Reading Is Sexy: What I Did On My Summer Vacation
16 August 2007Godless by Pete Hautman
(“Wait, so, no the Ann Coulter one? Huh. Go figure.” Come on, now. I don’t read books for grownups. Let alone crazy grownups). I got a copy of this at a CBC event about 3 years ago (huh, I wonder when that was… oh right, it was when my team won the first kids’ book trivia night. How could I forget) and it’s always been one of those “okay as soon as I have two hours where I’m not doing anything, I’m reading this” particularly after the whole “winning the national book award” thing, which I hear is kind of hard to do. And last week, I had many hours free after burning through season 2 of The Office in about a day (courtesy WorkFriendJen and her vast DVD collection), and I’m really happy I finally got to this one. I haven’t seen anything else that even tries to handle how hard it is to question religion as a teenager (other than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret… and the marketplace scene at the beginning of Life of Pi where the main character is asking why he can’t be many faiths at once and all the various religious elders can’t come up with anything better than “You just can’t, okay?”), particularly with such humor and flow. (I hate when people use the word flow. Sorry. It was better than “ease.” I think). Kind of Christopher Moore for 14 year olds. And it’s always fun to have a book remind you that you’re a crazy Christian, which somehow lead me to wikipedia to check out the list of patron saints, which never fails to amaze me. There is a patron saint for advertisers. And one for surfers (but it’s St Christopher, who’s allegedly a big fake. Sorry, dudes). And one for computer programmers (don’t make a y2k joke… don’t make a y2k joke…). And, my new favorite, St. Peter Celestine, patron saint of bookbinders, also known as Pope Celestine V, whose wikipedia article has a section that says See Also: Hermit. I hope someday my wikipedia article can be as fantastic.
Bloom by Elizabeth Scott
I’ve been wanting to read this since it came out in May even though I was a little confused about what it’s all about. (1) Good cover. Totally don’t mind the disembodied hand-and-head look that tends to bother me a lot. (2) Slightly odd flap copy, though I bet it’s really hard to write flap copy for books that people go on to describe as “quietly powerful.” (3) Trade paperback original instead of a hardcover, which I think is unusual for a literary author you’re going to build, but at the same time, I wouldn’t have bought it in hardcover so that decision alone got me to read this book. And I’m glad I did! Because now she’s one of those authors where I’m going to read every single thing she writes because this one really felt kind of early Sarah Dessen-ish and we all know how I feel about her.
You Are SO Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah! by Fiona Rosenbloom
I’ve been wanting to read this for awhile because the title is awesome and the cover is awesome and the general concept is generally awesome, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s pretty hilarious and comes across as kind of Meg Cabot Does Jewish Coming Of Age Rituals, right down to the dramatic scene at the bat mitzvah in question where the main character has a moment of clarity and does something no teenager would ever actually do in front of hundreds of people if they didn’t want to be That Girl for the rest of her life, as you find in most Meg novels. (I’m not being condescending, just observant. It happens, I’m fine with it). I think I’m actually going to have to read the sequel now. And I can’t decide if I can handle parting with it, but if I can I will obviously be sending it to Carolyn, whose bat mitzvah I enjoyed so thoroughly back in the day when we were wee middle schoolers together. My mom has the truly awesome picture of Cousin Danny and Cousin Erin and I standing in our grandfather’s living room, suited up and ready to head off to Carolyn’s Big Day, and it is priceless. Erin is smiling because she was totally beautiful, even as a 12 year old when no one should be beautiful (and because smiling is what you do for cameras and she wasn’t totally sullen like some of us) and Danny is smiling because he is also good looking and charismatic, and I am a foot taller than the pair of them and not smiling. If I could get my hands on that picture I’d totally put it up here just to keep myself humble. My second thought was to use a picture from my Sweet 16 where I’m wearing converses with my tights and dress at the end of the night because I was impossibly cool by then, if inept with tweezers as I have no eyebrows to speak of, but after scanning in 200 pictures for my Top Secret Project my scanner is in a coma, and fixing it was the domain of The (ex)Boyfriend. (See how I slipped that in there, all stealth like? So, yeah. As of this weekend. And, yeah. It’s pretty awful. Thinking about the reality of it is so upsetting that I’ve switched to trying to look at it like some kind of sociological experiment because so many aspects of my post-breakup life are oddly fascinating… like, I never knew what a small, small amount of fuel the human body needed to keep going. I must have been taking in about 450% more calories than necessary prior to this weekend, because as of right now I am completely off solid foods per constant mandates from my stomach and I’m surprised I have the energy to walk across the living room to check on my turtles, much less walk to my office and function like a {somewhat} normal person. And it was pretty remarkable that, within moments of one another, my dad sent me an email telling me that the Buddhists say “Who knows what is good and what is bad?” {response: sit on it, Buddhists} and my mom sent me an email suggesting I find a mantra to use to get me through this– a “simple positive truth” (she says I can’t use “I can’t believe how much this effing sucks” OR “crap, now I have to manage my own {losing horribly} fantasy baseball team, and cover the engraving on my iPod shuffle.” I picked a line from Finding Nemo. You can probably guess which one). And I can’t believe how amazing some people are about all this, and how some people can just say the exactly perfect thing at the right time and you wind repeating it to yourself for hours, but some other people just aren’t suited to this kind of grief counseling and should not be allowed to talk at all. For example, you should never say to someone in this position “you’ll find someone else.” nor should you start sentences with “You deserve to be with someone…” unless you’d like to be a target of my Misdirected Rage Cannon, which has been firing itself off left and right. On Monday I was sitting at my desk and yelled out “What. The. FUCK!” when I thought someone had taken my calculator while I was on vacation, only to then notice it sitting 6 inches away from where it normally rests, exactly how I had left it. Or when someone asked me what the price of stamps are and I went on an unprompted tirade about what a load of crap the Forever stamp is. {It IS. Ask me sometime} But mostly, it’s just really, really, really sad wanting things to be different but knowing that they can’t be. I know I’ll be fine– I’m already starting to be fine, much earlier than I thought I’d be, despite all of the weird manifestations like how on Sunday all I could think about was making JellO, so I made three boxes of it in individual cups and then later on profusely thanked myself for picking the sugar free kind as it kept me from going into insulin shock when I started inhaling them circa 3am. I am in bad shape now, but I know I’ll be in good shape eventually. Soon, even. Maybe. Thank you for your patience. And for practicing your words in your head before you say them out loud to me. And please keep being nice to me and don’t assume I’m fine just because I’m not crying. And keep sending me books. {thanks feez} Seriously).
