Project 50 Redux: May, June Backlog

I'm sorry that I've been so lax in posting new book reviews. I feel like I haven't been reading very much at all, so it doesn't occur to me to write reviews.

May
"A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Austere Academy" by Lemony Snickett
I plugged along with this series even though I was getting kind of bored with it, but this book did not disappoint! There was an actual cliffhanger involving some new characters, two triplets at a boarding school to which the Baudeliere children are sent. I'll keep reading this series after all! A-

"A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Ersatz Elevator" by Lemony Snickett
I think the vocabulary in these books is getting more advanced as the series goes on. This was probably the first time since Book 2 that I was kind of afraid for the orphans' lives because the action was pretty intense, and the problem from the last book was still not resolved, so we'll be seeing the triplets again. B+

"Are All the Giants Dead?" by Mary Norton
This was one that I read out loud with one of my students that I watch after school/during the summer. It's kind of a fairy tale, except that it borrows characters from multiple fairy tales, ages them, and throws in a boy from modern times who gets to the fairy tale land apparently by way of a dream and a journalist guide. I found the story kind of wanting for new material, especially in the first part of the book. And of course, it's all a dream, so there's that old ending. C

June
"The Edge Chronicles: Beyond the Deepwoods" by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle
This is another one that I read out loud with my student. It's nicely illustrated by Chris Riddle. Twig, raised by woodtrolls in the Deepwoods knows that he's not really a woodtroll. When he is 13, his mother tearfully tells him that she found him in the woods and raised him as her own, and that he needs to leave their home. On his journey to find his destiny, he runs into dangerous and wondrous races and creatures in the Deepwoods. What I liked and also disliked about this story was that EVERY chapter had him happening upon some other form of danger. The poor boy doesn't get a rest until the end when he finds out who he really is. It's a good start though, and there are several in this series that I'm going to keep trying to read. A-

"1984" by George Orwell
This was one of my favorite books in high school, especially because of the concept of Newspeak. I love how you can tell from the first sentence that something is just not right in this distopia. The story is thick with warnings about control of the media, control of the police, prescribed jobs and behavior. Upon rereading it, I could tell that Winston was doomed the whole time. If anyone has never read it, I kind of consider you a poor human being. In the 2008 election, the term "Orwellian" was used a lot by people who didn't get it, even from my own grandmother, who had never read Orwell. I found that really sad. It's a wonderful frightening book. A

You've got 12 hours to make me a very happy lady

I've recently become involved with the HP Alliance, a non-profit collaboration of Harry Potter fans from all over the world who band together to fight evil and injustice in the world. It's like Dumbledore's Army for real! We work towards improving literacy (collecting 55,000 books to send to underserved areas), campaigning for human rights, and recently raised $123,000 dollars to fill FIVE cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti after the earthquake. It's an incredible organization full of caring people who are committed to making significant changes in the world.

Right now we are entered in a contest to win $250,000 from Chase Giving. Even if you can't come to my super awesome birthday party, you can give me a great present by taking about 10 seconds to vote for HPA on Facebook so we can get some serious funding to do some serious good.

Here's a little video about HPA:



And here's the link that you need to vote. Thanks guys!

All The Single Ladies (and single men)

I've been feeling the sting of being single a lot more lately. It's May, so wedding season is coming up, and my engaged webfriends are talking about their bridal showers and arguments with the DJ and the drama that their FHs and FMILs are making (that's "Future Husbands" and "Future Mother In Laws" for those of us who don't live in the world of family acronyms. First comes FH, then comes DH, then comes DD and DS in a BC.) At church, I am the only adult who is not married, much less with children. The pressures of marital roles don't apply to me, so I pretty much have nothing to talk about besides work and crafting and my cat, which just makes me sound like an old cat lady. At work, I'm the only single person who doesn't have kids. I haven't heard from many of my other married friends since fall.

