Looking back at 2010

One great thing about having a blog is that I can go back and look at my resolution post for New Years and see how I did.  So how did my 2010 compare to the great visions I had for it 12 months ago?  Let’s find out.  (I realize that this might be one of those posts that’s only interesting or useful for me.  I won’t be offended if you skip over it!)

I had 10 goals in 2010 (I’m so clever.):

1) Healthier equals happier. Yeah, I think I accomplished this.  Back in January 2010 I was the heaviest I’ve ever been in my whole life and even though I haven’t lost all that much weight, I’m slowly (oh so slowly) making this part of my life better.

2) Spending does not always equal happier. I need to do better with this one!  Since Spain I’ve been trying to build back up some savings.

3) Stress-free equals happier. I did pretty well managing my stress at the beginning of the year and over the summer, but this holiday season has been particularly stressful for whatever reason.  I try to remind myself every day not to let the little things stress me out, but I could be doing better (not that that needs to add another stress on my life).

4) Read more classics!  Read 15 classics published before 1970.  FAIL.  I read 3.

5) Use challenges as a way to focus reading, to read more books by women, by people of color, by authors from different countries. Well, even though I gave up all my challenges, I still did an excellent job.  Of all my reading, I had almost a 50/50 split between men and women and over 50% of my books were written by a POC author or featured a prominent POC character.  I do want to read more books in translation and from different countries in 2011.

6) Find more of a balance between the genres of fiction, non-fiction, recently published and older novels, YA and middle grade. This sort of happened organically.  I read a lot more non-fiction and a lot less YA this year, two things I wanted to accomplish.  (Not because I don’t love YA, but just because I wanted my reading to be more balanced.)  I also read more recently published novels.

7) Read more poetry & 8) Read more short stories. Both of these were failures.  I did read some poetry, but not enough in my book and I read barely any short stories.

9) Find more time in my life for things like crocheting and cooking healthy meals. Win!  I actually read a lot less books this year than last year and I’m totally okay with that, because I’ve been crocheting and cooking a lot.  I’m also on my way to finishing my first knitted scarf.

10) Write more. I’m going to do this.  Really, I am.  I didn’t in 2010, but… I will in 2011!

So…um… 4.5/10.  But this isn’t a numbers game – overall, 2010 was a great year and I’m so pleased with the goals I did accomplish.  Besides, I can’t be perfect. I have to have  some goals for 2011, right?

Enjoy your New Years Eve, kids.  Check back in 2011 for my new New Years Resolutions!

The White by Deborah Larsen

This is one of those times when I picked up a book and judged it solely based on its cover.  While browsing through the library stacks, this cover and title stuck out at me.  The stark title covering that unreadable face of that little girl… it just caught me.  So I grabbed it and that cover kept staring at me from my pile of library books.

The story behind this cover is just as haunting.  I knew going in that this was the story of Mary Jemison, a young girl who was captured by Shawnee Indians and was eventually adopted by Seneca women to replace their brother who was killed in the French-Indian War.  I often find fault with historical fiction, either for what it did or did not include.  I was worried that such a slim volume would do the same injustice to Mary’s story that I felt Malinche by Laura Esquivel did to La Malinche: in an effort to be spare and literary, the essence of the story is lost.  I found that I believed Larsen’s narrative more than I did Esquivel’s, perhaps because The White only employed the first person sometimes, not the entire time.

Though there are details about the Seneca and Shawnee ways of life in this novel, and as far as I can tell they are fairly accurate, the strength of this story is the prose.  This is a novel meant to be enjoyed for its language, which makes sense since language was originally the only way that Mary really had to connect herself to her previous life.  There are a lot of touchy subjects addressed here, like scalping and all the retribution that went on between Indians and white settlers, but there are no villains here.  No side is evil, no murder is worse than another.  Yes, what happened to Mary’s family was awful.  But what happened to the young man Mary replaced?  That was also horrifying.

