Below are the books I have read in January-June 2011. On the pages linked above are the books I am reading and hope to finish, and the books I hope to not have to finish, thank you. Oh, and the ones I hope to start. Most recent books on top of list.
Books that I read already:
27. On the Banks of Plum Creek and On the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Reread in June.
Summary/commentary coming...
Note: I have been stuck on reading kids'/young adult books for a while and I am guessing that the reasons for this are: I have a lot of really good kids' books around, and I want to read something with plot and most of the stuff on my "to read" shelf is either nonfiction or in a foreign language that I'm too lazy to work at. Really, this is my last time excusing myself for this here, and in the future, I will attempt to either go to the library and find some challenging fiction, or I won't number books that I consider too easy.
26. Anacaona: Golden Flower, by Edwidge Danticat.
Reread in June.
This is a book in the Royal Diaries series, which I mentioned in the book #20 blurb below. These are the historical-fictional journals of princesses or other future female rulers in their early teen years, set while they are developing the personalities that they will later be famous or infamous for. The girls do rad princess-training things like studying English, Latin, Greek, French, and Italian (Elizabeth I), sleeping on soldier cots (Anastasia), or learning where on his outfit, depending on his rank, a warrior can attach a shrunken head (Lady of Palenque). The heroine of Golden Flower is the daughter of a supreme chief of the Taínos and witnesses the arrival of Columbus and the "pale men" with him in the New World, specifically Haiti.
Anacaona is an unusual "princess" in this series for a combination of reasons. First of all, because the real Anacaona was illiterate, the author had to consider the forms of art, especially songwriting, that Haitian culture in 1490 did feature, and construct a first-person narrative around these media. It still came out sounding like a diary, which I am sure was intentional, but it still must have been a challenge to make the story cohesive in a place with no written "history" from this time period (that is, from a perspective other than that of Columbus's men...). Second unusual thing: okay, so we don't know much about Anacaona's actual life, but a lack of facts hasn't kept authors from being creative in the past, and it didn't stop Danticat. The narrative is believable, though the author did take a few liberties with realism, see item three on my list: [SPOILER ALERT?] Anacaona dies only a couple years after the "diary" is finished, and it's not at all surprising, because she practically knows it will happen. She is the most mystically-aligned Royal Diaries narrator I can think of off the top of my head, and frequently has dreams and visions that inform her of future or distant events. How cool! Yet, unless this novel was meant to be fantastic for the purpose of showing some Taíno tradition, I am not sure why the extrasensory powers were necessary. If unusual quality of this book #3 was that Anacoana died so soon after the story in the book ended, I should also mention that according to Wikipedia, she was in her late twenties when sequences of events caused her to be killed by Europeans; the Anacaona of Danticat's book seems much younger, though no specific age is mentioned. But this is the sort of vagueness that can still work in historical fiction, when little is known of the history itself.
25. Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
Reread in May.
The last of Baum's fourteen Oz books, this novel was written after one of the earlier ones that was supposed to be the last, but wasn't (in that earlier novel, Glinda, I think, closes off Oz from any further human contact! No more stories for you!). It was also written shortly before Baum's death, and contains a note from the publishers to the effect that he is off to tell Oz stories to the souls of children who are no longer with us. This book is standard Oz story format: Dorothy and Ozma go on an adventure, encounter hijinks and dangers, and are rescued by their any magical friends. The unusual thing about this book, though, is that as we go through the landscape of Oz and meet different characters, we learn that there are different sorts of magic, all of which have limits. We learn that fairy magic can be a burden or even destructive if the fairy cannot help others with it, and that humans can even consider themselves lucky to not be endowed with magic, if they see their situation in the right light. All these meaning-of-magic lessons apparently set the rules for Oz books written by other writers (there are many! Think of it, a century of fan fiction.), but I like to think of it as a reminder to child readers that they can have okay lives even if they are not whisked off to a faraway enchanted land themselves. Such a lesson really bridges the worlds of the reader and the characters, and I appreciate this connection as much as I enjoy the comparison of heaven and the larger Narnia through the doorway at the end of the Narnia series, or the hint that future readers of a certain magical book, users of their imaginations, can also all be part of the Neverending Story. It's a smooth ending for an author's reign as "historian" of a fantasy world.
24. A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, by Kathryn Lasky.
Reread in May.
