852. The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Centennial Edition

by L. Frank Baum, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn

After reading Gregory Maguire’s version of Oz in Wicked and Son of a Witch, I felt I needed to return to the original, which I hadn’t read before. Like many of us, my entire knowledge of the story is from the 1939 movie. I had purchased this centennial edition for my college’s children’s literature collection, and this was a great excuse to read it. The book incorporates facsimiles of Baum’s 1900 publication, including the original artwork by W. W. Denslow. Hearn has added extensive annotations to the text, as well as a 98-page introduction with background on the author and illustrator (and many relevant photographs and drawings). It’s a gorgeous book.

I learned, among other things, that the “ruby slippers” of the movie were actually “silver shoes” in the book (a detail that was correct in Wicked), and that the Tin Woodman was in fact the woodcutter upon whose ax Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose (aka the Wicked Witch of the East), casts an evil spell that resulted in his slowly but surely being turned into tin. Interestingly enough, in Wicked, Nessarose has no arms, an implication that she may be the product of her mother’s affair with the Quadling Turtle Heart. In the original Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends encounter the armless Hammer-Heads in Quadling country, near the end of the book, after Dorothy has killed the Wicked Witch of the West.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[This book was borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

1052. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

This book recently (November 14) was named the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. I read a prepub copy I picked up back at the Texas Library Association meeting in April, so I’m not sure if the final book was the same. It was just published in September.

The book is an autobiographical novel, told in first person, with the 14-year-old main character, Arnold Spirit, leaving his Spokane (WA) Indian reservation school to attend a wealthy, all-white school. Arnold deals with many typical modern Native American problems: the alcoholism of his father, the death of his grandmother and sister, poverty, and despair. 

Like the 2007 Newbery winner The Higher Power of Lucky, this book will generate some controversy, with its references to the “chronic tribe of masturbators” (page 217) and “boners” (pages 96, 97, 190, and “a metaphorical boner” on page 98). The book is recommended for ages 14 and up, and I think boys in particular will enjoy it.  

Alexie, born in 1966, attended Gonzaga and Washington State, and now lives in Seattle. It’s the second year in a row that a Seattleite has won a National Book Award. Last year, journalist Tim Egan won the non-fiction award for The Worst Hard Time, which my out-of-town book club read early this year.

[ETA:  Since its publication, the book routinely appears on lists of challenged or banned books.]

© Amanda Pape - 2007

818. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

I can’t believe I didn’t read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler back when it was published and won the Newbery. I would have been 10 or 11 and I think I would have loved it, and identified with Claudia, the main character.

The audiobook has the illustration from the 1977 edition, but the hardcover 35th anniversary edition I just bought for my library has the illustration posted here, with full-color figures of Claudia and Jamie placed over the black-and-white original drawing by author E. L. Konigsburg.

I think this story has held up well over nearly 40 years because it does have a good plot (see my last post on Holes) and is appealing to children. Konigsburg’s Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth was named a Newbery Honor book the same year (that feat has not been repeated).

An actress named Jan Miner narrated the audiobook. She did a great job with the voice of Mrs. Frankweiler, the narrator, but her take on Jamie was too loud and had too much of a (Jersey?) accent.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

817. Holes

I was particularly intrigued by the setting of this 1999 Newbert Medalist, being from Texas myself, and did a little research on that. In his Newbery acceptance speech, author Louis Sachar said that he moved from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, in 1991. “Anybody who ever has tried to do yard work in Texas in July can easily imagine Hell to be place where you are required to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across day after day under the brutal Texas sun. … this story to me has always been about a place, Camp Green Lake--where there was no lake, and hardly anything was green. I thought of the place first. The characters and plot grew out of that place.”

West Texas has playa lakes, which are usually dry but can hold water after significant rainfall. One of the largest of these is Big Lake, which is a little closer to Austin (on the western edge of the Edwards Plateau, a big peach-growing area in Texas – Austin is at the eastern edge). Today Big Lake is a dry depression most of the time, but it formerly held at least some water, fed by springs that have since been pumped dry. The nearby town dates back to the 1880s. Wild onions are also pretty common in this part of Texas.