Mary is conflicted, as she should be.  There is nothing glossed over, Mary hates her father for not protecting her and she hates her captors for not being her family, but she also grows to forgive her father and love her new family, because they love her.  Larsen expertly weaves historical fact with the imagined, drawing much of Mary’s narrative from her actual account of what happened to her, as told to Dr. Seaver in the last years of her life.

The White is not perfect and at times I was confused as to how much time had passed or where we were geographically, but these are small complaints.  The prose is nothing short of gorgeous.   Not only that, but beyond making me interested in Mary Jemison’s story, I’m also more interested in Native American/Indian culture now than I ever was before.  I want to read some non-fiction, both about Mary’s story and about the French-Indian War and, in general, the treatment of American Indians.  Any suggestions?

This is another book that you could probably find a quote on every single page, but here are is my favorite:

I had never known moss as I learned to know it among the Seneca. From my new family I learned to diaper my babies with it.  Moss was soft and did not irritate the skin.  It held much of the wettings and dried out quickly.  I had known the word for moss first in English and then in Seneca and I had seen moss and had touched it, but only now, dressing my baby with it, did I know it.  And the word “moss” was but richer in my sight.

It came to me that I could listen, could memorize, could speak, could tell stories, could sing, and that in two languages to be sure.  That was what I would do. I would not let one word escape me; I would speak new words aloud as I learned them so as not to forget them.

I would pay attention to the human voice; I myself would speak carefully and expressively; I would never mumble.  And I could give my children this gift: the words, the names, the arrangements of words, the pitches – rising notes,  falling notes.  I would teach them about the world using my ears,  my throat and my tongue.

I would speak the things of the earth out loud, so loud that the moon itself would feel called upon and would incline to my signals.” (129)

This is the only novel that Deborah Larsen has written and I want to read more.  The White was such a pleasant surprise, because I honestly didn’t expect much.  Historical novels, especially ones so closely based on one primary text, don’t often do the main figure justice, but Larsen certainly does.  I’m going to be jumping to read Larsen’s memoir just to find more of that gorgeous prose.

So go read this!:  now| tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

2010, what a wonderful year!*

*for reading that is!

2010 seems like the longest year of my life. When I look back to what I was reading at the beginning of the year, I can’t believe that that was still 2010.  You mean I only read Anne of Green Gables this year?!  I only just read and fell in love with Blankets in 2010? That wasn’t last year? Are you sure?

Blogging has had its share of ups and downs this year, but I’m pleased to be ending the year on a strong note, with only more hopes for more excellent reading and blogging in 2011.  Over the past few days I have gone back and reread a lot of my posts from the early days of Regular Rumination and I think that my little blog and I have really come into our own over the last few months.

In terms of reading, there have certainly been some hits and some misses, but for the most part, I would say that my reading of 2010 was great.  So here we are, the 2010 Regular Rumination Awards.  These are the books that struck me as particularly wonderful, that still stick with me all these months later, that I think you should be reading to make your 2011 as excellent a reading year as my 2010 was.

To avoid this just being a normal old top ten list, I’ve added made-up superlatives.

The book that was so good, I had to reread it immediately

Is anyone surprised by this choice?  When I read Blankets back on the 2 of January, I was blown away.  When I turned the last page, I went back and started it all over again.  I stayed up until the wee hours of the night rereading and reliving the relationship between Craig and Raina – in fact, I’m pretty sure I’d like to name a future daughter Raina.

What makes Blankets the best graphic novel I read this year?  The drawings absolutely took my breath away, but so did the story.  Thompson weaves together the story of his relationship with his brother and family with the story of his first love.  It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and changed the way I read graphic novels forever.  I can’t wait for Thompson’s newest, Habibi, to be released.

Honorable mention: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Best Precocious Child Narrator

This book was a total surprise.  I don’t even know how it came into my hands, other than the fact that we all know I’m enticed by a blue cover with adorable pictures on it.  What I wasn’t expecting was one of the most intelligent, endearing middle-grade fiction books I have ever read.  Bapu is Anu’s grandfather and one day, while they are out walking, he collapses.  What follows is Anu’s journey to find his grandfather again after he has passed away.  This book with simultaneously crush your heart and heal it again.  Anu has such great friends and such a great family and such wonderful insights that somehow never seem out of place coming from such a young person.  I want everyone to read this book, it is wonderful.  It deals with such heavy topics, but is also so funny.

