Glowing Review

Before reading this book, you must read:

1. Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Jerome K. Jerome
2. A generous helping of P.G. Wodehouse (especially his early novels and Jeeves novels)

It would also behoove you to:

1. Read some of Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey mysteries
2. Have a familiarity with Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Read Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

I mean, let's be honest, you ought to have done all that already, unless you're just some kind of shameless failure. [I'm sort of kidding because, actually, I haven't yet read The Moonstone, only Collins's The Woman in White. But I do believe a disregard of Wodehouse is a critical character flaw.]

So, have you done that? Good. Now you're ready to read a book that will make you scrunch up your shoulders and grin so wide that you feel you're attempting to squeeze out all your excess glee. It's To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. It's the closest thing to a modern writer writing like Wodehouse I've found, and I didn't think that was even possible. There are overbearing aunt types and a sappy Madeline Bassett type and a poetry-quoting, infatuated Bingo type and an absent-minded Oxford professor and a retired Colonel obsessed with fancy goldfish and imposters and imminently capable butlers. It's obviously a tribute to Jerome, so much so that Harris, George, J, and Montmorency have a cameo on the Thames, as does a tin of peaches (or is it pineapple?). And it's a mystery: What happened to the bishop's bird stump? But technically, it's science fiction. YES. Because it is about time travel.

And it's just the best thing you can imagine. It's so funny, and it's genuinely romantic, and it's set in Oxford, and it's really exciting, and the last line is excellent. Oh my goodness. I am positively in love with this book. I can't say any more about it, or I'll give it all away.

Many thanks to Jenny for the recommendation.

Don't Play Their Game!

[This post won't be of much interest to you unless you've already read The Hunger Games. If you'd like to know more about it, here's my review. The following is more of a personal rant than a helpful review. Just know that I highly recommend both books.]

I picked up Catching Fire (sequel to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games) yesterday morning and completed it this afternoon. My eyes are tired and adrenaline is coursing through my veins. What can I say? It was very like THG in quality and theme. It picks up six months after the end of the games with more star-crossed loves, more wretchedness from those Capitol despots, more fights to the death, and a heap of political unrest. There is, as I expected, an agonizing cliffhanger ending, and I have no idea when the third novel of the trilogy will be published. Sorry. Aaagh.

Katniss's character is so damaged to begin with that she isn't much changed, aside from new nightmares reminiscent of the games. She struggles to protect her loved ones, not knowing whether she ought to play the government's game or rebel against it. I'm a little impatient with her slowness to rebel within the hunger games, to be quite honest. I understand that she's just a teenage girl, and technically she has been rebelling from the start of the series by trespassing and hunting. But there are all these obvious little hints that the oppressed people from multiple districts are looking to Katniss for leadership and inspiration, and she's clueless. So I'm sympathetic to her frustration that she is being used against her will and knowledge (by more than one faction), but I want her to grab control of the situation and do something really risky and smart and effective! Perhaps my expectations are too high for a 17-year-old girl. She's done amazing things already, and she spends a lot of time admirably questioning whether her motives are selfish and/or for the good. I'm too quick to compare her to Gregor from Collins's Underland Chronicles, who is younger yet wiser and more decisive. In a comparable war situation, he aims to avoid violence, choose mercy, and urges others to do the same. But of course, my critique of Gregor is that he is too young, at 11, to be a sword fighting warrior who petitions for peace.

Herein lies the value of Collins's novels. They fill me with excitement, revulsion, pity, and inspiration to the point of utter confusion. I am frustrated with protagonists on the basis of flaws which only make them more human, and yet they are fantastic, symbolic heroes. I struggle to put my impressions into stilted prose and am just going to give it up because, once again, fiction has done the job for me. However, if there's one relatable message I take from Collins's writing, it's that children can survive a lot; they're weak and strong and surprisingly resilient and thoughtful. With Free-Range Kids fresh on my mind, I'm convinced we don't give children enough credit for their intelligence and abilities at a very young age.

Worrying Less

"There has never been a single substantiated instance of any child dying from a stranger's poisoned Halloween candy." Infant formula, BPA, metal baseball bats, cell phone brain cancer, lead, raw cookie dough, and plastic bags are either less threatening than you'd think or completely non-problematic. A walking school bus and giving kids a chance to create their own games in PE are great ideas! "If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen? About seven hundred and fifty thousand years."

Awesome. I feel better. Much better. Thanks to Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry by Lenore Skenazy, I took Ben to the playground yesterday and didn't feel nervous when he crawled further away than usual, played with friendly strangers, ate dirt and ice cream, and took off his hat when he wasn't wearing sunscreen. I really like Skenazy's message, and I laughed out loud at her humorous prose multiple times. Now The Today Show seems even more alarmist than ever before. Mostly, it reminded me of the freedoms my parents granted me as a child, how much I enjoyed them, and how very much I benefited from them.

Here's a list of some of the best things my parents let me do before I reached age 20. All of these things made me brave and curious and eager to explore.

