We Wish You Whatever You Want…

…whether that be time alone or time with (imaginary)friends; books aplenty or wrestling for the remote, playing video games and watching movies; time to sleep or late night walks to oogle lights; high energy last-minute midnight shopping, or cider and a fire and music on the stereo. We wish you whatever you want, whatever you need…we wish you well.

Joy to Your World from WritingYA!

Holidazed

Today is the first day of… holiday for me. I think holiday feeling is almost a choice, like love or sobriety. You just sort of look internally and decide to set aside the grimness for a moment at a time… For some people, the right music, the right cookie, or the best holiday lights help a lot. For others, it’s just the right book. What’s your favorite thing to read during holidays? Do you return to read the same piece again? Unlike most normal people, I grew up absolutely hating O. Henry’s classic Christmas tale, and I wasn’t all that fond of Dickens’ ghostly tale either (although the less familiar Cricket on the Hearth is easier to bear.) But I was — and am — and always will be a Grinch fan. (And you know I mean the real book, or Bob Jones’ 1966 animation, not the recent vexatious film.)

Theodor Geisel’s family maintains that he was not into the “sentimentality” of the holidays, thus his lying, sneaking, thieving hero. I like that the mean guy is the hero, though Little Susie Who was cute… because it’s not how you start out that’s important; it’s how you end up, which was what Dr. Seuss was saying. So my wish for you: may you end up… where you mean to be.

A title is born: Harry Potter and the What?! Play the game with JK and go into a room, click on an eraser… and after quite a few twists and turns you’ll find out the title… getting to the title on the website sounds like it’s a lot more fun than writing the last book in the series. Poor JK, she’s lived with Harry for years. It must feel like breaking up, knowing she’s rounding the corner toward the end for the last time. She reports that she’s started dreaming about Harry… and the wait staff in the cafe where she writes. Perhaps she should cut back on the coffee.

I’ve read Hanukkah books that I’ve really liked before, but after watching the lighting of the National Menorah this year, I kind of cringed. What’s UP with that huge blue dreidel guy!? These guys are much better: Bubie & Zadie are way cool. It’s a classic tale that’s based on the author’s memories of living in Alaska, and though it’s gone out of print, it’s back with better illustration so that more kids can enjoy it. The idea that children are invited to write letters, email or visit their blog and leave messages gives topping up points to Hanukkah. It’s just as cool and full of miracles as any other holiday.

Three cheers: My editor has finally emerged from beneath the piles of things that have occupied her to email me and say that January is my month! I am both ebullient and alarmed by this thought. Cheer two: I have two great heaping bags of books next to my bed, and none of the reading is for Cybils! (although the short lists are due to be posted January 1. Eeeek!) Yay! Cheer three: I have four pounds of cranberries and two pounds of satsumas, and I am thinking of a lovely bread to share with the neighbors. And of making some chutney. And maybe some fruitmince. Ah, the sugary smells in the kitchen! And the tasting! Oh, the tasting! And the gym avoidance! Yes! Excesses and avoidance: It is indeed a holiday!

However, the toilet is now leaking, so I must hie me to the hardware store instead.

Mature behavior.
Sigh.

Notes From All Over

Greetings! The long silence was due to the frantic finishing of the Cybils requirements, but now that my top 10 is in the bag, I am resting up for the wrangling ahead. Okay, I’m lying. Actually, I’m jonesing for another book… it’s seriously frightening, now that I don’t multitask with a book on my lap while doing everything else (eating dinner, watching TV, doing the bills, listening to the sermon) I don’t know what to do with my hands. I may have to start reading the paper when it comes and even knitting again, horrors! Just another two weeks before we can happily drop this Cybil stuff in the laps of the judges… and may I say to you, dear ones, be prepared? You have a lot of long conversations ahead of you. Already the YA group is trying desperately to figure out how to narrow our list of books down…

I’ve been meaning to share something I read in the paper. Did you know that according to German scientists, if you’re feeling bad about yourself, you should not read mysteries? No, seriously. If you’re already feeling kind of stupid, apparently you should just read something… else. Something with no twists at the end to trip you up.

Hmm.

And, if you can figure out the plot of the mystery you’re currently reading? Does that boost self-esteem and cause you to cut people off in traffic with an air of superiority? Does this explain SUV’s?

