Blurb Wars

On the back of The King's Peace, by Jo Walton, is a blurb by someone named Debra Doyle. It says, in part, "The King's Peace is the novel that The Mists of Avalon should have been."

Way to take a swipe at MZB. I think it's because it's an Arthurian story with a strong woman protagonist, but a little more historically accurate, maybe? Not sure, but great.

I read a contest in a fantasy magazine once for the best blurb that you'd give if you hated the book but didn't want to insult the author. "As tight and fast-paced as Tolkein!" "This author could not have written a better book." Etc. I wish I could think of some more. Anyone?

Reader's Block

I seriously just can't read anything serious right now. Not just serious, but substantial. I have three good, worth reading books that are due back because I've had them nine weeks, and I just can't. Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, and Tony Horwitz's Confederates In the Attic. I really want to read all three, but I can barely concentrate hard enough to keep myself into a 180 page book about a 12 year old hero, never mind a 360 page book about nine (or twelve or fifteen--it covers a stretch of time) Supreme Court justices.

I'm pretty disappointed in myself, especially since I had such good luck getting my hands on these books. But I think I'm going to have to return them and try again another day. I'm trying to aim low for a little while, remind myself that this is supposed to be fun--there's no reason to slog. It's not like I'm getting paid by the page, or the book, or the hour or at all really.

I will say that there is one book I'm giving up out of pure good sense. I like therapy books in general--nonfiction by psychologists who talk about their pet theories and their most memorable patients. I got a recommendation for a book called The Unsayable: The hidden language of trauma, by Annie G. Rogers. I checked it out, and it's very well written and looks pretty good. Then I flipped to a page at the middle and read a few lines about her asking a young patient who she trusted, who made her feel safe. Her horse was the first answer, and how much she enjoyed riding, followed by a neighbor who is kind to her. The author then elaborated on these feelings for the reader, mentioning casually the relationship between the neigh of a horse and the word neighbor. At this point I put the book down and stepped slowly away, and I hope you support me in that decision.

So: more Margaret Peterson Haddix, more Bloody Jack, maybe The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. And maybe, just maybe, I can sneak a Philippa Gregory novel past the blockade. I mean, there's nothing substantial about that, is there?

My Imaginary Favorite Author

You know, like your imaginary boyfriend, who is probably John Cusack, or maybe George Clooney or Hugh Jackman. My imaginary new favorite author is Margaret Peterson Haddix. I think I mentioned her recently--I read Just Ella, and blogged about how princesses are done all wrong. But, though flawed, there was a core of something great there, so I checked out Double Identity. But then I figured out the big plot twist after five pages. I don't know if that was because I'm not the 12 year old target audience, or if this was a flaw in the book, but I put it down instead of reading through to see what else the story had to offer.

But I decided to keep trying, so I got Among the Hidden, the first in her series. Finally, this book was great. It's a lower reading level, but sharp, serious, thoughtful, and fast-paced. The story is about a boy who lives in a world where only two children are allowed. His two older brothers lead normal lives, but he can't leave the farm and, when a housing development goes in next door, becomes confined to the house. The whole totalitarian government thing is also going on in The Giver, by Lois Lowry, which I just finished, and contrasting the two has been very interesting. The governement in the Haddix book is much less tidy around the edges, and it looks a lot more like what a real government looks like--impenetrable, complicated, everywhere and nowhere. Well rendered.

So the next time I went to the library, I went a little nuts. I found the next book in the Shadow Children series, Among the Imposters. I found another book called Leaving Fishers, which is apparently about a girl who joins and leaves a cult. I got Running Out of Time, which looks like a version of the movie The Village, hopefully better executed. And something else called Found that I don't know anything about but that's by her.

So hopefully I'll have something really intelligent to say about Margaret Peterson Haddix in the next couple of weeks. So far, Leaving Fishers is not bad, though it's a little heavy-handed. That might be, though, because the story that cult members tell potential members really sounds like that. I've read enough to suspect that.