I also found an interesting article about Holes winning the Newbery by Tim Wadham (then the acting manager of the Pleasant Grove Branch of Dallas Public Library, and a member of the 1998 Newbery Committee), called “Plot Does Matter” in the July/August 1999 issue of Horn Book Magazine:

For some time, I have been bemoaning the dearth of truly imaginative realistic fiction for children. I've seen too many realistic books that masquerade as children's books but are really a type of adult fiction at heart, showing off what Philip Pullman described in his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech as the authors' “dazzling skill with wordplay" ahead of virtually everything else. They ape the tendency in adult literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction) to place plot on the bottom rung of the ladder of importance while authors cut what Pullman describes as "artistic capers for the amusement of [their] sophisticated readers." I don't necessarily mean that these books have no plot; it's just that the plot is sidelined because other elements take precedence. On the other extreme from plotless language exercises are books with a plot, but, alas, the same plot as dozens of other books. In much recent children's fiction, plot has become a paint-by-numbers affair: boy/girl suffers abuse from/change in personality by/ loss of parent/pet/best friend/sibling/home and copes by running away/withdrawing, etc. Anyone who cares to delve a bit into realistic children's fiction published in the last three to five years will begin to see a numbing sameness to the "stories." I do not mean to dismiss the seriousness of any of the social problems portrayed in these books when experienced by a child in real life, or the positive impact such a book might make on a child. Nor do I imply that there have not been notable books, both realistic fiction and fantasy, over the past few decades where plot has been placed at the forefront. I am saying, along with Philip Pullman, that children need stories. Children need books, as he says, "where the story is at the center of the writer's attention, where the plot actually matters."

He goes on to add, “It somehow feels like Newbery winners from two or more decades ago, such as E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. These are both books in which the plot does matter.” I thought this was interesting because it seems these three books have been particularly well-liked, particularly by their target audiences.

I listened to the audiobook read by actor Kerry Beyer, who is originally from Texas. I thought he did a marvelous job giving each character a different voice – I especially loved the soft but deadly rendering of the Warden!

 © Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

815 & 816. Two Newbery Winners

I’m sorry, but I HATED the 2004 Newbery winner, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I’m not even going to bother with a picture. On the positive side, the story will introduce some readers to some new vocabulary. But I definitely think parents may want to read this for themselves before reading it with their children.

This story was too dark for me. I know some kids like such stories (like the Lemony Snicket books), and if yours is one, they might enjoy this. I was bothered by Despereaux’s father and brother turning him in (because he dared to talk to a human!), even though they knew it would mean certain death in a dungeon of rats for such a minor crime.

Even more disturbing to me was the treatment of the character Miggory Sow. She’s named for a pig; she’s ugly and gets fat; her father SELLS her for a hen, a red tablecloth, and some cigarettes; and the man who buys her BEATS her until her ears look like cauliflowers and she loses part of her hearing. She’s described as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”—boy, doesn’t that reinforce stereotypes!

I do think Graeme Malcolm did a great job narrating the audiobook. His British accent was perfect for this medieval tale, and he created different voices for the various characters – Italian accents for the Italian-named (Botticelli was especially amusing) rats, French for Despereaux’s mother Antoinette, Scottish for the threadmaster Hovis. Some of the voices may sound evil, but it IS a dark tale. DiCamillo’s use of asides to the reader/listener comes across as very intrusive and irritating in the audiobook. I did like the lovely cover and and deckled paper of the hardbound version, but found the pencil illustrations by Timothy Basil Eving generally only added to the grimness of the story.

[Originally drafted 8/26/07, revised 5/27/18.  The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

A post comparing four different editions of the 1923 Newbery winner, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, got so long that I set it up on its own website.

Bottom line: There are some editions out there that do not make it clear that they have been revised from the 1922 original. Even with those that are upfront about changes, it's good to know exactly what is different. Buyer beware!


© Amanda Pape - 2007

814. Out of the Dust

Although I have access to all the Newbery winners in print form, with the new semester starting and three more interlibrary loan books (that I haven’t started) to finish in the next 5 to 15 days, I’ve been listening to Newberys on my commute. I’ve finished all audiobooks available to me that had not been reviewed to date, so for a while I'll be posting on some that others have already reviewed.

Earlier this year, I read (and loved) Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. The day before my book club discussed it, on February 24, 2007, I experienced my first dust storm (this photo was taken about 40 miles south of me). It gave me a taste (literally) of what it was like for those portrayed in Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, the 1998 Newbery Medalist.