• I walked to school without an adult every day of elementary school. In the 4th and 5th grade, this was even more thrilling because it was a much longer walk (perhaps a mile?) and after school we would wander around and explore the huge drainage ditch. I still get an enthralled shiver when I think about that ditch.
• In the 5th grade, I went to Wild Animal Park camp and petted a cheetah. This may be the best animal experience of my life.
  
• When I was 9 or 10, I spent the night with a friend whose parents were gone most of the evening. She and I baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch. (They tasted horrible, but it's one of my most exciting baking memories.)
• In the 6th grade, my family and I walked down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I stood still while a street performer did a flip over my head. Everyone laughed, and no one voiced a concern that I might get kicked in the noggin.
• I spent many many hours as a kid just wandering around our neighborhoods, the mall, the movie theater, parks, and the community pool. Without a cell phone. I came home for dinner, then went back outside to play kick the can in the dark.
  
• In the 8th grade, I went on two trips with a girls' service organization from my church. On one trip to a college campus, I encouraged my friends to skip the activities and wander around the campus with me at night (I was so inspired by this that I decided right then I would go to college there, and that's exactly what I did). On the second trip we went to San Antonio, where I encouraged my friends to skip the activities and wander around the Riverwalk with me.
• My parents took us to Washington, DC. Our hotel caught on fire, but everyone was safely evacuated. We laughed and took photos of ourselves pretending to scream in horror next to firetrucks, then went to the zoo.
• When I got a driver's permit, my dad would often take me out in the "wart." During these drives he would recline his seat and pretend to nap, or fiddle with the overhead light and tell me funny stories. He didn't give me a lot of driving tips, he just told me not to trust other people's turn signals. Later he taught me how to drive his sports car like a fighter pilot (his profession).
• I never had a set curfew. My parents trusted me not to get in trouble, and I didn't.
  
• In my junior and senior years of high school, I went on two choir tours, during which I wandered around downtown Washington, New York, Toronto, Santa Fe, and Chicago completely without adult supervision and had a spectacular time.
• I went off to college. Without a cell phone. My mom and sister helped my carry my stuff in, hugged me, and left. It was the best three years of my life.
• When I was 19 years old, my parents put me on a plane to Frankfurt, Germany, with some cash and a Eurorail pass. Two days after I arrived in the little town of Iserlohn, I called my parents from a pay phone; I cried a bit and complained that I couldn't call the US on the phone in my dorm and someone had stolen my luggage wheels. When I hung up I felt better and went to eat some gelato. My parents didn't feel better, but there was nothing they could do, so they didn't. I had a glorious summer. I went on on several trips with my fellow students and two weekend trips all by myself. One afternoon when I was bored, I just wandered out of the town, up a mountain, through a thick forest of evergreens, and out into a wheat field just as the afternoon sun turned it light gold. It was possibly more beautiful because I was on my own and could have gotten completely lost (but I didn't).
  

I'm so very jealous....

Just check out Neil Gaiman's personal library here.

Of note: Of course there's a cat napping in the comfy chair. This is "Cat-Crazy Gaiman," as I shall henceforth refer to him.

Things missing that would be in my personal library fantasy:
1. cozy stone hearth
2. rolling ladder attached to the shelves
3. big globe
4. massive thesaurus on display
5. chrome tea cart full of tea things

1763: Reading about it is nice, but I wouldn't want to visit.

I just completed Gideon The Cutpurse by Linda Buckley-Archer, and I really regret not having checked out the second book in this trilogy, The Time Thief (published under the title The Tar Man in the UK).

And let me just take this moment to say that I am tired of publishers changing titles of books when they publish them in the States. The Tar Man is a far far better title, especially if you already know this character from reading Gideon!

Okay, back to it. In Gideon momentum builds slowly, the author taking care to develop characters and relationships. It's a time travel story about two 21st-century teens, Peter and Kate, sucked back into 1763. They receive the aid of Gideon, a former thief but gentleman, as they search for their time machine, stolen by the treacherous Tar Man. Buckley-Archer goes into fascinating detail to depict 18th-century England, as well as a few famous persons and places. Obviously I've never been to 1763 (I know you're all surprised by this), but I have one bone to pick. Peter and Kate would suffer dysentery for a week or more after eating the food and drinking the water back then!

That is my one small criticism, as I enjoyed everything else about the novel. The prose is elegant, there is occasional humor and plenty of suspense involving highwaymen, horse races, and science fiction-y stuff. Yes, it seems like it wouldn't all go together, but Buckley-Archer manages to make it work. I especially came to like the character Parson Ledbury, whom I feared at first would be a Falstaff-like buffoon or a judgmental buffoon (some kind of buffoon). He was neither and was a character who displayed greater depth and change, as well as humor and mercy, as the book progressed. What a pleasant surprise!

The cover design of the hardback edition is wicked cool. The spine looks like an 18th century volume, but the cover has a cutout crack with an eye peering through it. I picked it up at the library simply because the cover design captured my interest!

Note [added 8/31/09]: The American edition of Gideon The Cutpurse is titled The Time Travelers. I think the UK title and cover design are more interesting, but the artwork on the North American editions is still rather nice. The third Volume, The Time Quake, will be released in the U.S. in October.

