Armchair Travel

A Travel Challenge - I blame Constance. I just went to her blog to take a look at pictures of Spectacle Island and I found a link to this reading challenge.

I always enjoy a challenge and if I commit myself I am much more likely to finish a pile of books that might be lurking around rather than just looking at them wanly and hoping that the stories they contain will just jump right into my head.

I took a close look at the rules and determined that if I could find 6 books that qualified in THE PILE then I could take part. (I am afraid that THE PILE is now of such epic proportion that it must be typed in all caps. Did I mention that I went to NMRLS and got a stack of freebies to review? Just throw another 10 titles on THE PILE Fecteau. You'll get to them.)

So here is the bit of rules that allow me to take part: Fiction or non-fiction works are fine, and do not need to be specifically travel related, as long as the location is integral to the book - I’ll leave that to your discretion.

And so - the list (all of which are possibilities for Summer Reading 2008):

INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakauer - The story of a young man who shucks off every bit of his identity to travel from Georgia, through Canada and into the wilds of Alaska.

COME BACK TO AFGHANISTAN by Said Hyder Akbar - An Afghan-American youth spends his summers with his father trying to help rebuild post-Taliban Afghanistan.

LOST AND FOUND by Carolyn Parkhurst - A mother and daughter try to connect while taking part in a round-the-world reality show.

DOES MY HEAD LOOK BIG IN THIS? by Randa Abdel-Fattah - An Australian-Palestinian girl decides to put on the hajib - traditional head-wear - at her snobby Australian prep school. (This one is kind of a stretch, but if she were in Palestine, it wouldn't be a problem. It is the whole story since she is in Melbourne!)

SUMMER AT TIFFANY by Marjorie Hart - Two young girls spend the summer in New York City in 1945.

BREAKOUT by Paul Fleischman - An all day traffic jam in Los Angeles is about as hellish as travel can get!

So there you have it. Wish me luck!

I just saw HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX last night and enjoyed it immensely. And now I am fixated on the DEATHLY HALLOWS. Here is a link to an essay by Stephen King about the end of the series.

The Pile

Here is a list of books that I am reading for my own pleasure, accidentally bought when I was looking over the summer reading tables at Barnes and Noble or that I borrowed from Mr Flanders' book stash.

Do you know that Mr. Flanders has the most amazing collection of young adult books at the high school? I am storing them for him over the summer and I really would like to replace them with old copies of Someday Man Will Walk on the Moon or The Career Gals' Guide to Dressing Smart! or other outdated books I keep in the backroom, but he would notice. Someday, when I can't control myself any longer I am going to raise an army of 10th grade girls and storm his classroom with torches and pitchforks demanding that he donate them to the library. But that's a story for another day.

Back to the book list. I have put them in three categories for your reading convenience. (And bear in mind that I have another 40 or so books that I bought for the library that I need to test drive this summer as well. Boy this job is good for having an excuse to read all the time.)

First up are the books I am reading for my old lady book clubs that look interesting anyway:
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen - Circus, the Great Depression, murder, elephants; what's not to like?
EVENING by Susan Minot - It's a movie starring every great English speaking actress on the planet - plus a little girl from Beverly - and it is about love and death and that sort of thing.
LOST AND FOUND by Carolyn Parkhurst - A mother and daughter appear on a reality show. This is by the author of DOGS OF BABEL, which is one of my all time favorites and I demand you go read it right now if you like dogs, or trees or people or tattoos or anything. Go read it!

Next up is non-fiction:
THE BURN JOURNALS by Brent Runyon - A fourteen year old boy set himself on fire. Find out why.
INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakauer - This is the first paragraph of the author's note. "In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moos hunters." Way to hook a reader, Krakauer! I don't even like nature and I am dying to read this!
ELEVEN SECONDS by Travis Roy and E.M. Swift - Roy was a B.U. hockey player who was paralyzed in the first game of his freshman year. This is his story.

And of course I have plenty of fiction to read:
BREAKOUT by Paul Fleischman - This looks fascinating - it has two interweaving parts. In one a girl is trying to leave a lousy life in L.A. In the other she is looking back as an adult and performing a one woman show based on the events of the first story. And many students will love it because it is 137 pages.
HONEY, BABY, SWEETHEART by Dab Caletti - Take a quiet girl who likes to read and a thrill-seeking rich boy. Add a road trip, lost love and a book group of middle aged ladies! [Okay, I know I nearly had you until the middle aged ladies...]
BOY MEETS BOY by David Levithan - A romance by the amazing author of REALM OF POSSIBILITY.
SLEEPING FRESHMEN NEVER LIE by David Lubar. This looks hysterical. Also it has the word "freshmen" in the title so people will think it is easy and will be willing to read it!
LUNA by Julie Anne Peters - How did I miss this National Book Award finalist about a cross-dressing teen?