This and book #26, excuse me, are written for I am guessing fifth graders. Do they count as books? I think they do. I am not including blatant picture books in this list but I do read young adult/kids' novels for relaxation and they get numbers too. In regards to this actual book, I haven't gone back to it since maybe high school, and I was surprised by a number of things. Well, plot rundown first: pilgrim girl sails to Massachusetts with her family; they settle down. Right. Anyways, the SHOCKERS are:
-Throughout the narrative, people around "Mem" are constantly dying. It is very bleak. Sometimes she does not write for a while because too many people have died. Sometimes she is working in a sick bay AKA "dying shed", if I recall correctly. Sometimes a character is driven mad by grief. But everyone plods right along. I suppose this was normal back in the day, but I don't remember all the death and sickness and depressed sadness from my earlier readings of this book.
-How nonchalantly Mem states that the men from the ship have found some corn stored under a rock by the Indians, and how glad she is that they took (looted) it! How little her conscience is affected when the men find the queer houses of the "people with feathers" and take what is inside! And yet she is so frightened that the Indians might just possibly attack them. No kidding! Quit stealing stuff!
That's about it, this wasn't as relaxing a read as I had hoped for.
23. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
Reread in May.
I'm surprised I've let four years pass before rereading this book, because I was amazed by it the whole way through, both readings. Don't be tripped up by the title: this novel won't try to convert you to Christianity, and though some of the narrators of this broad, long story give up on the Baptist faith of their origins, this book shouldn't make you a doubter, either. The plot is told by the five women and girls of the Price family as they are led to the Congo by a missionary father, the Baptist preacher, and then as they leave him to his fate and individually seek their own in their trails toward escape or, as the newspaper reviews called it, redemption. These narrators are each wholly and surprisingly different. Rachel, the oldest daughter, lives in unchanging teenage vanity until the humor of her immaturity begins to reveal its tragedy. Ruth May, the youngest and innocent one, ends up indirectly causing her family's dispersion across the world. The twins, Leah and Adah, share a high level of intelligence but while the first girl works to love friends and family and to adapt to others her whole life, the second first retreats within herself, then reclaims individuality as her personal philosophy takes a startling shape. And the mother bears the brunt of it all. In summary, an enjoyable read for me, sometimes heartbreaking but not depressing.
Quote time! Here are some of Adah's linguistics, followed by Leah's observations on life in Africa:
"People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of "self" as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die." (page 343 of a 1998 paperback)
"When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me." (437)
22. Silas Marner by George Eliot, AKA Mary Anne Evans.
Read in April.
Shorter novel about a miser who becomes a better person after an orphaned little girl shows up at his house. It's more complicated than it sounds, and the two major plots are a hint to the masterpiece Eliot would write ten years later, Middlemarch (I started it in the fall, never made it through to the end, found it funny until I found it overwhelming). I like this description of a woman at a party: "Mrs. Crackenthorp—a small blinking woman, who fidgeted incessantly with her lace, ribbons, and gold chain, turning her head about and making subdued noises, very much like a guinea-pig that twitches its nose and soliloquizes in all company indiscriminately". (Source)
21. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Read in April.
Sad and beautiful. I read this in English but would like to reread in Russian, if ever I get the patience. The story is of the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed it; we meet Yuri Zhivago when he is a boy at his mother's funeral, and follow him and his changing family, lovers, and other "comrades" as the country goes through political turbulence, and personal values and families' structures change simultaneously. Zhivago is a doctor as well as a poet and his deep experiences of various events give a sweeping view of a set of historical circumstances. Doctor Zhivago reminded me of Les Miserables more than anything else I've read-- so poignant, and involving historical politics in such a way as to actually make a non-history buff like me care about them. Can't really criticize this one.
P.S. the movie for Doctor Zhivago, 1965 with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, it's does its various jobs well.
20. Matilda Bone by Karen Cushman.
Reread(?) in April.
I was longing to read some fiction about the middle ages and knew of Karen Cushman, who wrote Catherine Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice. This is a young adult novel by Cushman which describes some time in the life of a young woman apprenticed to a bone-setter in medieval England. I like the grittiness of the surroundings described, and the personalities of the characters. It's an unusual coming of age story.