The audiobook was performed by Marika Mashburn, an Oklahoma native who was then a theater student at SMU in Dallas. She has a convincing accent, and the slight lisp she has/used added the right touch of youth to the performance of Billie Jo. When read aloud, you can’t really tell the book was written in free verse, it sounds more like journal entries, which is how Hesse framed the narrative poetry.

A few other interesting tidbits I uncovered: In her Newbery acceptance speech, Hesse said, “I based the accident on a series of articles appearing in the 1934 Boise City News,” a daily paper published in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the time that Hesse obtained on microfilm from the Oklahoma Historical Society. That paper provided the view into day-to-day life in the Dust Bowl that Hesse used in her novel.

Hesse also said, “I began my literary life as a poet.” However, she found that raising her children made writing poetry difficult, and it wasn’t until they were grown that she began Out of the Dust. “I never attempted to write this book any other way than in free verse. The frugality of the life, the hypnotically hard work of farming, the grimness of conditions during the dust bowl demanded an economy of words. Daddy and Ma and Billie Jo's rawboned life translated into poetry…”

I feel this book is more appropriate for an older reader, age 11 /6th grade, and up. The book has a message that is still important today: “It was about forgiveness. The whole book. Every relationship. Not only the relationships between people, but the relationship between the people and the land itself.”

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[This audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

813. Walk Two Moons

I didn’t realize until I’d finished the audiobook that I was listening to an abridged edition of Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. Considering that Creech interweaves three stories in one – that of Sal, of her best friend Phoebe, and of Sal’s cross-country trip with her grandparents to find Sal’s mother, the abridgement made the storylines easier to follow. However, the abridgement also left out some details that hinted at the ending, and thus heightened the suspense of the novel for me.

According to Creech’s Newbery acceptance speech, the book’s title comes from an American Indian proverb, “Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins,” that she received in a fortune cookie about four years before finishing the book. The proverb plays a part in the story as well.

The main character, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, or Sal, is a 13-year-old of Native American heritage (her name is the name of a tribe), as is her missing mother (and Creech). Sal and her father move from Kentucky to Ohio shortly after her mother’s disappearance, where Sal meets Phoebe, whose mother also disappears temporarily. If this isn’t enough missing mothers, Sal’s budding love interest, Ben, also has a mom who’s gone. By the end of the book, you find out why they’re gone and what happened to each of them.

Sal’s (and her mother’s) and Phoebe’s stories are told in flashback, within the framework of the trip Sal takes with her paternal grandparents from Ohio to Lewiston, Idaho, where Sal’s mother was heading. Along the way, Sal tells her grandparents Phoebe’s story, and through it, begins to understand her own.

The six-day trip traces Sal’s mother’s route and takes them many places I’ve been – Chicago and Lake Michigan, Madison and the Wisconsin Dells, Minnesota, the Badlands and Black Hills and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Yellowstone and Old Faithful in Wyoming, Montana, and Lewiston. According to the Newbery acceptance speech, the trip also mirrors one Creech took with her parents when she was 12.

The characters are funny and fully-realized – especially the grandparents, whose love for each other is palpable. Their dialogue in particular is down-home (Gramps calls Gram his “gooseberry” and both call Sal their “chick-a-biddy”). In narrating the audiobook, actress Mary Stuart Masterson did a marvelous job with this as well as with portraying Phoebe’s prissiness, Sal’s sometimes-typical-teen reactions, the anguish of both girls, and the eccentricities of other characters.

[edited to add an interesting tidbit - The Finney family as well as some of Phoebe and Sal's classmates come from Creech's 1990 book, Absolutely Normal Chaos, which is built around the journal assignment that also appears in Walk Two Moons.]

This book was written at a 5th-6th grade reading level and is mainly recommended for grades 6-12, although some reviewers suggest ages as young as 8. I think it is more suited for at least age 10 and up, because all of the major characters are 13 and older, and because of the complexity of the multilayered plots. There is plenty of action to hold a reader’s interest, however, and the book deals with poignant themes of loss and acceptance. I found this book to be both expressive and gripping, and I believe it is a Newbery winner that will appeal to adults and older children.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

812. Number the Stars

Lois Lowry's Number the Stars is based upon the true story of the Danish resistance against the Nazi occupation in World War II. In her Newbery acceptance speech, Lowry noted that “The Danish people were the only entire nation of people in the world who … did not, in 1943 … turn away … from the disaster” of the Holocaust.