Did I mention that I have 35 books in my trunk to take camping? Plus I have to read EAST OF EDEN by John Steinbeck and GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens or Mrs. Cohen and Ms Lincoln are going to torment me for the rest of my life? Do you think there might be something wrong with me? Oh, and the new Harry Potter will need to be read, too. Good grief!

A NORTHERN LIGHT by Jennifer Donnelly.

Here is a possibility for next year. It is an interesting look at a smart girl in what appears to be a dead-end life. She lives in northern New York and helps out on her widowed Dad's farm, works as a waitress at a summer resort and longs to go to New York City to college. There is a mysterious death at the hotel where she works and the letters of the dead girl become entangled with Mattie's own complicated life.

I also just read P.L.A.I.N JANES by Cecil Castellucci which is a graphic novel about "art terrorism" which I liked very much until a friend pointed out a bunch of things about it that made me like it less. Mainly, that you barely knew anything about the secondary characters which was quite irritating now that I think about it . I still liked the story quite well.

But A NORTHERN LIGHT was far more rewarding a read. And it made me want to dig into AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which shares the same murder as inspiration.

Now don't be thrown by all the medals on this book. I know that it used to be in elementary school that you had to read a Newbery winning book like Johnny Tremain or something of that ilk and it was usually deadly boring. That is not the case anymore. The committees who decide on these things are usually comprised of librarians (wonderful, wonderful people!) who actually want you to read books you like rather than books that are good for you. And sometimes they run across a book that is both.

Now I can say in all honesty that An American Plague is gross. It is about disease and death and mosquitoes and smelly seaports. I had my face scrunched up into an unpleasant moue the whole time I was reading it. (And I know I am kind of showing off by using the word moue, but do you know how often you get to use that word? Almost never!) But it is a fascinating look at how an entire city was brought low by a tiny germ. The thing that amazed me most about this book is that it drives home the fact that anyone who has passed high school biology has more actually medical knowledge than the doctors who were trying to fight this plague.

Now if you like your facts wrapped around a story you simply must read Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. Also The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Traitor to the Nation by M.T. Anderson is a simply magnificent and fascinating books that really shows how backwards scientific research was at that point in time. (Of course I wonder if people in 200 years are going to look at our medical practices and call us savages!) And finally an oldie but a goodie - Steven King's The Stand is the granddaddy of all plague books. It is about a thousand pages (you can build your upper body strength by lifting it as you read!) but you will get sucked in right away. I reread it every summer for about 15 years.

If you just like a true plague book, try Flu by Gina Kolata. It is a straightforward story of the 1918 influenza epidemic - well written and understandable.

I was a little concerned about The Tipping Point. I am not always a fan of what I consider to be dry academic non-fiction. This, however, was not that. Gladwell used lots to accessible examples to pinpoint how an idea or trend is adopted by widespread strata of society. (Wow, what a dull description!) As dull as I insist on making it it was really interesting. It explained why people buy really expensive shoes, why my kids got hooked on television, why teenagers still smoke and why sometimes people can do nothing in the face of evil.

Sometimes I like a book that attempts to explain everything in the world. My two favorites are Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs which is the perfect book to keep in the car in case you are ever stuck in a drive-thru line behind someone who has never actually ordered an iced coffee in their life and is taking for-EVER to decide between toasted almond and hazelnut. It is the story of a guy who decided to read all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and then writes what he learned. Again, I am taking a hilarious book and making it sound dull. What on earth is wrong with me? As for A Short History - you will fall down laughing. Bryson is the sort of writer who can make anything funny.

This is the story of Koren Zailkas who "fell in love" with binge drinking at the age of 14 and quit drinking at age 23. She wrote the book to reclaim the youth that she lost.

I don't usually like "recovery" books. There is not a lot of enjoyment for me in reading about people suffering and then getting better. I didn't read A Million Little Pieces even though people keep telling me to. I do have Dry on my personal summer reading pile. I do remember being really moved by The Late Great Me when I was in high school, but it is kind of dated now. Speaking of dated, Go Ask Alice is still really popular, even though it uses all kind of really dated language and seems kind of "scary on purpose".