I don't mind being single right now. I mean, I'm going to England for a year, and I'm really glad that I don't have to leave anyone behind. I just wish our kind were not so invisible in the world, the single non-parent. There's a Mother's Day, a Father's Day, wedding anniversaries, date nights, play dates, where those people receive praise and love and surprises because they've got the privilege of being attached to other people, but single people who live alone throw their own birthday parties. There's an Offbeat Bride site and an Offbeat Mama site, but an Offbeat Singles site would just be an online dating site for hippies and ex-punk rockers. I don't know how to have a good time as a single person since my friends moved away or got married because the only information out there for single people is how to get un-single. Maybe that's a plus but it's really not what I'm looking for.

I'm glad I'm not going to a big church right now because this is how it would work: If you're single, 1. something is wrong with you and you need to go to the meat market group to get un-single, and 2. while you're at it, you've got nothing better to do with your time than to serve the married people and parents so they can get a much deserved break. I liked hanging out with middle schoolers then and I hang out with high schoolers now, but the pressure and obligation for single people to take care of other people's kids while they go get their spiritual fix is intense.

I don't think that most married people recognize the special needs and internal struggle of single people (looking or not), or the way we get excluded from the common experience of home life and children. I'm reading a book about singleness and how we get unhappy with being single because of our marriage script. From youth we mark off an age at which we would like to be married. For me, I passed that marker on my last birthday, nearly four years since the end of my last relationship. My mother was 28 when she got married, and I feel like if I get there, it's all over. I watched my four older cousins marry at increasingly younger ages, so now I feel like it's my turn. We get an idea of the kind of person we want to marry. I wanted (and it's really common for people who are shy and insecure to get this idea) someone that other people thought was just the coolest, so they would be jealous and wonder how someone like me could land someone so great. I want children more than I want to be a wife, and with every new year, I feel like that chance is being taken farther from me. I wish there was a way that married or engaged people could learn to be more...considerate? That's not the word I'm looking for...just more aware of all that we go through.

Project 50 Redux: April

“A Scanner Darkly” by Philip K Dick
This was a good, gritty, slightly futuristic book about drugs and drug investigation and where they meet in one man. As the main character’s brain gets more damaged by Substance D, his sense of himself as one person dissolves, and he starts to see himself as a separate person from two different points of view. The only thing that I think keeps it from being a really good book is that it goes on for just a few chapters too long. When I came to the part that I thought was a good stopping point, I was disappointed to find more and it kind of ruined the ending for me, and really didn’t add anything more to the story. B-

I also read “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix again. Did I really only read one new book this month? I’m slipping.

Project 50 Redux: March

“Schuyler’s Monster: a Father’s Journey with His Wordless Daughter” by Robert-Rummel Hudson
Schuyler (pronounced Sky-ler, I couldn’t make myself think that through the whole book) is the author’s daughter, who was born with a brain deformity that caused her to be unable to speak. The family spent several years just trying to get a name for her condition, which the author calls “the monster.” Even though he emphasizes his daughter’s fascination with movie monsters and how much he loves her even though she is different, I have to admit that I was pretty uncomfortable with him calling her condition a “monster”. I did like to read about her parents championing for her to get what she needed in school, despite doubting speech therapists and penny pinching school bureaucrats. I’ve read a lot of book by parents of children with autism, but this one was really interesting to me because I’m particularly interested in working with children who are non-verbal. A-

“A Child Called ‘It’” by Dave Pelzer
I saw Dave Pelzer speak a few days after I graduated high school, a few days after I’d broken up with my high school boyfriend, who was abused by his father-figure and wallowed in it. I remember that trying to express what Pelzer had overcome in himself to survive against a veritable Eeyore fortress was frustrating. I’d never read the full account of the inhumane abuse he endured as a child, singled out from his brothers as his mother’s scapegoat, narrowly escaping death sometimes by pure will not to let her win. It makes me admire him as a person so much more now. This book is not light reading. It’s horrible to think that a parent could torture a child so much. I think that it’s important for people to know these things though, especially people who plan to become parents or for people who work with children, to repel that evil-ness away from their relationships with children and to recognize signs of child abuse. A