Segue: I don't like that much of the historical fiction I've read that was intended for young people seems to feature characters of that era who make a point of not really caring about religion. They may have been raised by a priest, like Matilda Bone, or going on a pilgrimage like the heroine of Peregrine, but as the story happens the character either decides to favor modern values (i.e. a preference towards less respect for tradition) along with, say, a more modern approach to medicine (Matilda Bone), or decides that religion is nice for other people but not for them. Elizabeth in Elizabeth I, Red Rose of the House of Tudor by Kathryn Lasky, from The Royal Diaries series, is an example of a deliberately unreligious character, but at least her treatment of religion reflects the actual Elizabeth I's opinions. I give credit to Carolyn Meyer for making Isabel in Isabel: Jewel of Castilla of the same series sincerely (and historically accurately) religious, by the way. Am thinking about Mircea Eliade's views of religion with the assumption that it is part of the religious person's reality (see #19 below), and how this might not be often reflected in historical fiction.
19. The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade.
Read in April.
A year and a half ago, a professor got me vaguely interested in Mircea Eliade and his friend Mr. Jung. This is because the ideas of nostalgia and archetypes being important to some theory in psychology or religion or anything appealed to me, and had a little to do with my nine-year-old thoughts concerning nostalgia for the future. Anyways, this book insists that the sacred should be viewed from the inside, since it alters the reality (or the perception of reality? But in a big way?) of those who acknowledge it. The things that are sacred, whether they are times or places or anything else to do with human life, are described and examined in a variety of cultures throughout time and from around the world. I liked the introduction best and the conclusion second, and the middle seemed muddled, but/and I definitely plan to read more of Eliade's work.
18. What I Eat by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.
Read in April.
I was being book-avoidant I tried reading a couple comic books, but they were boring (sorry, Foxtrot. I liked you before.). Finally I came across this on the NEW BOOKS shelf at the library and it was just the picture book I was looking for! See website. What I Eat is, judging from its physical size and the amount of photographs (!) it contains, a coffee table book. It's an account of what more than eighty individuals around the world, of all trades and social situations, eat in a given day. As a person who loves pictures of food and ways of examining people's strange lives, and who appreciates chapters numbered by amounts of calories, I enjoyed this volume immensely. What I Eat is inspiring me to become literate again after a relapse into book phobia (By the way, it's not all because of T.V. now. My new excuse is employment!).
17. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
Finished in late March.
First thing I read through by Dickens, unless I read some as a kid (but that was probably in abridged form). I was looking for something light in the Young Adult section of the library and opened this (brick of a) book and it was hilarious, so I kept reading. This is Dickens's most autobiographic novel except for the part about the wives. There are crowds of great characters, half of whom [SPOILER ALERT] end up moving to... Australia! How about that. I would have finished this sooner (it's March 26th and the last time I put a book on the "read already" list was sometime in February) but I got addicted to The Office and stopped reading, thinking, and eating vegetables for a month in favor of television.
16. Linda McCartney: a portrait by Danny Fields.
Read in February?
A guy who was friends/acquaintances with Linda (Epstein/Eastman) McCartney before she married Paul the Beatle recounts her life story, adding in previously unseen interviews and the opinions and recollections of her other friends, acquaintances, relatives, etc. Bad: name-dropping, that sort of thing. At times I found it hard to trust Fields's interactions with Linda after she married McCartney, but hey, I've never been friends with a wildly famous person so I wouldn't know how fake or real I'd act in that scenario. Also, Fields endlessly described and praised the photos Linda took, but I don't think he showed more than one or two (and those weren't remarkable). I guess I could look them up if I wanted to see more But... Good: a feeling for how the world was in the sixties and seventies, especially New York City when both Danny and Linda worked there; a new view of the Beatles from the inside at the time of their breakup; the plain existence of this book, a biography of Linda McCartney, which is what I'd been looking for at the library when I took it out. Bonus points for existing.
15. I am an emotional creature: the secret life of girls around the world by Eve Ensler.
Read in February?
The author of the Vagina Monologues, see #11 below, wrote this play for a younger audience. I like that the book tackles a huge variety of problems that girls (and boys) today have to deal with; I don't like that Ensler uses this work to push her politics, in ways sometimes not so slight, at children.
14. Year of Wonders: a novel of the plague by Geraldine Brooks.
Read in February?
It's early spring in 1666 and Anna is a young servant living in an English village with her two children and a boarder, a tailor from London. When this boarder receives a bolt of cloth infected with a mysterious sickness, the disease kills him and begins to spread rapidly through the village, until it is apparent that the plague has arrived. In a move of noble self-sacrifice, the villagers close themselves off from the rest of the country and spend the next several months either dying, tending to the dying, doing three people's jobs, or becoming flagellants. Anna manages to survive it all. Read the thing to find out what on earth happens to the poor woman.
13. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Read in February.
I guess I'm into women-y books these days, because this one's a dystopian novel about a future U.S., now known as Gilead, where the men are in charge and the women wear loose, long dresses that designate their function in life: as in, green = housework, red = birthgiving, stripes = "Econowife". Horrifying. Kudos to the "Underground Womanroad," though.
12. The Good Body, also by Eve Ensler.
Read in February, around V Day.
Now Ensler speaks of bellies. This time, the interviews are with a variety of women (sorry, guys) who are dealing with some aspect of their bodies, getting liposuction or botox or whatever, with remarkable fixation. A quote from a girl at fat camp: "All this talk from the government about blowing up from obesity. I think this government should be worried about blowing up from all these bombs." Heh. Oh, and this other quote: "I eat for my Moscow translator,/ who told me she thought cellulite/ was anticommunist/ and she loved her pure Russian fat."
11. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.
Read in February, around V Day.
I figured the occasion made it a good time to read this (in)famous play. What occasion? V-Day, see http://www.vday.org/, on Valentine's Day, is an event set aside to raise consciousness of violence against girls and women. Ensler's compilation of monologues, which is performed at college campuses and other locations nationwide, reveals to its audiences the truths about the female "down there" anatomy that people rarely think or know about. While "awareness" campaigns often fall into the category of being more annoying than useless, e.g. all those ribbons out there in symbolic colors, this play not only tells about the pleasures and horrors that can come with having a vagina (How many women don't know what an orgasm is? How many stay silent about a rape or assault?) but helps real women through its connection with an ongoing fight against violence. Bravo.
10. The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. Last Narnia book. Reread.
Read in February.
I'd been rereading some of the others in December and didn't know where this one was, then my brother cleaned his desk up and found it buried in there somewhere. I love this series, and I love when lost things are found!
9. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.
Read in January?
It's been recommended to me a couple times but I resisted reading it because of the half-gristly title. Now I read it, and found it okay, not my favorite book but it does continue the feeling of the title remarkably throughout. The feelings of revulsion and adoration with which one might react to life's various aspects are expertly blended and juxtaposed and pressed easily upon the reader by the inviting flow of the half-century long story.
8. Good Poems for Hard Times, multiple authors.
Read in January.
Edited AKA put together by Garrison Keillor. I read his compilation, Good Poems in one sitting this summer (er, 2010) when I got stuck outside my house with nothing but the sun and trees, a beach chair, fresh sweet peas and this book for company. Best day of the season, total poetry high. Also, the intro of for Hard Times totally speaks to me. Love them both, so much interesting, readable poetry.
7. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Read in January.
Novel narrated by young woman living with her unusual family in their castle-- I mean, the castle for which they don't exactly pay rent anymore because they can't afford decent meals. Quite the charming and humorous voice, though I liked the book (and its story, its characters) less and less as it went on. British, 1930s. Author of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
6. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
Read in January.
Reread. Such an effective page turner, this novel is somewhere in between being a romance, sci-fi book, and a solid piece of literature (at least this is my claim. It's nowhere near Jane Eyre, for instance.). I saw clips of the movie and don't like it much, but the book, sigh, the book...
5. The Best American Essays 2004
Read in January.
This collection contained a number of gems. Did you know that the author of Seabiscuit has been confined to her home basically since college on account of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? She writes about it in this volume.
4. The Emerald City of Oz
Read in January.
My favorite perhaps of the Oz books. It was meant to be the last of L. Frank Baum's series but totally wasn't. It has two alternating plots, one scary and one quite sweet, that meet at the end. The scary plot involves some really horrendous evil hordes of invaders, and the sweet one has Uncle Henry and Aunt Em being charmingly Kansasian while on a tour of Oz with Dorothy and some unusual companions.
3. The Road to Oz
Read in January.
Dorothy and Toto meet the Shaggy Man, who gets a brand new, jeweled shaggy outfit once he arrives in Ozma's palace. Lots of nice magic and shenanigans with a host of new friends. Santa Claus makes an appearance!
2. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Read in January.
Here's the Wizard again, so human and lovable. And friends. And miniature pigs. A bunch of interesting characters travels through the center of the world here, and finds lands not known, apparently, to modern science.
1. Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
Read in January.
The third in the series following The Wizard of Oz. In this volume we meet the Nome King and a princess who owns thirty heads. Pleasure/lazy reading on my part, and I like the pictures.
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