Everything's on Vacation

It feels as though it has been an eternity since I've posted anything here, and really it hasn't (just since August 1). But still. It's because I'm so busy with baby care and other responsibilities, I'm having difficulty finding time to read. (This makes me feel very not myself.) In addition, I haven't read anything extraordinary lately. I did read the young adult novel Speak last week. I accidentally picked it up thinking it was by M.T. Anderson, and then Ickie pointed out to me it is by Laurie Halse Anderson. However, I saw it was nominated from some awards, so I gave it a try. It was a quick read and a well-written YA novel about a 14-year-old girl trying to come to grips with a traumatic experience. It had the high school-outcast thing going on like Veronica Mars, minus the snark and the noir. I appreciated LH.A.'s believable depictions of relationships at that age, the protagonist's difficult growth, and the open-ended finale.

What else? I read Nicholas on Vacation, which was just as funny and charming as the other Nicholas books. I'm currently reading Gideon the Cutpurse, which captured my attention largely because of the cool cover and is showing promise.

My reading choices have been slightly more limited the past two months because the state-wide library loan system has been down. Boo! It is due to restart at the end of this month, and you'd better believe I'll be flooding the system with all my requests! The sequel to Hunger Games is coming out in about a week, and my biggest goal is to find time to read it as soon as I lay hands on a copy.

More of a Good Thing

One might argue that you can't improve upon perfection, but I say, give me more of it, and you've done so! Nicholas Again by Goscinny & Sempe and Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome are great examples. I can't say for sure I've laughed harder at these follow-ups to Nicholas and Three Men in a Boat, but I've laughed at least as much. Tears of joy have been shed; hyperventillation has been experienced; a book has been set aside as I strain to compose myself and continue. And a good time was had by all, except for, perhaps, Ickie, who has to put up with my insistence on reading snippets to him. I know he'd prefer to read them for himself, but I am compulsive in my desire to share my amusement with him.

To wit, here follow some selections from each text. Nicholas Again contains more stories of little Nicholas going to school, happily fighting with his buddies, innocently terrorizing adults, and having a fabulous time. This is from the chapter "Prizegiving Day":

"There were prizes for everyone. Cuthbert, who is top of the class and teacher's pet, got the Arithmetic prize, the History prize, the Geography prize, the Grammar prize, the Handwriting prize, the Science prize, and the Good Behavior prize. Cuthbert is nuts! Eddie, who is very strong and likes to punch his friends' noses, got the Gymnastics prize. Alec, my fat friend who is always eating, got the Regular Attendance prize; that means he goes to school the whole time, and I suppose he really did deserve the prize, because his Mom won't have him in her kitchen, and if he can't be in the kitchen, Alec would rather go to school than anywhere else. Geoffrey, who has a very rich Dad who buys him anything he wants, got the Deportment prize because he's always smartly dressed. There are times when he's come to school in his cowboy outfit or his Martian suit or his musketeer's uniform, looking really great. Rufus got the Art prize because of the big box of colored pencils he had for his birthday. Matthew, who is bottom of the class, got the Good Comradeship prize, and I got the prize for Public Speaking. My Dad was very pleased, though he looked a bit disappointed when our teacher said the prize was awarded more for the quantity than the quality of my work. I'll have to ask Dad what she meant."

In Three Men on the Bummel, "J," Harris, and George are 15 years older. J and Harris are married with children, and George, it can safely be assumed, couldn't be bothered to get up early enough to find himself a girl. The three fellows choose to go biking in Germany for this holiday. In one of my favorite chapters thus far, J chronicles the misery of being awakened by Harris's unruly children in the middle of the night. After which, the three fellows stop in London to play a joke George has devised. He found a phrase book written for Germans visiting England, with lots of dreadfully awkward, stilted phrases, and George tests them out on London cabbies and shopkeepers. (Doesn't this sound like a joke we'd come up with today?) It sends a boot salesman into a rage.

The chapters set in Germany capitalize on amusing cultural differences (primarily the German obsession for rules and order).

"All three of us, by some means or another, managed, between Nuremberg and the Black Forest, to get into trouble.
Harris led off in Stuttgart by insulting an official.... Harris did not know it was an official he was insulting. He took it for a fireman (it looked like a fireman), and he called it a 'dummer Esel.'
In Germany you are not permitted to call an official a 'silly ass,' but undoubtedly this particular man was one. What had happened was this: Harris in the Stadtgarten, anxious to get out, and seeing a gate open before him, had stepped over a wire into the street. Harris mantains he never saw it, but undoubtedly there was hanging to the wire a notice, 'Durchgang Verboten!' The man, who was standing near the gate, stopped Harris, and pointed out to him this notice. Harris thanked him, and passed on. The man came after him, and explained that treatment of the matter in such off'hand way could not be allowed; what was necessary to put the business right was that Harris should step back over the wire into the garden. Harris pointed out to the man that the notice said 'going through forbidden,' and that, therefore, by re-entering the garden that way he would be infringing the law a second time. The man saw this for himself, and suggested that to get over the difficulty Harris should go back into the garden by the proper entrance, which was round the corner, and afterwards immediately come out again by the same gate. Then it was that Harris called the man a silly ass. That delayed us a day, and cost Harris forty marks."