The Girls by Lori Lansen
And now for something just as uplifting… a novel about twins joined at the head. Turns out I do read books for grownups sometimes, particularly when Target tells me I should. And I meant to force book club into reading this (we’re on book club “Summer Hours” through september, which seems to mean that we either don’t pick a book, or we do pick a book and no one reads it, or we just give up and pick a movie instead) and I wish I had because it is seriously phenomenal. I don’t even want to tell you about it because I feel like giving away even small and seemingly unimportant details would be taking away from it as a whole, but you should read this, and then give it to your mom to read. It feels very Mommy Book Club, like Water for Elephants and the Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Except awesome-er.
Beauty Shop For Rent… Fully Equipped, Inquire Within by Laura Bowers
First off: Look! The girl on the cover HAS A FACE and you can actually SEE it! I don’t know when we started doing the whole face-truncating thing and I get that it was probably after two twelve year olds went “but I like imagining how they look in my head!” and I agree that that is pretty much the entire point of books, but covers are also made with the intention of getting people to buy the books and there has to be a way to marry getting someone to buy the book without ruining their potential image of the characters with a headless horseman on the cover. And this cover is great! And I think it’s really well-representative of the book, which WorkFriend Kara would call “aw, shucks literature” (think: how to eat fried worms, because of winn dixie) with a few darker topics that make it a little older. I keep a notepad next to my bed because I’m always thinking about things I want to write about, either up here or as part of The Novel That Is Sucking My Soul Out, and also because it’s really hilarious to read things that made total sense as I was writing them down but will never make sense again. At one point I woke up and saw that I had written down “Halloween costume: Easter bunny.” What IS that? The worlds’ worst SAT problem? Anyway, when I finished reading this book I wrote down “bipolar parents are the new narrators with asperger’s,” which, while phrased in a manner that’s a little too flip, is something I’m seeing a ton of. I don’t think the mom in Beauty Shop is supposed to be manic, but extremely irresponsible, both with money and peoples’ feelings, but I’ve been reading a lot recently narrated by outstanding characters who have parents dealing with manic depression, which is an interesting topic that I’m worried is going to become repetitive pretty quickly. Like zoo internships. Tifaux Maggie and I were just talking about all the YA novels we’ve been reading that have characters with zoo jobs. Which is a great setting because of the other-worldliness you get without having to go fantasy, as well as all the animal behavior metaphors. Still. What was I talking about? This is a good book.
The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney by Suzanne Harper
Finished this last night– I thought I had already read it, but I think the cover just reminded me of this one. Mostly the font. Okay, fine, I’m crazy. After this, I’m going to read another galley about Lily Dale, NY (Lily Dale: Awakening), a town I’ve never heard of that has recently warranted two YA books in the same season (and, according to my Amazon search, a move with Mary Stuart Masterson), having been founded over a hundred years ago during the American Spiritualism movement (was that really a thing? Maybe I should have taken some American studies classes when I was going to the oldest college in the country. Huh). These kind of trends always fascinate me– two authors got struck with this lightening bolt at the same time? Did Oprah do a show or something? Based just on its description I think the other title (Awakening) is going to be the more intense one, and Sparrow Delaney will be the quirkier one. There’s lots of fun hooks– Sparrow is the 7th daughter of a 7th daugher in a family full of mediums where all the girls are named after birds (quirky, you say?) who has chosen to keep all of her psychic gifts to herself in the hopes of living a “normal” life, even though she’s constantly hounded by ghosts asking her to deliver messages. So it’s kind of A Certain Slant of Light meets John Edwards: Crossing Over meets, uh, The Penderwicks? Maybe? I’ll be interested to read the other one.
3 Responses to “Reading Is Sexy: What I Did On My Summer Vacation”
August 16th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Yesterday at bar hop someone claimed to be attending the oldest public college in the country (he goes to UNC Chapel Hill) and I almost threw a drink at him because people working on MD-PhDs shouldn’t be that ignorant. But I didn’t, because I am learning self-control, at least with regard to wasting alcohol.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
if you need more books i have a million, billion of them at my disposal. nothing takes your mind off your own problems like reading about somebody else’s! hooray for my favorite coping method.
also, we were quite shocked to learn about the other lily dale book. le sigh. ours is super quick and REALLY series-tastic, but i’ve got the MS of #2 for when you reach the end and want to know what happens next.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Thanks for the book reviews. With the broken elbow and surgery next week, I need some good reading.