Annemarie, the 10-year-old main character, and her family bravely save her Jewish best friend and other Jews in late September and October, 1943. The title comes from Psalm 147:4a, “…he [God] determines the number of the stars…,” read in a scene in the story, and also refers to the Star of David, which is significant in the plot. An afterword tells what parts of the story are true, and that is even more fascinating – and moving.

One of Lowry’s good friends was a young girl in Copenhagen during the war. From her, from others who lived there at the time, and from the author’s own research in Denmark come a number of little details that make the book even more realistic – things like shoes made from fish skin because leather was scarce. The girls use paper dolls to pretend to be Scarlett, Melanie, and Bonnie from Gone with the Wind, then a recent and popular book (1936) and movie (1939).

Lowry also has many references to the high shiny boots of the Nazi soldiers. Again in her Newbery speech, she said, “I decided that if any reviewer should call attention to the overuse of that image -- none ever has -- I would simply tell them that those high shiny boots had trampled on several million childhoods and I was sorry I hadn't had several million more pages on which to mention that…”

The story is dramatic and suspenseful enough to hold the interest of all ages, boys and girls. The book is written at about a 4th or 5th grade reading level, but appeals to older students as well, and might be an easier novel to introduce the Holocaust than The Diary of Anne Frank, particularly for struggling readers. The book was recommended to me by a college student in the children’s literature class this past summer term.

Actress Blair Brown does a great job with the narration in the audiobook, using believable variations to distinguish between the young girls, adult women, and men, and gives an accent to the German soldiers. This is a Newbery winner that I believe will appeal to both children and adults.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[This audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

811. Sarah, Plain and Tall

I listened to the audiobook version read by Glenn Close. I enjoyed her efforts to give every character a different voice, although the young Caleb’s was a little too screechy for my taste. The audiobook also had two of the sequels to this book, Skylark (1993) and Caleb’s Story (2001). I’m sure you’re all familiar with them, thanks to the Glenn Close TV films (although the latter was originally called Winter’s End), but did you know there are two more? More Perfect Than the Moon (2004), and Grandfather's Dance (2006) complete the series, according to MacLachlan in an August 7, 2006 interview in Publishers Weekly.

In Caleb’s Story, there are references to World War I (1914-1918) and the influenza epidemic (1918-1919), therefore it is set in 1918. His younger sister Cassie is four years old in that book, therefore Skylark (which ends with Sarah pregnant with Cassie) is set around 1913. At least a whole year has passed between Skylark and Sarah, Plain and Tall, so the latter is set sometime around 1910-1912. MacLachlan was born in 1938, so it is likely that her mother, for whom she wrote the book, and who was also born on the prairie, would have been a young girl around the same time. (MacLachlan was born in Wyoming, and her father in North Dakota in a sod house).

In her Newbery acceptance speech, MacLachlan said that at the time she wrote the book, her mother was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s. MacLachlan said she “wished to write my mother’s story…and hand this small piece of my mother’s past to her in a package as perfect as Anna’s sea stone, as Sarah’s sea. But books, like children, grow and change, borrowing bits and pieces of the lives of others to help make them who and what they are. And in the end we are all there, my mother, my father, my husband, my children, and me. We gave my mother better than a piece of her past. We gave her the same that Anna and Caleb and Sarah and Jacob received – a family.”

The “borrowing bits and pieces of the lives of others” may refer to the real Sarah, who, according to an interview with MacLachlan at the end of the audiobook, was MacLachlan’s step-great-grandmother, who really was a mail-order bride from Maine. This character first appeared as Aunt Mag in MacLachlan’s Arthur, For the Very First Time (1980).

This is a Newbery winner that is more accessible to children. It’s only 56 pages and written at a 3rd-4th grade reading level. Older children might find it too easy or lacking in action (particularly boys). As an adult, I too loved the plain language, Anna’s honest feelings about the birth of Caleb, and the comparisons, implied and stated, of the prairie to the sea.

This would be a good book for children dealing with a new stepparent, or with an impending move. My favorite line in the book is from chapter 7, page 43, when Sarah says, “There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.” As someone who spent 21 years away from my home state and missing it, and who is now back in that home state and misses aspects of my 21-year home, this, like so much of the book, rang true.

 © Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

810. Kira-Kira

Kira-Kira is the 2005 Newbery Medalist, written by Cynthia Kadohata.  This story reads a bit like a memoir, narrated by Japanese-American Katie Takeshima, who tells about life in her family from the time she was about five, around 1956, to age 12. The story begins with the family moving. Her parents’ Oriental food store in Iowa has failed, and they are joining another family in Georgia where her father will work in a hatchery, and her mother in a poultry processing plant.

Katie idolizes her sister Lynn, who is four years older, and always able to see the brighter side of life. Lynn teaches Katie her first word, kira-kira, which means “glittering” in Japanese, and they use it to describe everything they find beautiful. The word is in stark contrast to the family’s hardships. It is post-World War II, and the family encounters discrimination (as I think they would have anywhere, not just small-town Georgia). A motel clerk in Nashville is rude and sends them to the crummy “Indian” part of the building – and charges $2 extra. The owner of the non-unionized hatchery and plant has questionable labor practices (Katie’s mother is forced to wear pads because she is not allowed any unscheduled breaks in her 12-hour shifts, and her father often sleeps overnight at the hatchery). And, as in so many Newbery novels, there is death: Lynn dies from lymphoma at age 15, on New Year’s Day, in about 1962. This happens on page 200 of this 244-page novel.

Much of the story deals with Katie eventually becoming the caregiver as Lynn becomes more ill and her parents work more hours to pay the medical bills and the mortgage on the house they bought with hopes that Lynn would get better. After her sister dies, Katie and her parents deal with their grief. At the end, Lynn’s kira-kira reminds them that hard work, hope, and determination make the world sparkle with promise.

The most vivid passage in the book is first referred to by Katie on page 1: “I used kira-kira to describe everything I liked: the beautiful blue sky, puppies, kittens, butterflies, colored Kleenex.” The latter is explained in a tender, heart-wrenching essay Katie writes about her sister after her death. But you’ll have to read that yourself.

Like Katie, Kadohata was born in the Midwest to Japanese-American parents. She grew up in small-town Arkansas and Georgia, where her father, like Katie's, worked long hours as a chicken "sexer," separating male and female hatchlings. In an interview (USA Today, January 18, 2005), Kadohata states, "It was a horrible, backbreaking job, and for some reason, all the chicken sexers were Japanese, and all the Japanese-Americans in town worked at the poultry plant," and she remembered "the sense of standing out." In another interview for School Library Journal (May 2005), she adds, “There are also a few details [in the book] that are true. Everybody in the hospital did come to see my [younger] brother when he was born because they had never seen a Japanese baby before.” When asked if she has an older sister, she replied, “I do, and she is still alive. She took care of us a lot, even though she is only a year and a half older than me. She had a maternal quality about her even then. So I always looked up to her.”

While the author says the book is aimed at ages 9 to 12, a number of public libraries classify this as a teen/young adult novel, as would I. I think it could appeal to younger females as well. Readers who prefer more plot will be disappointed; there’s very little that happens in the first half of the story, and little suspense overall. I think this book won the Newbery because it speaks to adults of the losses (and fear of loss) they have experienced, as well as remembrances of what it’s like to be a child. That’s why I liked the book.  However, it is one of many winners that may not have a lot of appeal to most kids.

This was a wonderful audiobook, however. Elaina Erika Davis, the reader, has a lovely, lyrical, passionate voice that made me feel Katie was actually speaking. She did an excellent job with Southern drawls (which the author says she did have, by the way) for Katie and Lynne, as well as Japanese-accented English for the adults. Relectant readers assigned this Newbery book might find it livelier and more humorous in audiobook format.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

1217. The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende

This book was written in 1991, a few years after Allende married her second husband, a San Francisco attorney. She mentioned in her memoir My Invented Country that The Infinite Plan was a story about her husband.

The main character, Gregory Reeves, is four years old when the book begins near the end of World War II, the son of an Australian itinerant preacher (of a New-Age-y “Infinite Plan”) and a Russian Bahai mother. The father falls ill while they are in the Los Angeles barrio, so Greg grows up there, speaking Spanish, practicing a type of Catholicism, and earning money from a young age. Thanks to a small inheritance from a librarian friend, Greg attends Berkeley during the 60’s (with all the requisite drugs and sex). He studies law, marries a vapid blonde heiress and fathers a daughter, who later becomes a drug addict. In real life, Allende's husband's daughter dies from a drug overdose about the same time as Allende's daughter from her first marriage, Paula, dies from porphyria.