Can I give a little snivel of self-pity? Via Book Moot we learn that yet one more of our favorite comics, Foxtrot, is going off the “air” except for Sundays. Waa! My mornings will not be the same without Paige and Jason’s squabbles. Jason is the child I shall never have… much like Calvin was the other child I shall never have. Man! All of the very best comic strips leave before I’m ready for them. The Far Side was one of the first. Yet I’m pretty sure the weird serial manga stuff our paper carries now on Sundays is going to be something nobody remembers …tomorrow.

While noshing on the ever-available cookies, I browsed a tabloid-esque paper to discover that there’s something new in lit’triture. In the beginning there was audio… I think. Maybe. Or maybe it was movies. But nowadays, the big thing isn’t necessarily to have your book made into a movie, or to have an online chapter-by-chapter adaptation of it. Now to be really cutting edge? You have to break into graphics. Or so it is said by those fans of Stephen King, who are excited that his Dark Tower series is being unveiled with Marvel Comics on February 7th.

In more news, Disney has got its fingers on Enid Blyton‘s classic Famous Five series, and reactions are pretty mixed. Some are cheering, but I’m not sure how great it is that once again folks aren’t looking for new creativity, but trying to recreate the wheel, which is rolling along just fine. Of course, the new Five are going to be the offspring of the original characters, and the series will allegedly be cartoonized, but one wonders if Mickey + Enid Blyton = Better Blytons or make them better or worse than some people already fear they are.

Via Fuse #8, you now have everything you need to write an epic novel — huzzah! You know you want to begin one right now, during the school break! Of course, should you actually manage to write one including ALL of these fine stock characters, I will be ever so interested in reading it! Probably no editors will be, but hey — you take what you can get, right?

What's Wrong With This Picture?!

This was forwarded to me in an email this week:
Memo to All English Faculty
Tentative Summer Reading List of Nameless High School

Prep: A Novel (Paperback) by Curtis Sittenfeld
From Publishers Weekly: A self-conscious outsider navigates the choppy waters of adolescence and a posh boarding school’s social politics in Sittenfeld’s A-grade coming-of-age debut. The strong narrative voice belongs to Lee Fiora, who leaves South Bend, Ind., for Boston’s prestigious Ault School and finds her sense of identity supremely challenged. Now, at 24, she recounts her years learning “everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people.” Sittenfeld neither indulges nor mocks teen angst, but hits it spot on: “I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a piece of scrap paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed… never decreased my fear.” Lee sees herself as “one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls” among her privileged classmates, especially the über-popular Aspeth Montgomery, “the kind of girl about whom rock songs were written,” and Cross Sugarman, the boy who can devastate with one look (“my life since then has been spent in pursuit of that look”). Her reminiscences, still youthful but more wise, allow her to validate her feelings of loneliness and misery while forgiving herself for her lack of experience and knowledge. The book meanders on its way, light on plot but saturated with heartbreaking humor and written in clean prose. Sittenfeld, who won Seventeen’s fiction contest at 16, proves herself a natural in this poignant, truthful book. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré.
In this sixth volume of the epic series, the Dark Lord, Voldemort, is wreaking havoc throughout England and Harry, now 16, is more isolated than ever.
From School Library Journal: Grade 5 Up–It’s no surprise that everyone’s favorite teen wizard is still battling Voldemort. What does perplex the young hero is a forgotten textbook with secret writing that brings together Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic, 2005). J. K. Rowling returns Harry, Hermione, and Ron to Hogworts amidst troubling signs that the Dark Lord and the Deatheaters are gaining strength. Fortunately, Headmaster Dumbledore is helping his apt pupil prepare for an expected showdown by taking Harry to remembered incidents in the life of his old enemy. Less dangerous, but still disturbing, Ron and Hermione have put Harry in the middle of their incessant bickering. Then there’s Slytherin Prefect Draco Malfoy who’s under orders to commit murder–but who is his intended victim? Finally, Professor Snape is now teaching the Defense of the Dark Arts class, but he appears to be doing some dark deeds of his own. A blossoming relationship with Ginny Weasley is a bright spot for Harry, but another personal loss forces him to make some grave decisions by the novel’s end. – Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT: Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Paperback) by Roddy Doyle
Amazon.com
In Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they’re just a little bit restless. They’re always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn’t have to. All they want is for something–anything–to happen.
Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make his little brother’s hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping on it just one time: “I jumped on Sinbad’s bottle. Nothing happened. I didn’t do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen.” Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to change forever–and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes that his parents’ marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward off further fighting. It doesn’t work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy’s logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. –Jill Marquis
From Publishers Weekly: Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel, told from the perspective of Irish, working-class 10-year-old Paddy Clarke, was a seven-week PW bestseller.