I like memoirs, though. Funny ones. A Girl Named Zippy is my all time favorite. I also love Me Talk Pretty One Day and anything by Laurie Notaro.

There is a swirl of controversy lately about how true a memoir has to be because of James Frey, and David Sedaris is caught up in it too. It makes for interesting discussion.

Of course the point of this book is that binge drinking harms young women in all sorts of ways. Which is a good thing to remember.

Someone recently described The Beekeepers Apprentice to me as "a great way to learn vocab for the SATs" which makes a certain amount of sense. I would probably describe it first and formost as an exciting mystery that spans the globe (well, not all the globe, but some interesting parts) with characters both new and familiar.

I like mysteries and this is the first in a series about an intrepid girl who becomes the apprentice of Sherlock Holmes late in his career. It is cleverly written with lots of wordplay and suspense. It is set during WWI, although the war plays a peripheral part at best. It deals with acceptance, grief, intrigue, revenge, kidnapping and estrangement.

I like this era a lot. There is a relitivly new series out called the Maisie Dobbs mysteries that is similar but feels less fictional because of the lack of Sherlock Holmes. Someone just recommended the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries that I have not yet read, but also deal with British response to WWI.

I expected Never Let Me Go to be a cross between House of the Scorpion and Harry Potter but it was not. It is the story of a group of people who lived in a British boarding school who are trying to figure out their place in the world. It was very interesting, although very slowly paced. I knew what the specific "twist" of the book was before I read it and that kind of wrecked it for me. I would have preferred to go into it without any preconcieved ideas. And so I will say very little about it. It is sort of an alternative world kind of book, although you don't really get that until the end. I have already said too much!
It is written by Kazou Ishiguro who wrote The Remains of the Day which was brilliant and also a very quiet and ultimatly moving kind of book.
I love boarding school or dormitory books. Some favorites are Is That You, Miss Blue? by M.E. Kerr, They'll Never Make a Movie Starring Me by Alice Back, Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster and - of course - the aforementioned Harry Potters.

13 LITTLE BLUE ENVELOPES by Maureen Johnson

I will interject a quick "I loved this book!" before I give you the musings, once again, of Hannah Howard:

If only we could all have summers like the one Ginny, the main character of the book, has in Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes! In the book, Ginny, a naïve and shy seventeen year old is lead on a wild, whirlwind tour of Europe by envelopes left for her by her Aunt Peg. Ginny travels from London to Copenhagen to Rome and points in between, all the while managing to fall in love and discover lots about herself in the process. Yes, this would be the moment where the alarm clock goes off and we all wake up from bed.

It is a little implausible, but who cares? Johnson’s book is so entertaining and delicious it hardly matters that the situation is kinda unbelievable. Would you really wanna read a book about a normal summer anyways?

Plus, we can all see a little bit of ourselves in Ginny. She’s ready to change and tired of being a kid, but she’s afraid to grow up, too. But when she’s forced to do it, she finds a lot within herself that she never suspected was there.

Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes is a great, quick read that is highly entertaining and leaves you wishing you had a wildly interesting aunt to send you on a trip to Europe, too. Pack it in your bag when you hit the beach, and who knows, you may just end up leaving impromptu for a beach halfway across the world.

Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES volume one

Since I haven't been posting even the tiniest bit in quite a long time, I have some catching up to do. To expedite this I am calling in some guest writers. The first is Hannah Howard who got me into this mess with her essay about A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY and how it is cruel to make high school students read books they don't like over summer vacation. So she brought this "guest blogging" upon herself. And here's Hannah:

Forget all those English class lessons about plot lines, because they’re totally and absolutlely nonapplicable to this book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, just don’t read it expecting a plot line, because you’re gonna end up hating it. Chronicles chronicles (ha-ha) events in Dylan’s life, ranging from his experiences as a small-town folk singer to hardships he later has escaping the paparazzi. It time travels like there’s no tomorrow, and I’m really wondering whether Dylan has ADD or something. That said, I absolutely loved Chronicles. Somehow, Dylan makes all the weird and possibly annoying stuff work in this book.

What really saves it is Dylan’s prose. Dylan is a great songwriter and storyteller and that really comes out in this book. There’s so much quotable material, I had to restrain myself from underlining like a crazy person. He somehow makes the weirdest things make sense, how I don’t really know, but then again that’s part of his genius.

Dylan has had, hands down, one of the most interesting lives of the twentieth century and has got quite a bit of advice because of it, but the book never feels preachy or stuffy. Dylan remains, as always, the cool king of youth and revolution.