“Wicked” by Gregory Maguire
This novel is based on The Wizard of Oz, but follows the birth and life of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West. Elphaba is born with green skin, to a mother who cheats and an ultra-pious father. She is sent away to school where she meets Galinda and a troop of other characters with “Wizard” connections like a Munchinlander and a Winkie prince. Following a violent incident at school, Elphaba leaves and gets involved in a conspiracy, things go wrong there, she leaves, and eventually she owns the role of Wicked Witch of the West. I felt like I was maybe supposed to feel sympathetic towards Elphaba, but she was so bitter and closed off, without any real hidden gems of virtue in her at all, that I never did like her. But I never got fond of Galinda either, because she was so shallow. I kind of felt the story did a bait and switch with Elphaba’s love life, and I didn’t understand why the author chose that character for her lover. It was interesting to see where this alternate story lined up with the Wizard of Oz sometimes, and sometimes it was overwrought. It’s good, but had some flaws as a story. B-

I also read “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” again this month.

Project 50 Redux: February

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
This is a graphic novel-style non-fiction memoir by a woman who grew up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Her parents were Communists and many of their friends were targeted and imprisoned or killed. She grew up with a fervor for knowledge and a gutsy stick-it-to-the-man attitude, encouraged by her parents, which got her into trouble when she questioned the rewritten history she was taught in school after the change in government. To be honest, I have little knowledge of Iranian political history, so in some parts of the book I just had to take her word for it, which was sometimes hard because it was written in the style of the age the author was at the time. I think it was interesting to have the combined perspectives of 1. a woman in 2. a liberal family in 3. a Middle Eastern country with its share of political and religious conflict. B+

“Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
This book really held my attention well considering that not much action actually happened for most of the book. It is the tale of two English magicians, the only two “practical magicians” in England, at the time of King George III. To keep the story moving along, the author finds ways of weaving new characters into a deep-held secret that only Mr. Norrell and the reader really understand for most of the story. Even though it’s an 800+ page book, I never really found myself bored because I got invested in the separate storylines that were sometimes close together and sometimes almost unrelated, and sometimes tied to actual events in history. Characters from previous parts of the story kept popping back up and knitting the storylines back together. I wasn’t all that satisfied with the way that the story ended because I felt like it should have been more finished, but the rest of it was so involved I felt like I was actually in the time period. A-

“Artemis Fowl” by Eoin Colfer
The premise of the book really put me off. Artemis Fowl is a young genius and heir to the fortune of a crime family which has lost its partriarch. He’s twelve and is just too brilliant and too cocky for my liking. I just don’t like books in which children are given more autonomy than they are supposed to have. He cooks up a plan that involves kidnapping a fairy soldier (I’ll admit that the rewriting of folklore into a “what humans think they know but don’t” mythology was pretty clever) and holding her for ransom, negotiating with the supernatural military for her release, pretending to want something that he doesn’t… oh it was all too contrived for a twelve year old. Maybe it would be more fun for someone who actually is twelve or younger, but I’m not buying it. C-

“The Ride Together: a Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family” by Judy Karasik and Paul Karasik
This book was co-written by the brother and sister of a man with autism. The sister writes in normal chapters, and the brother delivers his experience in graphic novel style, which worked especially well in some parts because of his brother’s interest in Superman. I especially liked it because the brother with autism was older than both of them, so they don’t tell much about his childhood, but mostly the family’s experiences bouncing him around to different group homes as an adult and his visits home during vacations or transitions. One transition near the end of the book was hard to read about because it came about when the facility was shut down because of abuse of residents by the caretakers. It spoke to me as a person who works with people with disabilities to say never, ever take advantage of a situation in which you are the person in power. A-

“Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” by Robert C. O’Brien
I think the last time I read this book I was in the fourth grade. It’s a little bit magical to read something that you thought you knew as a kid. I didn’t remember all the action in the story happening within just a few days, but that was probably because my class read the story over several weeks with vocabulary and comprehension sheets in between. The way the rats build up their civilization is so imaginative and complete, I can really see why this book was a Newberry Award Winner. A-

Project 50 Redux: January

I’m still working through “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which is an 800+ page monster, so I haven’t had time for much else.

"Coraline" by Neil Gaiman
I saw the movie before I read the book, and honestly…I liked the movie better. I felt like the book moved too fast without all the other extra things that the movie put in. As a book alone, it’s ok, but I didn’t get all that attached to Coraline even. C+