 

Honorable Mention: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Most Underrated Book By A Book Blog Darling

This is a book that I don’t think I ever expected to end up on this list, but here it is: Flight by Sherman Alexie.  Alexie has had his fair share of coverage on a lot of book blogs, especially for his most recent foray into YA with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I loved that book, but this one is better.  Most critics didn’t like it, but I say, they are crazy.  This book is great.

Zits, our narrator, is a homeless and poor Indian boy who, in a fit of desperation, decides to blow up a bank.  Instead of dying when the bomb goes off, he is transported back in time to inhabit some famous historical figures.  Yes, the premise is different, but that is why I loved it so much.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  If I had one complaint it would be that this book is too short.  Probably one of the best compliments you can give a book, now that I think about it.

Honorable Mention: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

Best Book Worth All the Hype

Look, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, is my favorite book of 2010, BUT it is a book that I think is worth the hype it received.  Is Franzen the greatest American novelist? Um, no, but he is a great US novelist.  This book so perfectly captures a specific time in our history and has made me even more eager to pick up The Corrections, Franzen’s first novel.  Maybe that will make my list next year?

Honorable Mention: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick



Best Book I Want To Put in the Hand of Every Girl/Woman I Know

It was tough to choose between the two Robin Brande books I read this year, Fat Cat and Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature, and while I thought Mena was such an amazing role model and the combination of religion and science in Freaks of Nature was brilliant, I had to pick Cat.  Maybe it’s because I saw a little bit (okay, a lot) of myself in Cat.  I wish Cat was real so we could be best friends.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I cannot wait for Brande’s next book, because I know it will be amazing.  It’s as simple as that.  Not enough people are reading these books.  Why aren’t you reading these books?  Hmmm?  Why?

Honorable Mention: Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande and Reading Women: How the Great Book of Feminism Changed My Life by Stephanie Staal

Best Memoir in a Year Full of Excellent Memoirs

I read so many great memoirs this year that I didn’t even get a chance to review them all and going back to pick my favorite was difficult.  I finally decided on Flyaway by Suzie Gilbert because it’s just so unique and I learned so much.  Gilbert is a wild bird rehabber and her journey is just so interesting and full of humor.  I dare you to read Gilbert’s memoir and not be charmed.

Honorable mention: Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli









Biggest Disappointment

I don’t think Great House by Nicole Krauss is a bad book, but I had such high expectation for it and it floundered under those expectations.  I don’t know if that’s my fault or the fault of the book.  It was such an even book that it was even more disappointing.  There was real greatness here, but it was ruined (for me) by the inconsistencies.

Honorable Mention: The Maze Runner by James Dashner



But let’s end this on a happy note…

Favorite Classic of 2010

Mrs. Dalloway is beautiful and contains easily some of the most amazing writing… ever.  I would have quoted the entire book if I could have.  I’m so glad the Woolf In Winter readalong made me read it, because I loved it.

Honorable  Mention: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (a very close second!)

2010 was a great year for reading, but here’s to hoping 2011 is even better!  Happy New Year, everyone!  I’ll see you next year, lolol.

On this day, a blog was born.

My very first blog banner!

Please forgive my irreverence, but today is a special day! On this day, in 2008 (2008?!) I was home from college and bored out of my mind, because I had nothing to read.  So I got on the internet to look for books to check out from the library and what did I find?  A book blog.  I knew, immediately, that my floundering, sad, pitiful little blog had found just what it needed – a community.  So on that fateful day in December, I wrote a new introductory post and wrote comments on all of your blogs, introducing myself.  And people commented back.  Oh my, it was  a beautiful thing.

Yes, I probably broke 1000 rules of blog etiquette, but you all still welcomed me with open, loving arms.  The face of my little blog has changed since then, but the idea remains the same. Read good books and talk about them – that’s why we’re here, right?  And hopefully, that’s why we’ll be here for many years to come.

