I've been incredibly remiss in updating, but I'm now blogging on Wordpress. There's a lot of new content up there!

Very brief mentions of a number of books.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch: Perhaps it's that you need to read a critical mass of the Ankh-Morpork novels to really get them, or perhaps I chose the wrong one; I liked it but not as much as Pratchett's YA, despite the time travel and the revolutionaries.

Sara Ryan, Empress of the World: Girls fall in love at gifted summer camp. I liked the first half much better than the second half; it's a much better book when it's making small sharp observations than when it feels the need to move the plot forward. The secondary characters felt kind of perfunctory, especially Isaac and Kevin, who I kept getting mixed up.

Esme Raji Codell, Vive La Paris: Paris's older brother is getting beaten up by one of Paris's classmates, and won't defend himself. He doesn't believe in violence. Meanwhile, Paris is taking piano lessons from old Mrs. Rosen, who used to live in Paris and who turns out to be a Holocaust survivor.
This is an intense and beautiful look at the meaning of pacifism, of nonviolent resistance, of how we should treat our enemies and those who are cruel to us. In a world that can be dark and cruel, is violence necessary to survive? Is it foolish to think you can avoid violence? This is heavy stuff for a middle-grade novel, and Codell deals with it with amazing sensitivity.

Esme Raji Codell, Sahara Special: Not as good as Vive La Paris because of the I'm So Specialness of the teacher (who feels a bit like an authorial projection), but a good story of a girl who's recovering from the breakup of her family by writing secret letters.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: Junior, a nerdy fourteen-year-old on a Spokane reservation, loses it when he realizes he's using the same math textbook that his mother used. He throws the book at his teacher--who forgives him and tells him to get off the rez. When he transfers to the all-white high school 22 miles away, he faces prejudice from both the white students and the people on the rez who call him a traitor. This is an extraordinarily delicately balanced book. There's so much darkness in it and yet Junior's narrative voice has enough distance in it that you don't feel pummeled by the darkness, and a genuine sense of humor shines through the terrible parts.

Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl: When Deanna is thirteen, her father catches her having sex in a car. It's a small town, word gets around, and her life is pretty much ruined. Years later, she is still trying to move on, working in a terrible pizza place, saving up money so that her brother and his girlfriend and baby daughter can move out. There are no easy solutions, but a few small and hard-won gestures of reconciliation.

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Linguist Pinker discusses the relation between words and thoughts, which aren't (in his view) as neat as some would suppose; he takes a hard-line stance against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that thoughts are constrained by language. Pinker explores causation (if you cause a window to break by distracting the window installer, that's not the same thing as 'breaking the window'), naming, swearing, and politeness. There's tons of "Wow! I never thought of that before!"
I thought it was great. But I should note that I previously agreed with Pinker on a lot of linguistic issues. He's been criticized for presenting his views as uncontroversial, settled facts when that is in fact not the case, and he's so persuasive you can't imagine that he might be wrong. And this isn't necessarily a good thing when he's basically the only popularizer that linguistics has.

By no means do I want to be the kind of blogger who only posts to apologize for not posting.

But: my car was stolen last week; since recovered, needs lots of work; library books missing; not in much condition for reading and writing.

Castellucci, Cecil. Beige

15-year-old Montreal girl Katy has to spend the summer with her dad in Los Angeles while her mother goes on an archaeological dig in Peru. Oh--and her dad is a legendary punk rock drummer. And she hasn't seen him in a couple years because the last time he was up in Canada, he got kicked out of the country for brining in drugs. It is not a positive way to start out a summer. But because of the kind of novel this is, you know that she will grow to love the people here. This isn't surprising; but it IS surprising that it's done really well.

Some young adult novels seem to unthinkingly take it for granted that of course one's parents are lame, and of course one wants more freedom from them. Katy, on the other hand, seems young for her age, seems like the kind of kid who has to be dragged kicking and screaming from childhood, from insulation. The book is a series of unpleasant truths discovered; but they're not things to Reconcile Oneself To. They're things that bring Katy from relating to people as a child, to relating to people as an adult--which means honesty, and raw emotions, and scary things like that. It's very symbolic, isn't it, that Katy's mom knitted a ton of blankets for the people in her life? That's comfort, and safety, and what Katy wants to cling to. But can't.