Also, I'm going to tack this on the end because I might have a real favorite author. The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner, is really, really good. She needs to write another book right now so I can read it, please.

Children's Books

As a parent, I read a few children's books. I imagine and hope that those quantities are going to increase over time--right now, I'm lucky if I can discern the words on a couple of pages before Adam gnaws them out of existence, or closes the book just because he can. So while I have some opinions--Bear Snores On holds up pretty well to repeated readings, I love Sandra Boynton, Baby Einstein is drivel--I have not yet felt the need to tell you about this.

But then, I read The Amazing Bone.

When I told Mike about it, I only got that far before he gave me a look that said that the title is the punch line. I don't even want to bother with that. Any humor you find there obscures the sheer AWFULNESS of this book. It's awful on almost every perceivable level--literary, storytelling, and possibly even age appropriateness. I'm almost horrified that it has a Reading Rainbow sticker on the cover. Levar Burton has something to answer for here. The only level on which the book does succeed is illustration; they're pretty. I like the style. End of positives.

Now I have to tell you about it, don't I? Sigh. I'd rather not relive it. Okay, it's a picture book, and all the characters are different animals. Petunia is a little girl pig who skips about enjoying the day. This part goes on a long time and is not unpleasant, though it is undirected. Eventually she finds herself sitting under a tree enjoying the day, and she says out loud how she loves the whole world. A voice answers, "Me too!" Petunia discovers, under a tree, a little bone that can talk and make sounds. It belonged to a witch who dropped it by accident.

Petunia and the bone make friends. She heads home to show her parents. On the way she encounters three robbers, but the bone scares them off with loud scary noises. Then she encounters a fox who decides he's going to take her home and eat her. He's not afraid of the bone's noises, and in fact is excited that he'll own a magic bone. Petunia begins to cry.

Fox locks her in a back room with the bone and starts getting ready for dinner--sharpening his knife, stoking the fire, etc. He's having pork. It's drawn out and pretty scary--this poor pig who's like 8 years old and hoping that he'll kill her quickly before he eats her. The bone doesn't know what to do either.

Finally the fox comes in for her. As he leads her into the kitchen, the bone suddenly starts shouting nonsense words. The bone doesn't know what it's doing, it just feels compelled to shout these words. As it does, the fox begins to shrink. By the time the bone is done, the fox is as small as a mouse and runs away into the floorboards. Neither she nor the bone know how this happened. She runs home and introduces the bone to her parents and they all live happily ever after the end.

Now, say it with me: WHAT??? I don't even know where to start. Why is it a bone, not a pebble or statue or bug? A bone? I really expected to have that explained to me by the end. Also, didn't anyone else learn, in like sixth grade, the term deus ex machina? One of our characters randomly starts shouting magic words that he didn't know he knew, and it solves all their problems. That's totally how an episode of House ended last week. Great storytelling technique, is what I'm saying.

Urgh. I'm turning into a crank. But really, this book is so weird. It was published in 1976, and I have no idea how it got past an editor, except that the author appears to have published a number of books before that. I can't imagine what they look like, but I have to think they must be better than this, for him to have slipped it in the door.

Okay, I'm not all moaning. I'm rereading The Giver, by Lois Lowry, and it's really fabulous. so there's that. I feel like I complain too much, but sometimes, you just have to stand back in awe. So, William Steig, wherever you are, I'm very sorry to be so cranky, but I think you owe me an explanation about the talking bone.

Up For a Challenge

It's not that The Nine is too heavy or serious. It's so well-written and compelling and I could keep reading. It's that the issues that have shaped the Supreme Court in the past twenty years are all ones that it kind of hurts to read about. I have opinions about politics--while I'm not particularly active, they're fairly strongly held opinions. And while I do understand how reasonable people can be on the other side of some of these things, I disagree with them so strongly that it's painful to read about Antonin Scalia tearing into a lawyer with what I consider to be a spurious argument.