Thank you, all of you, for making Regular Rumination such an amazing place. Thank you for being honest, for being kind, for being the least bit interested in what I have to say.  I can’t believe it has been two years, but here’s to many more!

A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

Is it too repetitive to tell you that A Wrinkle in Time changed my life?  It opened up the world for me, both the world of literature and my life.  I was camping, with my parents, right before my sister was born, and I remember trying to explain to my mother what A Wrinkle in Time was like.  She is not a reader and I think she was baffled, but she nodded and smiled as I described to her what it was like to be in Meg’s world.  I want to read everything she has written, but I don’t ever want to run out.  Slowly I’m reading her books that I’ve never read.

In any case, when I found myself wandering around a used bookstore a few weeks ago and I found a large portion of the shelf devoted to Madeleine L’Engle books, I purchased almost their entire stock.  Included were the first two books of The Crosswicks Journals, A Circle of Quiet being the first one.

This book was like sitting down with Madeleine L’Engle and having a conversation.  She talked about everything, from society, to her past and present life with her husband and children, to sex and marriage, to religion.  She states very plainly at the beginning of the memoir, “I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things” (32) and I took that to heart throughout the reading, because L’Engle often contradicts herself or believes contradictory things, but she never apologizes for it.  And reminds us that “an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking.  We do have to use our minds as far as they will  take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way” (32).

The Crosswicks Journals are a series of memoirs that begin with A Circle of Quiet, detailing several summers at the Crosswicks cottage, Madeleine and her husband Hugh’s summer home.  L’Engle repeatedly discusses ontology, something I admit I had to look up:

thephilosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations (from Wikipedia).

In that sense A Circle of Quiet is an ontological study of L’Engle herself, by herself.  If that sounds self-indulgent, maybe it would be if L’Engle’s thoughts weren’t so interesting.  She has an opinion about everything, and I would be lying if I said I agreed with absolutely everything she wrote about.  I don’t, but I never doubt that if I’d had the chance, we could have had a lively debate with no hard feelings.  I was very interested, as I imagine many readers are, of L’Engle’s religious beliefs.  Unlike other authors, say CS Lewis, who have a distinct doctrine in their texts, L’Engle’s books always had an air of religion, but nothing explicit.  And frankly, if you’re looking for some direct answers, most of L’Engle’s contradictions are when she talks about religion.  But I kind of liked that, because who really has all the answers about something so big as religion or religious beliefs?  If someone says they do, I have to admit, I’m not going to believe them.

Madeleine gives advice throughout the memoir, on everything from relationships and raising children to writing.  I treasured especially her advice to writers, young and old, experienced and inexperienced.  Some of my favorites:

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.  I go to my typewriter with reluctance; I check the ribbon; I check my black felt pens; I polish my collection of spectacles; finally I start to put words, almost any words, down on paper.

Usually, then, the words themselves will start to flow; they push me, rather than vice versa. (162)

Why do you write for children?’  My immediate response to this question is, ‘I don’t.’  Of course I don’t.  I don’t suppose most children’s writers do.  But the kids won’t let me off this easily.

If you want to raise my blood pressure, suggest that writers turn to writing children’s books because it’s easier than writing for grownups; so they write children’s books because they can’t make it in the adult field.

If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children.  If a book is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended and I am dishonoring books.  And words. (198)

This book was published in the 70s and the world has undoubtedly changed a lot since then.  L’Engle made some predictions for the future and I would love to be able to hear her reactions in relation to those predictions and how the world actually turned out.  I wish I could have known L’Engle.  I wish I had written her a letter when I was that 9 or 10 year old girl whose whole  world changed when she read one slim book.  But this memoir is as close as I’m going to get and I guess I will have to be satisfied with that.  At least I still have two more to read…

A few more favorite quotes:

The language of logical argument, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate.  But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. (194)

Probably my favorite passage from the entire book:

During one dinner, Alan mentioned that men who feel  that it is not God who is dead, as some theologians were then saying, but language that is dead.  If language is to be revived or, like the phoenix, born of its own ashes, then violence must be done to it.