The March: A Novel (Paperback) by E.L. Doctorow
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold collateral damage. In this powerful novel, Doctorow gets deep inside the pillage, cruelty and destruction—as well as the care and burgeoning love that sprung up in their wake. William Tecumseh Sherman (“Uncle Billy” to his troops) is depicted as a man of complex moods and varying abilities, whose need for glory sometimes obscures his military acumen. Most of the many characters are equally well-drawn and psychologically deep, but the two most engaging are Pearl, a plantation owner’s despised daughter who is passing as a drummer boy, and Arly, a cocksure Reb soldier whose belief that God dictates the events in his life is combined with the cunning of a wily opportunist. Their lives provide irony, humor and strange coincidences. Though his lyrical prose sometimes shades into sentimentality when it strays from what people are feeling or saying, Doctorow’s gift for getting into the heads of a remarkable variety of characters, famous or ordinary, make this a kind of grim Civil War Canterbury Tales. On reaching the novel’s last pages, the reader feels wonder that this nation was ever able to heal after so brutal, and personal, a conflict. — Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

ON BEAUTY, by Zadie Smith.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. This is a superb novel, a many-cultured Middlemarch, but it’s a rough one for an actor. James juggles a large cast of Brits and Yanks, middle- and working-class white, African-American, West Indian and African men and women, as well as street teens, wannabe street teens and don’t-wannabe street teens. James has a beautiful, deep voice that at first seems antithetical to Smith’s ship of fools, but he enhances the humor and pathos with vocal understatement. He helps give characters their rightful place in the saga. The parade of characters swirl around two antagonistic Rembrandt scholars in a Massachusetts college town. Howard Belsey is a self-absorbed, working-class British white man married to African-American Kiki and father to three cafe-au-lait children. Monty
Kipps is a West Indian stuffed-shirt married to the generous Carlene, with a gorgeous daughter, Veronica. The book is funny and infuriating, crammed with multiple shades of love and lust, midlife and teenlife crises. Class, race and political conflicts are generally an integral part of a story that occasionally strays from its center. The theme of beauty as counterpoint to individual, family, cultural and social foibles and failures ribbons through the novel and wraps it up, perhaps to say that Beauty is, finally, the only Truth. — Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

The Painted Drum: A Novel (Paperback) by Louise Erdrich
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review: Though Erdrich’s latest lyrical novel returns to Ojibwe territory (Four Souls; Love Medicine, etc.), it departs from the concentrated vigor of her best work in its breadth of storytelling. Erdrich essays the grief that comes when the sins of parents become mortal for their children. Native American antiquities specialist Faye Travers, bereaved of her sister and father, ambivalently in love with a sculptor who has lost his wife and loses his daughter, stumbles onto a ceremonial drum when she handles the estate of John Jewett Tatro, whose grandfather was an agent at the Ojibwe reservation. Under its spell, she secrets it away and eventually repatriates it to that reservation on the northern plains—the home of her grandmother. The drum is revived, as are those around it. Gracefully weaving many threads, Erdrich details the multigenerational history surrounding the drum. Despite her elegant story and luminous prose, many of the characters feel sketchy compared to Erdrich’s previous titans, and several redemptions seem too pat. But even at low voltage, Erdrich crafts a provocative read elevated by beautiful imagery, as when children near death fly off like skeletal ravens.

NON-FICTION
BOSS TWEED: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York By Kenneth D. Ackerman.
From Bookmarks Magazine
For historians, Tweed “is worth his weight in gold” (New York Times). Ackerman, who has written previous books on Gilded Age excesses, focuses on the years after 1870 when Tweed hopscotched between court and jail. Critics agree that Tweed, his cronies, and the crusading journalists responsible for his spectacular downfall come alive. Colorful details and a clear-eyed approach to both Tweed’s great leadership and even greater crimes highlight his opportunist philosophy and antics, though his formative years remain a mystery. A poor sense of chronology, combined with failures to address revisionist claims that Tweed was an “honest grafter” and examine his effect on the “soul of modern New York,” weaken the book. Despite these flaws, Boss Tweed is an excellent history with modern-day parables.

These are the books passed along to me by an English teacher at a high school which shall remain nameless… she is bemused and somewhat horrified by what is seen as a “contemporary” summer booklist, or the beginnings of such. Contemporary, meaning… ? We’re not sure.