The first part of the book discusses abortion a good deal, and while I can see how someone could be under what I consider to be a mistaken impression about when life begins, I can set that aside and see it as a debate. I get outraged when people get violent about it, but that's not an issue before the court today. But I am blinded by rage when people try to pass laws that say that a pregnant woman who is going to die cannot save her life by having an abortion, but must instead die with her baby. Because "mother's health" is a term that needs scare quotes.

This exact issue hasn't come up, but the mother's health clause has been under discussion, and the idea of someone in authority, the lawmakers in my own country saying this to a mother--to a husband and father who is facing this horrific situation--is so staggeringly awful, so evil, that I can't bear to read about it.

And now we're into the 2000 elections, and I know how it's going to turn out. And I know already that it was a travesty, I knew that, but I think reading about the details is going to be more harrowing than I can manage right now. Is that weird? That I don't have the emotional strength to read about the details of a political struggle that ended almost 10 years ago an the fallout of which is just a fact of life by now?

What can I say? I'm a delicate flower.

Now That's Commitment

I've stopped pretending. I'm just reading kids' stuff, light stuff, easygoing stuff. It's a load off my mind.

I just started a new audiobook, Tomorrow When the War Began, by John Marsden. It's an Australian book, and so is the narrator, which accent takes a little getting used to. But so far it's a pretty good camping story, which is going to turn into a story of some kids who come back from a major camping trip to find out that their town and country have been invaded and taken over. It's very Red Dawn, and so far very good.

I'm coming to the end of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith, which is not a YA book, but is sufficiently light in tone for the state of mind I've been in. It always makes me sad when there's conflict between our main characters in these books, but in this one you really feel the theme of patience and tolerance as being the reason a person can maintain such a pleasant attitude. Sigh, Botswana.

The little pile next to my computer contains New Moon, the second Twilight book, by Stephanie Meyer. I checked it out because it's never on the shelf, but there it was on the shelf, but I knew after three pages that I couldn't read it. At least, with an audiobook, you have the narrator convincing you that her love for Edward is true and real. In print, it's just unbearable. After ONE PAGE. I'm so sorry, Twilight fans, please don't kill me.

The reason I found it on the shelf is because it was next to In the Belly of the Bloodhound: Being an Account of a Particularly peculiar Adventure in the Life of Jacky Faber, by L.A. Meyer, which I am absolutely tickled to read. Sometimes, when I can't wait to get started on a book, I have trouble starting it. There's that ramp-up at the beginning when you don't know what's going on yet, there's the little sliver of doubt that it'll be as good as the last three, as good as you hope. There's the dread of finishing it. And there's something else, some other inertia that holds me off.

In this case, there's also the burning question of whether I'll read it before or after The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner, which I'm ALSO thrilled to have before me. I just finished The Queen of Attolia, and I'm so excited for the sequel. How can one resist following the cleverest character around on his misadventures--even when they're sometimes gloomy and dangerous? Gen has the same appeal as Jacky Faber, and they're due around the same time, and I'm going to have a very hard time deciding which to read first.

That should get me through--that and The Nine, the Supreme Court book that I'm still in the middle of. I figure I can get it back to the library on time if I read five or ten pages a day. Assuming I can renew it. Right?

God bless the simplicity and inspiration of young adult writers everywhere. Thank you all so much.

Parenting, Picoult-style

In Picoult’s fiction we rarely encounter characterologically bad parents. Instead, we meet mothers and fathers who try and fail, baroquely, to meet the current standards of caring for children — people who affect the deepest concern, who have absorbed the therapeutic language of talk shows and women’s magazines but who are congenitally unable to implement the idiom.

-"Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent," Ginia Bellafante, NY Times, June 17

Excuse my rusty citation skills. I liked this article, which was mostly an interview with the author. It was an interesting look at how she's built her own ouvre--all her books are pretty much the same, and here's how.