This seemed to me to be a distinct threat.  If language is dead, so is my profession.  How can one write books in a dead language?  And what did he mean by “doing violence to language”?  I began to argue heatedly, and in the midst of my own argument I began to see that doing violence to language means precisely the opposite of what I thought it meant.  To do violence to language, in the sense in which he used the phrase, is not to use long words, or strange orders of words, or even to do anything unusual at all with the words in which we attempt to communicate.  It means really speaking to each other, destroying platitudes and jargon and all the safe cushions of small talk with which we insulate ourselves; not being afraid to talk about the things we don’t talk about, the ultimate things that really matter.  It means turning again to the words that affirm meaning, reason, unity, that teach responsible rather than selfish love.  And sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone.  Then, through thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew. (133)

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR pile

Rebecca Reads also wrote a post about A Circle of Quiet.  Did you?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll add your post here.

Poetry Wednesday – Ruth Stone

All week I have been searching for the perfect poem to feature today on Poetry Wednesday.  I have two book reviews coming up and both authors are poets (Madeleine L’Engle and Deborah Larsen), but I couldn’t find any complete or reliable examples of their poetry online and didn’t have time to request anything from the library, so a Poetry Wednesday that coincided with those reviews was out of the question.  I had The Best American Poetry 2003 checked out from the library, so I decided to give that ago.  Let me just say, I’ve been so disappointed!  Nothing in here is really very interesting at all, and maybe it’s just because it was  all very trendy stuff 7 years ago that just isn’t my aesthetic, but I’ve only liked 3 or 4 poems I’ve read out of at least 100.  Finally, though, after reading 3/4 of the book, I found a poem that I thought suited my tastes and Poetry Wednesday.  Maybe one day I’ll include a poem I don’t really like so we can talk about that, but not today.  Today I have a poem by Ruth Stone, a local Virginia poet who I think I will like very much.  I’m thrilled to have found her work and hope to read more.  Here is the poem chosen for today, titled “Lines”.

Lines

Voice, perhaps you are the universe,
the hum of spiders.
If on the mountain a single bear
comes into the orchard;
much less, the husk of a locust
drops from the currant bush;
or the wind rattles a loose clapboard,
exchanging one skin for another -
it is the self longing to cross the barrier.
Sensing the visitors who hide among us,
the air enters and takes away.
Sharp as the odor of fresh sawdust,
the color of lost rooms,
those erotic odors, angst of brevity;
like crossing your thighs
in a spasm of loneliness.

__________________________________________

A lot of times, it’s better to know nothing about the author.  A poem should be able to stand alone, and I believe this one does.  However, the life story of the  poet adds even more  to this poem.  I know that some people say we should ignore the life story and history of the author, but I think it can be a good thing.  No the poet does not always talk about himself or herself, but they often do.  Let’s look at Stone’s history: Ruth Stone grew up on rural Virginia and in 1959, her husband committed suicide, leaving her alone to raise three children.  I read this poem before knowing that and again after.   Those last five lines are so poignant when you put it in that context.  The more I read this poem, the more it moves me.

Harry Potter Changed My Life, Too: Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli

Let’s start this post with a sad story, okay?  It’s a sad story that has a happy ending, so don’t worry about that, but this story begins in a sad place.  Middle school is bad for most people, but I had a particularly torturous time.  Kids were just so mean.  I was a chubby kid, who loved to read, who didn’t listen to cool music, who had horribly uncontrolled frizzy hair.  I didn’t know how I was going to make it through middle school and was  terrified that, if anything, high school would just be worse.   I read constantly, just to escape the world I had to live in every day.  I would hide books in my textbooks during class (and get made fun of for it).