Greg learns of his first wife's frequent infidelities during a spouse-swapping game and shortly after leaves for Vietnam for his obligatory military service (he was in the ROTC in college), at the height of the war. When he returns, a different man, he establishes a very successful practice and lives a life of excess. It takes a malpractice suit and a little help from his friends to straighten him out by the end.

This was Allende’s first book set in the United States, and it is clear she did a lot of research on her new home. The weakest part are the events set in Vietnam; Greg’s ability to make friends with the villagers he is spying on does not ring true. I found her characterizations of the women in the book, particularly Carmen Morales, Greg’s childhood friend, and Olga, a part of his family from his itinerant childhood, to be stronger than any of the men. This book has a little bit of everything – besides the previously-mentioned drugs and sexual games of the 60s and 70s, Greg is raped as a boy by a barrio bully, his sister is a victim of incest, and Carmen has a botched abortion and later adopts her dead brother’s half-Vietnamese son.

It’s an interesting book, but probably not one of Allende’s better ones.

© Amanda Pape - 2007 - e-mail me!

1216. My Invented Country by Isabel Allende

This memoir was published in 2003, seven years after Allende's first memoir, Paula. The latter is a better and more thorough memoir; but My Invented Country (subtitled "A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile" on the hardbound edition I read) still has something to say. The descriptions of Chile's landscape are thorough, but those of some of the customs and beliefs of Chileans came across a little too much as generalizations or stereotypes.

As with Paula, there is information in this book that provides background for her novels and other books. In particular, I learned that The Infinite Plan (1994), her first novel set in the United States, is based on the life of her second husband (married in 1987), who she discusses more thoroughly here than in Paula.

I liked her distinctions between exiles and immigrants, and her discussion of memory, nostalgia, and imagination, and the parts they play in writing and life. I could draw some parallels to how I felt when I was away from Texas and how I feel now that I'm back (sometimes I think Texas is my "invented country"). Some memorable quotes from the book:

"But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion....memory twists in and out, ike an endless Moebius strip." (p. 141)

"When I compare my experience as an exile with my current situation as an immigrant, I can see how different my state of mind is. In the former instance, you are forced to leave, whether you're escaping or expelled, and you feel like a victim who has lost half her life; in the latter it's your own decision, you are moving toward an adventure, master of your fate. The exile looks toward the past, licking his wounds, the immigrant looks toward the future, ready to take advantage of the opportunities within his reach." (p. 174)

"I have constructed an idea of my country the way you fit together a jigsaw puzzle, by selecting pieces that fit my design and ignoring the others." (p. 178)

"'You remember things that never happened.' Don't we all do that? I have read that the mental process of imagining and that of remembering are so much alike that they are nearly indistinguishable. Who can define reality? Isn't everything subjective? If you and I witness the same event, we will recall it and recount it differently....Memory is conditioned by emotion; we remember better, and more fully, things that move us...When we call up the past, we choose intense moments--good or bad--and omit the enormous gray area of daily life." (p. 179).

© Amanda Pape - 2007 - e-mail me!

1215. On Beauty by Zadie Smith

I read this book for the book club I'm trying to become more involved with in the town where I now live. They meet once a month on Tuesday nights, which is when I usually work (at least during the long semesters), so this was the first time I was able to attend. I wasn't real impressed, but then only three other people showed up (less than usual, I'm told), which may be partly due to the fact that no one seemed to like this book.

In many respects this book is your typical middle-age life-crisis story. Smith says she based it on E. M. Forster's Howards End, and, according to an Amazon.com editorial review, took that "tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender." The title comes from Elaine Scarry’s essay, “On Beauty and Being Just,” as well as the poem "On Beauty" by Nick Laird, Zadie Smith’s husband (and the poem also appears in the book, disguised as a work by one of the characters).

This book is full of numerous other literary and art references (the lead character is a Rembrandt scholar).  Looking at the art works that were discussed in the book really helped make sense of some passages.

We might have had a more meaningful discussion if the whole group had seen such a guide (or any reading guide) in advance. It probably would have been better if everyone had read the whole book (only two of us had; another had started it but did not finish, and the last one read the wrong book). But that's been typical in my ongoing book club; there's always some that don't read the book (although often they don't show for that discussion either) and some that have not finished it. I'll give this new group a few more chances; next month's book definitely looks better.