The only bad thing about this book is that it can get a little pop culture heavy at times. Dylan increasingly references musicians that I had absolutely no idea ever existed, but that’s really the worst of it. If you can get through that, then Chronicles is really worth reading. It’s a great book and an entertaining read, and I highly recommend it to everyone, not just the beat poets and political dissidents out there.

This hysterically funny book is the story of Bryson – a writer from the mid-west who has just moved back to the United States from 20 or so years in England. He decides a great way to reconnect with his country is to walk the Apalachian Trail. The Trail runs 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine. He brings his childhood friend the out of shape, cranky and somewhat recovering addict Stephen Katz. It is an epic journey – kind of like the Oddessy, but interesting.
I like a good travel book. Tim Cahill has written some very funny ones my favorites being PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS and ROAD FEVER: A HIGH SPEED TRAVELOGUE. Bryson has also written some good travel books. NOTES ON A SMALL ISLAND is his walking tour of England and IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY describes his travels in Australia. I also quite enjoyed his A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING. My favorite man in nature book is probably NEVER CRY WOLF by Farley Mowat which was on the old summer reading list and is excellent.

This book is a series of interrelated poems. At first it can be confusing – sometimes you can tell who the speaker is, sometimes not. But by the end of the book the amazing way these poems fit together is revealed and you realize that you know who all these kids are. As soon as I finished it, I went back to read it again and it was even better the second time – because it was easier to keep everyone straight in my mind. The language itself isn’t hard at all – these people talk like people really talk. And the way they relate to each other is fascinating.

I didn’t used to like books that were written as poems. It kind of seems like cheating. The writer gets credit for writing a whole book and they are using about a third of the number of words as a “real writer” would. But sometimes it really works. This is one of those times.

If you like this I would highly recommend KESHIA’S HOUSE by Helen Frost. Sondra Sohnes is another good poetry/novel writer. My favorite of hers is ONE OF THOSE HIDEOUS BOOKS WHERE THE MOTHER DIES. I also liked BURNED by Ellen Hopkins, but it is an emotional roller coaster of a book, so don’t say you weren’t warned!

The Zombie Survival Guide
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

When Zombies get their act together and start taking over the planet you are going to be really glad you bothered to read The Zombie Survival Guide! This tongue in cheek book gives you the best strategies for staving off zombie attack and keeping your brain out of the hands of the un-dead and in your skull where it belongs. There is no story to speak of, it reads like a guidebook. The fun lies in the serious tone that Brooks takes. There are little synopses of previous uprisings so you can compare them to your own zombie-related circumstances.

Brooks is also the author of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, so he knows whereof he speaks. If you like fake guides to crazy stuff you might also enjoy How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion and The Government Manual for New Superheroes.

Absolutely Positively Not...

Absolutely Positively Not...
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

This book is so gay!

I hear that sort of thing a lot from teenagers who should certainly know better - "gay" or "faggy" or "queer" used as an adjective to describe anything that the speaker finds distasteful or weird. In this case I am using "gay" properly using two of dictionary.com's definitions: "having or showing a merry, lively mood" and "of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues". See? That isn't so hard! And it makes me feel smart. But back to the book.

Absolutely Positively Not is the very funny story of Steven - a teenager growing up in Beaver Lake, Minnesota - "the hockey stick capital of the world." He is neat and considerate and enjoy square dancing once a week with his mom, even though he knows it is a little odd. But this absolutely positively doesn't make him gay. How Steven comes to terms with his sexuality is handled in a sensitive and often hilarious manner.

There are a lot of "coming out" stories out there, but few that have the light touch of this one. One exception is Totally Joe by James Howe. Alex Sanchez has written the Rainbow Boys books that share these books' light tone but are a little more direct about sex.

7 Deadly Wonders

7 Deadly Wonders
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

Now here is a book that practically begs to be read in line at Water Country! It is not yet a lock for summer reading, but it is full of explosions, molten lava, world domination and a professional soldier with a heart of gold (and an arm of sliver thanks to the aforementioned molten lava) so I would think chances are good.

The premise is that whoever finds the McGuffin (the pieces of the top of the great Pyramid of Giza, as if it matters) will somehow rule the world. And just to keep things interesting, if it isn't found - the world will be destroyed. No pressure...

Our heroes are a rag-tag group of mercenaries from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and a couple of other places that I could list if I weren't too lazy to get up and get the book from the dining room table. The bad guys are a bunch of "Old Europe" forces led by a really nasty classical historian from the Vatican. The second group of baddies is the U.S. special forces team that is trying to jump on the world domination bandwagon.