Then, somewhere in the middle of seventh grade, Harry Potter came along.  No, Harry Potter didn’t help my popularity or make my time at school easier, but it gave me something better.  At first, Harry Potter was just a pure escape to a world as complete as my own that I could get lost in.  Then, it gave me my first online community.  Though Regular Rumination is my first blog, I’ve been an active and proud member of online communities since 1999.  I immersed myself in Harry Potter, from fan fiction to fan art, and no longer was going to school so unbearable when I knew that I had the books and plenty of people to talk with about them just a click away on the computer.  Harry Potter brought me out of a particularly dark time in my life.  I crave the feeling I got from reading through the first three Harry Potter books and wish I could anticipate a book as much as I anticipated Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, probably my favorite book of the series (tied with The Prisoner of Azkaban).

So when Amanda of The Zen Leaf linked to her review recently of Harry, A History by Leaky Cauldron webmistress Melissa Anelli, I knew I had to read it.  I frequented The Leaky Cauldron regularly when I was in the throes of Harry Potter fandom, but didn’t know much about the creator or its history.  I would call this book a memoir, rather than just a history of Harry Potter.  It’s more like a combination of the two, because while there is quite a bit of information about the Harry Potter phenomenon, it is also Melissa Anelli’s personal experiences with Harry Potter and the way being a part of the HP fandom changed her life.

A lot of this wasn’t necessarily new to me, but I was quite a bit younger than Anelli when all this happened, so it was interesting to see a lot of events that I remember from a more adult perspective, because a lot of it is clouded in my adolescent memory.   The book begins with Anelli’s story of how she became involved in HP fandom and how she became editor of one of the post popular websites for Harry Potter news and ends with the culmination of all that work with a post-Deathly Hollows interview with Rowling.

What I loved most about this book was how much Anelli’s own excitement about Harry Potter reminded me of my own and how I could relive a little of that through her.  It has made me go back and reread all my fan fiction (some of it laughably bad, some of it actually pretty good, if I do say so myself).  It has made me want to reread all of the books, for the umpteenth time.  I want to feel all of that again, all the joy and sadness and community that is Harry Potter.

I’m sorry if this post seems more like a collection of my own experiences with Harry Potter, but that is kind of what this book is like.  Yes, the book is specifically about Melissa Anelli’s experiences as webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron and the Harry Potter phenomenon, but in turn that leads to you talking about your experiences and remembering where you were when all this was happening.  Part of you wants to be the biggest Harry Potter fan out there, you want to love it more than the next person, but the rest of you wants to share everything you love about it with everyone you know.

I did learn some things from Harry, A History, such as I had no idea how big Wizard Rock had gotten since I stalked Harry and the Potters website for news about a library tour date that was close enough for me to hitch a ride to (it never happened!).  Or how intense the Hermione/Harry and Ron/Hermione shipping wars actually got. I went back to read my fan fiction to determine which ship I belonged to, but I wrote mostly fan fiction about the previous generation, so Harry’s parents.  So I really don’t remember! I don’t think I ever saw Harry and Ginny getting together, but I was ultimately happy they did.  I loved having an inside look into the movie premiers and the interactions Anelli had with Rowling were amazing and I’m so jealous.  I’d love to get to meet her, as I imagine anyone who has read the books would.

And those were just the topics that struck me.  There’s so much here, that even the most seasoned and knowledgeable Harry Potter fan will find something to love here, if it’s only another way to relive that experience all over again.  Anelli does such an amazing job capturing that joy.  Like this!  This makes me so happy:

At Leaky, we were always hearing from people who had been taught to love books through their love for Harry.  We also  heard from dyslexic children who’d fought to overcome their disability in order to read Harry and by doing so realized they could overcome dyslexia almost entirely.  Priscilla Penn, a Leaky reader, told me that her niece, Kaitlin, had a substandard reading comprehension level before she started reading Harry Potter in late 1999.  By the next year her grade level had been brought to normal, and she was enthusiastic about reading.  The same happened for Kodie, a late-teen juvenile delinquent from Terre Haute, Indiana, who was illiterate before he discovered the series; his foster mother Shirley Comer, a nurse, had started reading Harry Potter to him while he was in a juvenile rehabilitation center.

