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Forgive me, readers, for two things. One, for being absent for so long, and two, for being self-indulgent and explaining away my absence. Humor me, it’s relevant (sort of).
Toward the end of the summer I took a new job and simultaneously, somehow, and totally on purpose, I found myself knocked up (no oops there, but I do wonder at my timing). So between the working, the throwing up, the commuting, the being exhausted and the studying for the MBA which suddenly seems much less important, I haven’t had time to crack a book for enjoyment since.
This, I have discovered, is a very unhealthy place for me to be. My body is having a hard enough time keeping down food (like some women, I’ve lost weight in my first trimester). This is no time for my soul also to be lacking in (literary) nourishment.
This baby may not end up being a reader, though with nature (on both sides) and nurture (on all sides) I don’t see how that will be possible. Regardless of how he or she turns out, it will not be from lack of a steady diet of stories.
Starting now.
After 26 years (seriously, that is almost my entire life!) Reading Rainbow will be coming to a close.
Apparently funding is given for shows that teach kids how to read, not why to read.
Sad. Very sad.
Jesse and I are very excited to announce that our friendly little blog has been nominated for three (yes three!!!!) BBAWs:
- Best General Review Blog
- Best Review
- Most Collaborative
We’re currently compiling our best blog posts to send to the nomination committee and jumping up and down with excitement!!!!!
“I love this book,” I said to Tim while attempting read in a moving car, something that, to my intense frustration, I have never quite managed to do without wanting to vomit (thankfully I can read on a moving train, which makes my long commute more bearable).
“Listen to this,” I said, quoting page one (yes, page ONE!!).
Hours later, not long after the genesis of Francis Wells’ idea, the party would meet a premature death with a cloud of plaster dust covering the Gardner’s guests, as well as a dessert table graced with spun-sugar Giacomettis and the life-sized sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, whose penis had all evening been dripping syphilitically.
“And this!” I raved.
By ten p.m. there had been three slideshows – one of which, “Hop Art: A Portfolio,” projected photos of Bunny’s own work onto the ballroom walls, interspersed with a series of dinner courses as carefully presented and unsatisfying as Francis’ wife.
“I didn’t want to love it, but there it is, how could I not?”
“Don’t you want to love all books?” he asked, confused.
I pondered his question; certainly its a valid one. When it comes to reading, as with the rest of life, I’m total cynic. I certainly don’t expect to love all books – an inordinate amount of what is published is trash, or boring, or overdone (or pleasant and inoffensive, but forgettable). But there are those who allege that cynics are disappointed idealists. Maybe. If it were not true that a vast majority of published works are just plain mediocre, if we did live in an ideal world, would I really want to love every book I read?
King Arthur may well be the ur-fantasy story. The ur-hero story even. This story has been told countless times, in many forms including, quite notably, Monty Python’s version (you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!), one of my personal favorites. There is even much academic debate about whether a real Arthur or Merlin existed. While that is mildly interesting, and I have been known to read a treatise or two about what might have happened, I’d much rather read pages and pages (and pages and pages) of stories about what could have happened.
The Arthurian legends were certainly my first foray into “fantasy” and it’s the one story I never tire of, no matter what the medium. I daresay I’ve read them “all” – The Mists of Avalon, the Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, even Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I have a grand copy of Le Morte d’Arthur, almost too beautiful to read (or at least that’s my current excuse for not reading it).
I love this story (or should I say stories) so much that I took an entire class in college about King Arthur (me, a science major!), in which we read the older texts based on the oral legends (where Gawain was the hero, not some pretty French dude). They aren’t as flowery as the Lancelot versions with their courtly love, chivalry and the round table, but it is those gritty older texts that, in my humble opinion, have spawned the best modern Arthurian works. As my high school English teacher always told us “Arthur was a peer of Beowulf.” Which means, though he likely carried a sword, his armor was made of leather instead of metal, and he probably didn’t joust.
With some extreme exceptions (Harry Potter for one), I’m generally opposed to book “phenomenons.” If I see everyone reading it on the subway I like to flatter myself that I’m above it all. I tell myself that I read “real” books (which as any reader of this blog can see, is not entirely true). I hate when non readers tell me I *HAVE* to read such and such book. It irritates me. Worse yet are the books that are made into movies, causing an explosion of books into the population, mostly non readers.
The Twilight series is one of those phenomenons, tween girls are crazed about these books (and the subsequent movie). But it’s not just kids, plenty of young adult women have been trying to push the series on me. I successfully resisted, until one of my best reading friends literally put the stack in my hand and said, “Read them, they’re fun.”