Castellucci knows Montreal like I know Montreal. She makes me long to go back there. And it's a great deal of fun reading a novel that makes you say "Oh! I remember that! I love that!" We only get to see Montreal in Katy's remembrances, but I for one would love a sequel. It wouldn't even need to have a plot. It could just have Katy hanging around Montreal doing Montreal-type things.

I was curious about one thing. I am sure that Castellucci has done bucketloads of research and is way more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than I am, but: Guitar Center? Really? Raleigh isn't a L.A. or Nashville or Seattle but there are half a dozen music stores that I would go to in preference to the corporateness of Guitar Center. Maybe the one in L.A. is better?

Anyway, good book, loved it (maaaybe not quite to the extent of Boy Proof?), it made me cry.

Abdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big In This?

Australian-Palestinian girl Amal decides to start wearing the hijab full time, faces racism and stupidity at school, joins the debate team, has a crush, and deals with her friends' problems: Leila has a strict mother who wants her to leave school and get married, while Simone is a size 14 and has much angst about her figure and unlovability.

It is a book with a fabulous voice and a lot of genuine humor--I skipped through some pages at random to refresh my memory and got, "So is it like nuns? Are you married to Jesus now?"

If it hadn't been written with as much authority and assurance, I might have thought some of the situations were over the top -- obviously my high school (pre-9/11) and a snooty Australian prep school (post-9/11) don't have much in common, and I'm sure that I wasn't aware of everything that went on, but I felt like at my high school it was accepted as just normal that we had a handful of students who wore head scarves. But Abdel-Fattah made it totally convincing and believable.

Now, there were moments when it was just a little preachy (I thought Simone's issues were handled much less gracefully than Amal's) and moments when it lacked narrative drive and moments when it was trying too hard to be cool. But (without dismissing the seriousness of the issues involved) it's nice to read a book that takes on serious issues while being both reverent and irreverent, and very funny.

School from seventh grade to tenth grade was Hidaya - The Guidance - Islamic College. Where they indoctrinate students and teach them how to form Muslim ghettos, where they train with Al-Qaeda for school camp and sing national anthems from the Middle East. NOT!

Read and enjoyed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (yes, the day after it came out), but don't feel like I have anything to say about it that hasn't already been said a dozen times. (I'm just now updating my sidebar with the page count, so I feel like I should mention it).

Bear, Elizabeth. Whiskey & Water

The sequel to Bear's Blood and Iron-- a book that was occasionally a little like watching two strangers play three-dimensional chess. Fascinating, but not always easy to understand, or to invest with emotional meaning. This book is more like when you've been at the chess tournament for a while, have begun to absorb the rules, and have chatted with both players in between games. Much easier to understand, both intellectually and emotionally.

But it's still three-dimensional chess. We've got Hell, with Lucifer and other various devils; the Prometheans, who want to keep the power of Faerie bound; Matthew, ex-Promethean, a wounded man of divided loyalties; Faerie, and its queen; Heaven, and the angel Michael; oh, and Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright (late of Prometheus, Faerie, and Hell). And a loose band of humans who could've almost come straight from a Charles DeLint novel. All these groups and people have their own allegiances and motives, personal, political, and metaphysical.

The most interesting thing about this novel, to me, is that it has a number of things that ordinarily would push all my buttons and make me go squee. Like sexy devils! And sexy angels! And sexy Kit Marlowe! And cute gothy people! And then-- it turns around and stays too honest and dark and brutal to actually make me go squee. It's not even the turned-up melodrama of everybody dying beautiful tragic deaths; it's something quieter than that, and harsher in its own way. But this is so much a book about stories and lies (all stories are true, we hear again and again; but all stories are lies almost by definition; the most powerful magic is the magic of deception, which is the same thing as the power to control one's own stories...). And so the book's delicate balance between tragic/gorgeous/seductive and brutal is Just. Perfect. In fact, it rather exactly mirrors what one of the characters goes through...

It's not a book without flaws. In particular, it's so dense that I couldn't read it quickly, but it also requires so much memory that I couldn't read it slowly without losing track of my threads. Bear doesn't just require you to put two and two together; she requires you to put two and x together, where x is a detail you hopefully remember from a hundred pages back. So there were plot developments where I had to say, "Okay, I buy it, if you say so." But it would be silly of me to blame the book for being too smart for me, wouldn't it?