“Now, he wants me to bring him any kind of book on mythology, or Star Wars books.  He even tackled Lord of the Rings,” Shirley said.  She even found him a book on psychology that was appropriate for his comprehension level.  ”It’s helping him understand himself a little better, and that’s something that I would never have thought he would have been able to read and enjoy.” (160)

I also got a little reassurance that I wasn’t the only one who felt a certain way about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

“So far, Harry had become a whiny bastard and had shouted down everyone who had ever been good to him in his life.  Nothing was magic and happy and enchanting anymore.  Harry was arrogant and prideful and petulant, and kept doing and saying things before thinking, and, in general, had turned into someone I had little interest in spending eight hundred more pages with.” (163)

But eventually, and it took me years to get to this point, I really appreciated what Rowling did to Harry in book 5.  I was that lucky group of kids that got to grow up with Harry.  I was 11 when I started reading the books and I was 18 when they ended.  I was an emotional, whiny 15 year old when I was reading about Harry being a whiny, emotional 15 year old in Order of the Phoenix.  Maybe I saw too much of myself there?

Not only am I eternally grateful for the way Harry Potter changed my life, I’m thrilled that it changed other people’s lives as well and I’m so happy that Melissa Anelli committed that joy to paper.   So if you love Harry Potter, if you want to experience all that again, then read this.

So go read this!:  now| tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy, The Zen Leaf and Shooting Stars Mag all wrote posts on Harry, A History also.  Did you? Let me know in the comments and I will add your link to this list.

TSS – The Dog-Ear Manifesto

I always get a lot of flack for being an unapologetic dog-earer of book pages, library and personal copies alike.  (I can hear you all gasping right now, as I type.)  But please, hear me out.  I have here for you today, The Dog-Ear Manifesto.  The top six reasons that dog-earing a book should not only be accepted, but embraced!

1) You have a bookmark wherever you are!  No more tearing up old receipts or your child’s school art project.

2) When you dog-ear a page, there’s never any fear that you will lose your place!  Your bookmark can’t fall out when it’s part of the page.  Even if the page becomes un-dog-eared, you can still usually tell where you dog-eared a page.

3) It does little to no real damage to a book.  So the page is bent a little, it’s not the end of the world, but usually you can’t even tell!

4) Instead of writing in a library book, or using up a ton of paper, I can mark a page with a fabulous quote without hurting the book.

5) It saves the environment! You don’t have to make extra bookmarks, there’s one built right in to your book!

6) Whenever I see a library book that has been dog-eared, I immediately begin thinking about that other reader.  Are they a kindred spirit?  What did they think about this page, why did they stop here?  Was it just a good place to stop or did something interrupt their reading?  Did they find something particularly moving on this page?

A dog-eared book is a well-loved book.  Pass it on.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben wrote one of the first books on global warming (a title I do not like, so from now on, I will call it climate change) back in 1988.  He warned us all that if we did not change our ways, in 100 years or so we would be living on a very different planet.  Well, he was wrong.  We’re living on that different planet now.  A planet so different, but that still sort of looks like the planet we all know and love, that we might a s well call it Eaarth.

Let me explain why I don’t like the phrase global warming.  Whenever I would tell people that I was reading a book about global warming, they would invariably say something along the lines of, “Global warming?!  It’s 25 degrees outside!”  But, if I said that I was reading a book about climate change, people automatically changed their response.  They would say things like, “Oh yeah, the weather is really different now than when I was a kid!”  Or, “Did you hear about that [insert strange weather formation]?”  People just respond better to the term climate change, for all its ambiguities.  If I could change one thing about the way we talk about climate change and global warming, it’s that we would simply refer to it as climate change.  Would that solve all our problems? No!  But it might help.

Okay, back to Eaarth.  The bottom line of this book is simple: Look at what we’ve done to Earth, look at what we can do to help.  It is organized very succinctly into 4 chapters.  The first two chronicle the changes that are already occurring and what will happen in the coming years.  The second two chapters, and last 100 pages, talk about changes that need to be made and includes some practical real world examples of how our society is already changing to accommodate our new world.