© Amanda Pape - 2007 - e-mail me!

1212 - 1214. Books Read January - May 2007

I was inspired to read Paula after hearing Isabel Allende talk about her daughter at the Texas Library Association meeting in April 2007. Allende shares the story of her life through 1992, including the military coup disposing her uncle Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Paula is Allende's 28-year-old daughter, a newlywed in a coma from inherited (from her father) porphyria. Allende interweaves the story of her life with the story of her daughter's last year, spent in a hospital in Spain and Allende's home in California. Moving and magical.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs: I read this "memoir" with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. I would have stopped reading before finishing it if not for my long-time book club. I hated this book. It comes across as making the mentally-ill mother look even worse because she trusts an even-more mentally-ill psychiatrist. According to Wikipedia, parts of the book may be untrue (shades of Frey's A Million Little Pieces?). Perhaps some memoirs should not be advertised as such, and should be marketed as fiction, when that is what they are. There are some similarities to Eugenides' Middlesex, but I thought the latter book was FAR better.  

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya: I enjoyed reading this book as it really illuminated cultural practices (such as curanderas) in the Southwest in the mid 20th century. I found it especially interesting that there were cultural differences even within the protaganist's family, his mother's Lunas (moon) versus the Marez (the sea) of his father.

A student where I'm a librarian (Tarleton State University) wrote a thesis on this novel (which I also read), the premise being that Rudolfo Anaya used the main character of Antonio as "a window into his [Anaya's] progressively developing world view" to "describe the events he [Anaya] encountered which oriented, disoriented, and reoriented him into the world" (Cruz-Solano, Minerva Maria. Rudolfo Anaya's Bless me, Ultima : reshaping the "Dusty relics of distant memories," Thesis (M.A.)--Tarleton State University, April 1996, p. vii). 

Examples of the orientation are the Catholic faith Anaya (and Antonio) grew up with, as well as the Aztec and Mexican myths and legends (on the creation and destruction of man, curanderas and brujas or witches, La Malinche and La Llorona, and Coyolxāuhqui) that they heard growing up.

Examples of disorientation are their questioning of their Catholic faith and the storytellers' tales, the educational system (particularly going from a Spanish-speaking home to an English-speaking classroom, and hearing the fables and fairy tales of the predominant culture), and conflicts in his parents' family traditions (farmers versus cowboys - believe me, a BIG issue here in the Southwest at that time!). 

The reorientation is how Anaya and Antonio come to terms with these issues, for example, accepting aspects of both the Catholic and a more naturalistic faith (as represented by the golden carp in the book).

You don't have to be Catholic to understand the book, but I do think it makes some of the author/main characters' motivations easier to understand if you are. One also notes in the book that the river has a "presence" or alive-ness to it that I have often felt around rivers.

© Amanda Pape - 2007 - e-mail me!

1050 and 1051. Two Award-Winners

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron:  I read this book because I think I need to as part of my job - it's a controversial award-winner. This 2007 Newbery winner has quirky characters: a 10-year-old motherless girl named Lucky, and her two friends, knot-tying Lincoln (whose mother is a part-time librarian in the nearest larger town, and whose dad is 23 years older), and Miles, who lives with his grandmother (since his mother is in jail) and wants to read/have read 1960's Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman over and over. Lucky lives in trailers with her young French guardian (her father's ex-wife) in a remote town, population 43 (apparently mostly members of 12-step programs) at the edge of a California desert. The controversy about the word "scrotum" on the first page of the book is overblown, but the story probably is not appropriate for children under 12 anyway. It's a heartfelt tale with an ending that brought tears to my eyes, but most 9- to 11-year-olds, the book's target audience, may not "get" it.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan:  I was impressed with how Egan made me care about the people in this book, and followed their stories through the various events and circumstances in the first 40 years of the 1900s. I've been to the southern edge of the Dust Bowl (in the Texas Panhandle) and the descriptions of the settings are quite accurate. I experienced my first dust storm on February 24, 2007, and it gave me a taste (literally) of what it was like for those folks. Well written and educational.  Egan and The Worst Hard Time won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2006 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography.

© Amanda Pape - 2007