I think it was the fact that she didn’t fly into rhapsodies about how amazing and impressive they were that made me take them from her. Still, they sat on my bookshelf. I had no intention of reading them, I figured I would just hold them for an appropriate amount of time and then return them with a disclaimer that I was “too busy” to get to them.
But what I didn’t count on was that my foray into British history was coming to an abrupt halt with Roy Jenkins’ Churchill. That book was painful; somehow he made Winston Churchill seem boring. I had to give up, only halfway through. It was disheartening, and I just didn’t have it in me to start anything even remotely challenging.
“They’re fun,” she had said, and so I reached for Twilight.
Katherine by Anya Seton is one of those books that is right up my alley. I first read it when I was in high school, before my Anglophilia went rampant. It was however, right at the perfect time when the romance part of this novel was best appreciated by my melodramatic teenage heart. It is the novelization of Katherine Swynford who, with her lover and eventual husband, John of Gaunt, are responsible for the majority of England’s (and Europe’s) royal families.
I hadn’t thought of this book in years, until I was in a store a few weeks back spending a gift certificate for my birthday. When I have “free” book money I tend to buy impulsively and wildly, getting things I wouldn’t spend my own money on. Katherine was sitting on a table and I wondered how it would read for an adult mind, so I snatched it up. Interestingly, I also picked up the new Alison Weir book, Mistress of the Monarchy, barely glancing at the title (I LOVE Ms. Weir!). I brought them both, in a stack with two other titles, to the register, I brought them both home, I put them both on the shelf.
It was only weeks later, when I finally picked up Katherine to read, I looked at what was underneath it and saw the subtitle of Mistress – The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster.
No one , certainly not the cashier, or anyone looking at my bookshelf, will believe it was unintentional, but it truly was. It’s funny how your mind keeps working even when you aren’t paying attention.
I admit the title got me on this one. And I still think the title is good, probably the best part of the book.
In the beginning this book promised a lot: mysteries & conspiracies, action & adventure, love and even a little sex (it is a YA novel after all).
In the end I was left unsatisfied and totally disappointed. None of the promise was fulfilled.
I don’t have a huge problem with zombie stories, though as a germ-phobe I always get distracted about where such epidemic zombie infections come from. I think that lately though, zombies are a bit overdone. I mean look at some recent movies: 28 Days Later, I am Legend, and even Shaun of the Dead. These are just some mainstream movies, I haven’t even delved into the “horror” movies. Basically the undead are everywhere.
Still this book could have capitalized on the current (and probably persistent) zombie-philia.
It didn’t.
I apologize dear reader(s), for being gone so long. My blogging has been stymied by other obligations. I have been reading like crazy, however. I promised to get back to y’all about that.
*****
I decided to devote some of new year to books that high school or junior high has ruined for millions. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are two of these. I must admit I was looking for the same lightning in a bottle as To Kill a Mockingbird. Alas it was not to be, though I can’t say I’m disapointed either.
Tom Sawyer has been accurately described as a children’s book about a boy. I would venture to guess that if it were written today it would not make the best seller lists. What it lacks in complexity, it doesn’t make up for in plot. There is a lot of action and adventure and not much substance. One wonders how one boy got into so many scrapes in such a small amount of pages! I must be getting older, because I wonder about Aunt Polly’s fitness as a guardian. Though her Mary seemed to turn out alright. All in all, it’s over too soon and not much of it sticks with you, besides the whitewashing scene. Though cultural prevalence probably has more to do with that than anything.
I was looking forward to Christmas this year, unlike many years past. It is a children’s holiday after all, and this is the first year I had children in my life (small ones, not the tweens who don’t give a shit unless you give them electronics). The spirit of giving was certainly overflowing, and I enjoyed every new gift (I mean, book, since, as Jesse noted, they make the best presents). So what if I was buying them for babies, they need to get started on the right foot. Yes, even my unborn niece got some, the biggest stack in fact!
Due to some health issues (mental and physical) I wasn’t up for huge amounts of family this year. So despite my new found love for the holiday, Tim and I escaped to Vermont. As I’ve mentioned before, whenever I travel it’s hard to know what books to bring. I’ve been on a historical biography kick lately, but that isn’t very, well, Christmasy. Perhaps it was all the time spent in the children’s section buying for the babies, but I wanted storybooks to read on my mini vacation. But where to find just the right stories? I had a tall order: they had to be 1) smart 2) funny and 3) engaging. That just about rules out all adult books, so off to the YA section I went.
What We're Reading Now 