Swann, Leonie. Three Bags Full

When their shepherd George is suddenly found dead with a spade in his chest, a flock of sheep determine to solve the murder: Othello the mysterious black sheep, Mopple the Whale, clever Miss Maple, and a dozen others (some more differentiated than others).

Something appealed to me about this book from the very first. I don't know why; I don't read mysteries normally, and especially not mysteries where overly intelligent pets solve the crime. But I had a good feeling about it, and that was borne out.

First of all, the writing is lovely. I was about fifty pages in when I started skipping around the back and front matter out of curiosity, and discovered: it's a translation! From the German! This didn't entirely astonish me because it feels like the quirky sort of book that would have an easier time getting published in Europe, but I was astonished that a translation would have writing that brave and interesting. (What I mean by brave is this: if I were a translator I would want to beat more sense into a paragraph like the following, and I would be scared of what my editor would think if I didn't.)

Green stretched all the way to the horizon. Green was the song of unreason. It grew without sense or understanding, urging all creatures to do the same. And they did. Green was the most beautiful commandment in the world

Mind you, most of the prose is a lot more straightforward than that.

A lot of the story is necessarily a little oblique. The reader doesn't always understand the sheepy things that happen, and the sheep definitely don't understand the human things that happen:

None of them thought Satan capable of such an act. Satan was an elderly donkey who sometimes grazed in the meadow next to theirs, and uttered bloodcurdling cries. His voice was truly dreadful, but otherwise he'd always struck them as harmless.
"I still think it was God who killed him," said Mopple, with his mouth full. "Beth thought so too." The sheep had a certain respect for Beth because she had invested so much time and trouble in such a doubtful thing as George's soul

As a result, none of the plotlines had as much emotional impact as maybe I was hoping for.

And yet-- as I finished the book, I was utterly satisfied and content with it. And that's saying a lot.

In lieu of full write-ups

Jack Gantos, Love Curse of the Rumbaughs

What a strange, strange book. Gantos's preoccupation with free will vs. predestination is an interesting one. I think I admired more than liked it.

Cecil Castellucci, Plain Janes

What Boy Proof does for geeks, Plain Janes does for suburbia: hits the balance between empathy and call-to-action. "Yes, it sucks, I know it sucks, you have every right to be angsty and alienated. But it's up to you to make things better. Nobody else is going to do it for you. So go to it! It's fun!"

Loved it, but wanted more (especially given all the advertising in the back pages...)

Katayama, Kyoichi. Socrates in Love

I'm not abandoning the blog-- I've been spending my lunch hours reading in Japanese. It takes longer. (And I have a couple more books to write up this weekend that I've really been meaning to get to!)

And this is one of the books I've been reading. I looked over the translation and wasn't particularly impressed by it, but as you'll see, I wasn't particularly impressed by anything else in the book either.

Two Japanese teenagers, Aki and Sakutaro, fall in love. Then Aki gets leukemia and dies. There is not much plot (but you never expect a Japanese novel to have too much plot); there is a lot of sophomoric philosophy and maudlin rehashing of people's feelings. (Let the record show that the version I borrowed was not entitled Socrates in Love, but that apparently is the author's original title.)

It was nowhere as deep as it wanted to be; and that's because of how intensely it idealizes Aki, and the relationship between Aki and Sakutaro. Does Aki never do something dumb? (Sakutaro does, but it's romantic dumb stuff) Do they never say things that are angry and mean? Why do you only have scenes like this? (my translation, not official translation):

"I think we have everything right here and now." When she finally spoke, she chose her words carefully. "We have everything we need, we don't lack anything. So there's no reason to ask God for anything, no reason to seek heaven or the afterlife. Because--everything is here right now, and you just have to find it." After a while she said, "What I don't have isn't going to appear after I die. The things that are here right now will still be there even after I die. I guess I can't put it into words right..."
"Like, my love for you exists now, and that's still going to be there even after you die."
"Right," Aki nodded. "That's what I want to say. So I'm not sad or scared."

Truthfully? I kind of want to smack her. Not only for that scene, but because it isn't balanced out with the truth that dying sucks, and dying before you've even graduated high school sucks, and being told you have aplastic anemia even after you start getting chemo and your hair starts falling out sucks.

Go get some Kleenex and download "Casimir Pulaski Day" off iTunes; it's six minutes and a much better "my girlfriend got cancer and died" story.