The search involves the seven wonders of the ancient world - two or three of which I could have named before reading this book. One of the things I really like about this book is that there are maps and charts all over the place. One of the reasons I rarely read this sort of Indiana-Jones meets DaVinvi-Code kind of fiction is because I can never picture the adventuresome parts. Reilly takes pity on people like me and actually charts out the fortresses, caverns and encampments.

I think the last really rousing adventure novel I read was Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park which is to say that I am probably not the best person to recommend this sort of thing. I did really like Jackdaws, by Ken Follett which is one of those books where a disparate group of people get together for a cause. (Tough girls vs. Nazis) Every review I have read of this book mentions The DaVinci Code, so I suppose I should too. Although the shocking truth is - I haven't read it. I did read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and liked it fine. 7 Deadly Wonders is a similar sort of fast moving ride.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

It looks like I am going to be blogging mostly the fiction first. I can't help it. Fiction is what I like! Anyway - Jonathan Safran Foer is a snappy writer. He wrote Everything is Illuminated which was extremely funny and moving.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the story of a 9 year old boy who is a genius. He is dealing with the loss of his father in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He wonders if perhaps his father didn't die and he spends his time investigating what could possibly have happened to him.

The fact that this book is written from Oskar's 9 year old perspective is fascinating. The fact that he is so smart and yet also very much a child makes him less irritating than you would think. He also comes across an old man who survived the bombing of Dresden when he was young and parralels are drawn between that and 9/11 that make for interesting reading.

This book is heartbreaking and funny and well worth reading.

Twilight
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

I did not believe that Twilight by Stephenie Meyer was as good as everyone said until I read it for myself. But it is SO good! I don't want to wreck any of the surprises by telling too much about the story so I will give you the bare bones.
Bella is new in town. She has come to Forks, Washington to stay with her father. She has come from Phoenix where it is always sunny and beautiful. She has a hard time dealing with the small town attitude and the constant rain. One thing that makes it bearable is the presence of Edward Cullen. He is beautiful, mysterious and unusually fixated on Bella.
This book has so many strange and exciting elements I wouldn't even know where to begin. Lets just say that this is a story of falling crazy in love with a bad boy and hoping that you can keep from losing your head.
There is a sequel, New Moon which I am dying to read. And I hear that there are going to be even more! Here's hoping...

American Born Chinese

American Born Chinese
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

Here it is ladies and gentlemen - what I believe is the first lock in the BHS 2007 Summer Reading Extravaganza. I just got my copy from Amazon yesterday and reread it and it is as good as I remember. As a matter of fact, it could very well win the National Book Award tonight. I know, the suspense is killing me, too!

The premise is that Jin Wang is a sweet young geek who feels like a lot of his problems stem from the fact he is Asian-American. Then there is the monkey king who feels like his problems stem from the fact that people do not worship him appropriatly. Then there is Chin-Kee who has problems they have not even developed names for yet.

The way this book plays out it terrific. It is a graphic novel (Did I mention that?) which means that at some point some person is going to say, "You're reading a comic book for summer reading?" at which point you should look at them distainfully and tell them to take a look at the New York Times Magazine from (and at some point I will put an actual date here) and then look at them pityingly for their cluelessness.

Like Water For Chocolate

Like Water For Chocolate
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau.

I finished the last book on the summer reading list sitting in my favorite chair in the world – a black wicker rocker next to a window in my grandmother’s attic, the chair in which I did all my best summer reading as a kid. I did a little dance of joy when I finished. Then I realized that I had to end my entire project with a book that is very hard to describe.

It is described as a book in monthly installments with recipes. It is actually written from the script of the movie - which is unusual for a book that is so well written. It is a story of love that is forbidden. Tita, the youngest daughter of a Mexican family is not allowed to marry but must serve her mother all her life. Her kingdom is the kitchen and she infuses everything she cooks with her joy and anguish, her frustration and her freedom. Basically, this book is about Mexico, sex and food. Since I haven’t read much about Mexico I will focus on the food aspect. Where is the sex? - you may ask. Um, all over the book! But lets talk about cooking. Yes, cooking!

I just read an excellent book about food, Julie and Julia. It is the end product of a blog wherein an underemployed actress in New York works out her professional disappointments by attempting to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s two volume French Cooking guide in one year. It is funny and moving and an inspiration to all who set ridiculous goals for themselves and then document them in blogs. Of course I can’t think of any specific examples at this time…