I am of two minds of this book.  I think it is excellent and I think it should be required reading but I do not think it can stand alone. I also don’t think McKibben intended it to, but I found myself wanting more.  I thought it easily could have been 4oo pages instead of 200, because I wanted more practicality.  I agreed with most of what McKibben said, and even though he really did use a lot of real world examples, there were some things that I wanted more explanation for.  I hope that there are many books to follow demonstrating how we can change our world for the better with a more practical, rather than idealogical, approach.

All in all, I learned a lot.  I was terrified, and then incredibly hopeful for the future.  The idea is that we will no longer be able to support constant growth and big government and big farms, so we will have to return to small communities.  If we make this political (which it shouldn’t be, because this will be everyone’s problem) I think both liberals and conservatives will find things to latch onto in this book, something I wasn’t exactly expecting.  I also very much approved of McKibben’s stance on the internet as a big, magical community that should never go away.  Amen to that.

Though this book does feature the efforts of other countries, it is very US centric, but Eaarth never pretends to be otherwise, so I didn’t really find this to be a flaw.  This is the first book about climate change that I have ever really read and it has made me eager to read more and to do more, which was probably its secret purpose all along.  Please go read this book, it is important.

Favorite quotes:

“Don’t let your eyes glaze over at this parade of statistics (and so many more to follow).  These should come as body blows, as mortar barrages, as sickening thuds.  The Holocene is staggered, the only world that humans have known is suddenly reeling.  I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning of some future threat.  This is the current inventory: more thunder, more lightning, less ice.  Name a major feature of the earth’s surface and you’ll find massive change.”(5)

“As we’ve seen, though, scientists are far more guilty of understatement than exaggeration, and our economic troubles are intersecting with our ecological ones in ways that put us hard up against the limits to growth.  This book has been dedicated, so far, to the idea that we’re in very deep trouble.  Now we must try to figure out how to survive what’s coming at us.  And that survival begins with words.

We lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale. We’re so used to growth that we can’t imagine alternatives; at best we embrace the squishy sustainable, with its implied claim that we can keep on as before.”  (102)

“Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary.  Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients.  But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher  planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer.  Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.”  (133)

There were so many more quotes that I would like to include here.  Bill McKibben knows how to terrify and he knows how to inspire.  From this book, I’ve already been inspired to start composting and being more diligent with recycling (which I should have been already), but beyond that, I am just so entirely hopeful for our future world.

So go read this!:  now| tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

It’s back! Poetry Wednesday – Catherine Bowman

I’ve decided to bring Poetry Wednesday back.  It went on a little hiatus because I wasn’t getting a lot of comments on the posts, but then I decided that was a silly reason to stop doing a post I loved.  So here it is again, and we’ll start off with Catherine Bowman, a poet from El  Paso, Texas.  I wasn’t originally sure how I felt about this poem, but the ending pretty much made me love it.  I had to look up stet:

Stet is a Latin word (meaning “let it stand”) used by proofreaders and editors to instruct the typesetter or writer to disregard a change the editor or proofreader had previously marked. (Wikipedia)

Now with that in mind, here’s the rest of the poem.

Provisional

When he procured her, she purveyed
him. When he rationed her out,
she made him provisional. On being

provisional, he made her his trough.
On being a trough, she made him her silo.
At once a silo, he made her his cut. On being a cut,

she made him her utensil. On being
a utensil, he turned her downhill. So being
downhill, she made him her skis.

When she was his stethoscope,
he was her steady beat. From beat
she was dog, from dog he was fetch,

from fetch she was jab, from jab
he was fake. When he was her complex
equation, she was his simple math.

So she turned him into strong evidence,
accessory after the fact. So he turned
her eyes private, made her his man

on the lam. So he became her psalm,
so she became his scrubby tract. When he
became an aesthete, she became his

claw-foot bath. So she made him a rudimentary
fault line; so he made her a volcanic rim.
So she made him her unruly quorum;

so he made her his party whip.
That’s when they both became
mirror, and then both became lips.

From lips she was trumpet, from trumpet
he was mute. Then he made her his margin
of error. Then she made him stet.

____________________________________________

What do you think of this poem?  What was your favorite line or stanza?