own rule after all).   I really like Dennis Lehane’s books and though I hate most Martin Scorsese films (yes, even the ones with Leo in them), I wanted to see this movie because the author himself said he really enjoyed it.  After seeing it I was so intrigued by how it would play out in print form.  It was an impulse buy at the checkout line, pure and simple.

So in the interest of alleviating some cognitive dissonance (how’s that for a psychological term?) I decided to change this rule too.  My new rule:  it’s acceptable to buy the movie version of the book – only if it’s a trade paperback. 

What first impressed me was how well the movie matched up with the book.  Several important, but finely wrought details from the book made it in to the movie and they remained, for the most part, subtle (good job, Martin,this time you didn’t hit us over the head with a baseball bat!). 

Second, though I really liked the book much better, with its intimate exploration of Teddy’s psyche, I think that the movie also played out the scenes that are entirely in Teddy’s brain quite well. It’s often hard to take the abstract images from a character’s brain and make them visual.  Dream sequences can be deadly to a movie.

This story has a very Sixth Sense-ness about it in a way that makes you want to go over it again.  You chastise yourself “I should have known! Why didn’t I see it!”  Though the movie had a tidy ending, the book was a bit more vague.  Both of these things are departures for Lehane and I can see why some of his fans weren’t so keen on this particular book.  But overall the book is trademark Lehane – his sense of location, his ear for dialogue, his exploration of relationships. 

The brilliance of the new rule is that I got to read the book, and I don’t feel the need to keep it. I can pass it along, since it only cost $5.99.

Jesse and I like to think we appreciate each other all the time (though as a middle child i often feel underappreciated), but even so we’re really excited that it’s that time of year again!  Book blogger appreciation week is almost here.   It’s a time when we can appreciate other book bloggers and the general fun and geekiness that is book blogging in general.  We both encourage you to check out the BBAW website  for more information.

Jesse and I have registered our humble little blog for two categories - Most Eclectic Blog and Best Written Blog.  Our favorite posts below will be presented to the judges.

Best Eclectic Blog

Peter and The Sword of Mercy
1602
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
A New Mom’s Guide to Reading
Odd and The Frost Giants

Best Written Blog

Peter and The Sword of Mercy
1602
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
A New Mom’s Guide to Reading
Odd and The Frost Giants

Wish us luck and check out some of the (other) amazing blogs participating in this year’s BBAW!