I’m not questioning the value of the books themselves. I’ve read a couple of these, and what I have read is quite good. There are several really strong authors, etc., that interest my more adult tastes, but as hard as it is to get some teens to read, I think, to put it mildly, some other choices could have been made. I suppose the department head was trying to be sure that minorities were represented, and women, and military personnel, and rich kids and beleagured wizards… Honestly, I am looking, but I can’t figure out what else was going on in their head. I cannot imagine being the English teacher required to have a discussion with high school freshmen about any of these texts.

Forgive my snark for saying so, but sometimes I am glad I opted not to teach English for a living. This would give me such a headache.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?!

This was forwarded to me in an email this week:
Memo to All English Faculty
Tentative Summer Reading List of Nameless High School

Prep: A Novel (Paperback) by Curtis Sittenfeld
From Publishers Weekly: A self-conscious outsider navigates the choppy waters of adolescence and a posh boarding school’s social politics in Sittenfeld’s A-grade coming-of-age debut. The strong narrative voice belongs to Lee Fiora, who leaves South Bend, Ind., for Boston’s prestigious Ault School and finds her sense of identity supremely challenged. Now, at 24, she recounts her years learning “everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people.” Sittenfeld neither indulges nor mocks teen angst, but hits it spot on: “I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a piece of scrap paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed… never decreased my fear.” Lee sees herself as “one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls” among her privileged classmates, especially the über-popular Aspeth Montgomery, “the kind of girl about whom rock songs were written,” and Cross Sugarman, the boy who can devastate with one look (“my life since then has been spent in pursuit of that look”). Her reminiscences, still youthful but more wise, allow her to validate her feelings of loneliness and misery while forgiving herself for her lack of experience and knowledge. The book meanders on its way, light on plot but saturated with heartbreaking humor and written in clean prose. Sittenfeld, who won Seventeen’s fiction contest at 16, proves herself a natural in this poignant, truthful book. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré.
In this sixth volume of the epic series, the Dark Lord, Voldemort, is wreaking havoc throughout England and Harry, now 16, is more isolated than ever.
From School Library Journal: Grade 5 Up–It’s no surprise that everyone’s favorite teen wizard is still battling Voldemort. What does perplex the young hero is a forgotten textbook with secret writing that brings together Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic, 2005). J. K. Rowling returns Harry, Hermione, and Ron to Hogworts amidst troubling signs that the Dark Lord and the Deatheaters are gaining strength. Fortunately, Headmaster Dumbledore is helping his apt pupil prepare for an expected showdown by taking Harry to remembered incidents in the life of his old enemy. Less dangerous, but still disturbing, Ron and Hermione have put Harry in the middle of their incessant bickering. Then there’s Slytherin Prefect Draco Malfoy who’s under orders to commit murder–but who is his intended victim? Finally, Professor Snape is now teaching the Defense of the Dark Arts class, but he appears to be doing some dark deeds of his own. A blossoming relationship with Ginny Weasley is a bright spot for Harry, but another personal loss forces him to make some grave decisions by the novel’s end. – Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT: Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Paperback) by Roddy Doyle
Amazon.com
In Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they’re just a little bit restless. They’re always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn’t have to. All they want is for something–anything–to happen.
Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make his little brother’s hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping on it just one time: “I jumped on Sinbad’s bottle. Nothing happened. I didn’t do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen.” Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to change forever–and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes that his parents’ marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward off further fighting. It doesn’t work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy’s logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. –Jill Marquis
From Publishers Weekly: Doyle’s Booker Prize-winning novel, told from the perspective of Irish, working-class 10-year-old Paddy Clarke, was a seven-week PW bestseller.

The March: A Novel (Paperback) by E.L. Doctorow
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold collateral damage. In this powerful novel, Doctorow gets deep inside the pillage, cruelty and destruction—as well as the care and burgeoning love that sprung up in their wake. William Tecumseh Sherman (“Uncle Billy” to his troops) is depicted as a man of complex moods and varying abilities, whose need for glory sometimes obscures his military acumen. Most of the many characters are equally well-drawn and psychologically deep, but the two most engaging are Pearl, a plantation owner’s despised daughter who is passing as a drummer boy, and Arly, a cocksure Reb soldier whose belief that God dictates the events in his life is combined with the cunning of a wily opportunist. Their lives provide irony, humor and strange coincidences. Though his lyrical prose sometimes shades into sentimentality when it strays from what people are feeling or saying, Doctorow’s gift for getting into the heads of a remarkable variety of characters, famous or ordinary, make this a kind of grim Civil War Canterbury Tales. On reaching the novel’s last pages, the reader feels wonder that this nation was ever able to heal after so brutal, and personal, a conflict. — Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