The quote above interested me, though, because the author's take on what she does is so different than what I saw. It's a little embarrassing to admit this, because I think she's right, and by extension I'm pretty blind to a lot of the nuance in the world. But I've always seen Picoult's books as stories in which everyone is doing their best to do the right thing, and yet everything turns out horribly anyway. Human frailty and bad luck conspire to make a mess of everything, in spite of excellent parenting--this is how I would have encapsulated what I thought she was doing.

This author, however, seems to be saying that the message is closer to "bad parenting practice can look a lot like good parenting theory. I can't really argue with that, and looking back, I can see that Jodi Picoult gets a lot more credit if you look at it that way. In my theory, all these people are trying their best, and it's a weakness of the parenting system that that keeps resulting in something awful. In her theory, these parents think they're trying, but really they're being controlling, or gentle but oblivious, or some other innocuous looking but really shattering parenting trait. The concerned, doting mother in My Sister's Keeper, for example, is not making the best of a bad situation and trying to save her children. She's obsessing over the one daughter at the expense of the others.

Here's the thing: I had seen this, and thought of it as a failing of the author. I had thought that she was backing these parents up, that the omniscient third person narrator was looking at them benevolantly, rather than critically. I think I might have been wrong, and, while this might not change my enjoyment of the stories, it certainly changes the reading. It makes sense, then to see, as the Times writer does, that the situation in My Sister's Keeper goes off the rails in a way that is "meant to serve as a cosmic rebuke to the mother’s stilted management."

I don't think that this explanation covers everything, though. All of her stories are based around a major secret that is being kept by one of the characters (as I've mentioned before, sometimes it's being kept for NO EARTHLY REASON, e.g. Vanishing Acts, The Pact). Although sometimes the parents have secrets of their own, the world-shattering secrets in these books almost invariably belong to the kids. I can't help but see in this pattern a statement to the effect of, "even good, concerned parents can't know everything about their kids, and sometimes those secrets are deadly." The secret-keeping on the part of the kids often exonerates the parents--they really were doing a good job, but they were deliberately fooled.

I won't say I was entirely wrong about her, but I will say that I think I wasn't looking deep enough. And as I said, that's embarrassing--I remember, after seeing the movie The Hours, making a comment about being annoyed at how Meryl Streep's character's inability to take action had annoyed me. Someone replied that I wasn't very sympathetic to depression, and I was absolutely humiliated to realize that, though I had recognized that the other two characters were depressed, I had not noticed that that was the whole point of the movie.

Point being, I can be a total moron. I'm amazed that you're still reading this. Thank you for your patience.

Brain Freeze

I'm not sure what it is, but I can't get my brain around any of the big stuff. I've read a lot of YA lately, and I'd been feeling like I should look for something meatier. But I can't seem to keep any of it in my line of sight. I can't read the Jodi Picoult (there was in interesting article in the Times about her, thank you Linden, and I'll have more to say about that tomorrow), fine. But I had to put down The Book of Night Women, which I had really wanted to read after hearing so much about it on NPR a few months ago. But the dialect was just hitting me too hard--it required real focus to read, because every time you picked it up, you had to get back into a very specific dialect. I do too much of my reading in one page spurts for that.

Somehow, though the YA stuff keeps me coming back. I'm not usually embarrassed about that, but right now I'm feeling a little like I've dropped the ball because of this. I'm going to push that aside, though, and just be excited that I have the next Bloody Jack book, In the Belly of the Bloodhound, and Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Hidden. I gave up on her Double Identity when I figured out the plot twist on page seven; I assume there's more to it than the twist, but I need to keep moving forward right now. I got New Moon, too, for some godawful reason--mostly because there's usually a long wait and there it was on the shelf. I just finished Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, which was such sweet fun.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I am very much enjoying The Nine. It'll take me a long time to finish, since I only read about five pages a day, but it's really interesting and dense with information. It's always fun when a nonfiction book has worldbuilding to do.

I had a bunch of other things to say, but my mind is all over the place. Another time, then.