ON BEAUTY, by Zadie Smith.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. This is a superb novel, a many-cultured Middlemarch, but it’s a rough one for an actor. James juggles a large cast of Brits and Yanks, middle- and working-class white, African-American, West Indian and African men and women, as well as street teens, wannabe street teens and don’t-wannabe street teens. James has a beautiful, deep voice that at first seems antithetical to Smith’s ship of fools, but he enhances the humor and pathos with vocal understatement. He helps give characters their rightful place in the saga. The parade of characters swirl around two antagonistic Rembrandt scholars in a Massachusetts college town. Howard Belsey is a self-absorbed, working-class British white man married to African-American Kiki and father to three cafe-au-lait children. Monty Kipps is a West Indian stuffed-shirt married to the generous Carlene, with a gorgeous daughter, Veronica. The book is funny and infuriating, crammed with multiple shades of love and lust, midlife and teenlife crises. Class, race and political conflicts are generally an integral part of a story that occasionally strays from its center. The theme of beauty as counterpoint to individual, family, cultural and social foibles and failures ribbons through the novel and wraps it up, perhaps to say that Beauty is, finally, the only Truth. — Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

The Painted Drum: A Novel (Paperback) by Louise Erdrich
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review: Though Erdrich’s latest lyrical novel returns to Ojibwe territory (Four Souls; Love Medicine, etc.), it departs from the concentrated vigor of her best work in its breadth of storytelling. Erdrich essays the grief that comes when the sins of parents become mortal for their children. Native American antiquities specialist Faye Travers, bereaved of her sister and father, ambivalently in love with a sculptor who has lost his wife and loses his daughter, stumbles onto a ceremonial drum when she handles the estate of John Jewett Tatro, whose grandfather was an agent at the Ojibwe reservation. Under its spell, she secrets it away and eventually repatriates it to that reservation on the northern plains—the home of her grandmother. The drum is revived, as are those around it. Gracefully weaving many threads, Erdrich details the multigenerational history surrounding the drum. Despite her elegant story and luminous prose, many of the characters feel sketchy compared to Erdrich’s previous titans, and several redemptions seem too pat. But even at low voltage, Erdrich crafts a provocative read elevated by beautiful imagery, as when children near death fly off like skeletal ravens.

NON-FICTION
BOSS TWEED: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York By Kenneth D. Ackerman.
From Bookmarks Magazine
For historians, Tweed “is worth his weight in gold” (New York Times). Ackerman, who has written previous books on Gilded Age excesses, focuses on the years after 1870 when Tweed hopscotched between court and jail. Critics agree that Tweed, his cronies, and the crusading journalists responsible for his spectacular downfall come alive. Colorful details and a clear-eyed approach to both Tweed’s great leadership and even greater crimes highlight his opportunist philosophy and antics, though his formative years remain a mystery. A poor sense of chronology, combined with failures to address revisionist claims that Tweed was an “honest grafter” and examine his effect on the “soul of modern New York,” weaken the book. Despite these flaws, Boss Tweed is an excellent history with modern-day parables.

These are the books passed along to me by an English teacher at a high school which shall remain nameless… she is bemused and somewhat horrified by what is seen as a “contemporary” summer booklist, or the beginnings of such. Contemporary, meaning… ? We’re not sure.

I’m not questioning the value of the books themselves. I’ve read a couple of these, and what I have read is quite good. There are several really strong authors, etc., that interest my more adult tastes, but as hard as it is to get some teens to read, I think, to put it mildly, some other choices could have been made. I suppose the department head was trying to be sure that minorities were represented, and women, and military personnel, and rich kids and beleagured wizards… Honestly, I am looking, but I can’t figure out what else was going on in their head. I cannot imagine being the English teacher required to have a discussion with high school freshmen about any of these texts.

Forgive my snark for saying so, but sometimes I am glad I opted not to teach English for a living. This would give me such a headache.

Holiday thoughts from Our Jane

This foggy, dim, and rainy weather is the best time of all to go down into the basement of your favorite independent book re-seller(dear old Copperfield’s) and browse among that sweet, dry, used-bookish smell. Normally, I love old books, and have found some great treasures I missed by not being born in the 1960’s, including books by Dodie Smith and some great old Joan Aikens — and I am always trying to palm off my favorites from bygone eras on my poor hapless siblings, niece, former students, and random strangers on the street. UK author Sarah Burnett also found some great old books at a charity sale, and blogs about her old faves – reading them, and discovering that they are racist, classist and sexist. Um, what they? Do you still try to get people to read them?

Hm…

Meanwhile, in my continual and timid adoration of Jane Yolen (timid in that I have yet to actually speak to her, continual, in that I plan months ahead to attend a conference where she will speak [psst! don’t forget to REGISTER, guys!]) I continue to haunt her online journal (or, I guess they call that lurking), and this week found quite a funny screed about her work habits vs. the work habits of the rest of the world, and how writers simply cannot just assume that because they work a particular way, they are going to be a good writer or a bad one. However something else caught my particular attention, and in light of the fact that sometimes writing seems like a rather frivolous occupation in view of the continuing situations in myriad locations around the globe, I’ve been thinking about it. A reader asked her the question, “How can a fantasy writer help innocent people dying on another continent?” Her reply is excellent:

Alas, just the way anyone else does — by sending money to the Good Guys, like Doctors Without Borders, or clothing and food through recognized charities; writing your congress critters, voting your conscience.

Oh, perhaps you mean how to help using one’s writing? We fantasy writers, like all writers, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Our words can make people think, can change minds, can influence opinion. But our job as fiction writers–as opposed to sermon writers–is to do all this through the medium of story.

So how can you help, etc? Work hard, BIC, write characters who sing and don’t preach. Make landscapes that replicate in odd ways the underlying passion of your literary creations. Remember “May the metaphors be with you.” Don’t be fooled into thinking you are just an entertainer. But don’t be fooled into thinking you are more than one, either.

Hm. Well, here’s to making people think.

The Twelve Days of Whining


Ah, ’tis yet again the season:
The joy continues tonight with both sibs in elementary/junior high holiday programs, tomorrow night a benefit concert at the nonprofit early childhood center for which I volunteer, the morning of the 19th is the brunch and concert for the adult chorale, and the 21st is the concert date for the smallest kids to sing out of key and ring triangles and jingle bells for their parents’ camcorders. My fellow Cybil-ites can be sure that I’ll be lugging along a book bag to each and every one of these concerts — except to the one I’m singing in — theoretically — and eventually I’ll get in the spirit, perhaps put up a few decorations… eventually…
I’m just not yet in the mood for all of this! But, the holidaze continue, whether you’re in the mood or not. At least it is raining and I am eschewing the dubious joys of the mall for making my UPS guy work that much harder… One of the funniest things about the Cybils is the daily book drops via UPS and FedEx. The guys are looking at me like I’m crazy. “What are you ordering?!” one of them asked me the other day.
They will be crushed to know that I have not yet begun to shop… heh heh.

The Happy Season of EidChrisSolKwanZukkah Continues

Now that my abortive entry into National Novel Writing Month is over, I feel like some of the pressure is off for my life to begin again. (Cheers to A.Fortis for finishing, however!) Only, there’s not so much beginning going on with the blog. I comfort myself that there’s not much going on in the publishing/YA literature world at this time of year anyway… Short of the blanchingly bad sex awards (not necessarily an award you want listed on your book jacket, eh?), the sad litany of deaths of authors, and an amusing piece on the sadism of Peter Rabbit in the Guardian, everything else in publishing news now is “Best of” lists or worse, gift guides, and I’m plugging my ears singing “La, la, laaaa!” because I simply cannot think of gifts or shopping yet for anybody while my big pile of Cybil reading is yet to be done (I have twenty more books to read out of the original eighty, so I am feeling quite pleased with myself!). However, I expect most of my fellow bloggers are all frantically shopping and singing and lighting candles, dressing up, attending prayers, burning incense, eating well, and decking the halls anyway, so before you have time to miss me, I’ll be back. In the meantime, thought I’d take a break from reading and reviewing to wish you all the type of holiday you enjoy — whether it be full of people and events or completely silent and cozy. I am already enjoying the best of taking time off to relax, thanks to my reading. After all these great books, I shall be ever so spoiled — the perfect attitude with which to begin a new year.

Proud Blogger

Oh, I am SO outing A. Fortis, my fellow blogger. It’s her fifteen minutes of fame, but I’m so proud of her that I have to spill it — she got to read a piece of her work today on her local NPR station!! All of us Mills Girls and your fellow YA writers are excited for you, A.F.! So they closed Cody’s on 4th before you could read your future novel there, but they’ll never close NPR (we hope. Stay away from public radio, Gubernator!)!

Many happy returns of your public novel reading occasions!