More good vampire reads

You simply cannot be involved with anything involving young adult (YA) literature and NOT have heard all the kerfuffle about Stephenie Meyer's vampire series. So I took the plunge and listened to the first of the 4 books in the series to be told from Bella Swan's point of view. Twilight-- as well as its two sequels (New Moon and Eclipse)-- have all been on the young adult section of the NYT bestseller list. The fourth book, Breaking Dawn, is due for release in the U.S. on August 2. There's a movie version of Twilight forthcoming. So now you know at least as much as I did when I decided to check this out. Bella Swan is 17 and has just moved to Forks, WA to live with her dad, Charlie, who just happens to be the police chief in town. She has resided up to this point with her mother in Phoenix and isn't at all happy about moving to the gray, soggy, cold Olympic peninsula, but she's trying to give her mom and new step-dad some room to get their life together. Bella is a klutz. She falls down walking on a flat surface, which makes sports, dancing, etc. totally out of the question. She's never had a boyfriend. Now, however, every boy in the high school seems to want her for a girlfriend and she's not really interested. Instead she is fascinated by Edward Cullen who sits in the cafeteria with his three siblings--all adopted children of the local surgeon Carlisle Cullen. The Cullens don't mix with anyone. They are beautiful, graceful, and apparently rich--everything Bella considers herself not to be. Edward seems initially to have taken an intense and puzzling dislike to Bella and disappears from school for several days after an abortive attempt to transfer out of biology class where he is her lab partner. Predictably they fall in love with each other, which is a real problem because Edward is--of course--a vampire. Meyer does insert some interesting twists in the body of myth about vampires. For example, they can't go out in the sun because they....glitter?! Also, all vampires are not created equal, nor do they evolve similarly. The Cullens strive to be 'good' vampires, but you can be sure that some bad ones show up. In short, it was a treat. I got so engrossed that I stayed up til the wee hours on a Friday night so I could listen to the rest of the book once I got about halfway into it. You can be sure that as soon as the pile of review books is cleared from my desk, I'll be back for the rest. Oh, and I'm ahead of you in the Netflix queue to get the movie :-)

Fluffy Romances

Stop now if you only read serious literature. But then if that were the case, you probably wouldn't be reading this blog at all, right? While I do draw the line at reading books where the covers depict a partially clothed women in the passionate embrace of some ridiculously pretty man, I still go for the occasional comic romance. Admittedly these don't have any particularly enduring literary value, nor do they stretch one's brain while trying to figure out a complicated plot, and they probably won't totally absorb you in the elegant use of prose, yet they are often good fun and offer some non-demanding downtime. Janet Evanovich's pre-Stephanie Plum novels are fairly entertaining examples of this genre, especially because her female protagonists tend to be mouthy and opinionated --yeah I know it's hard to imagine why THAT would appeal to me. The latest bit of confection I consumed was Wife for Hire which involves 27-year old school teacher, Maggie Toone, who wants to take a break from her job long enough to write a book based on the diaries of her Aunt Kitty, who was a madam. The part-time job she takes is to be a fake wife for an apple farmer in Vermont, Hank Mallone, who is trying to create a responsible enough image to get a bank loan for a new cider press. Complications abound. For example, the bank president happens to be Hank's father. Both Maggie and Hank have interfering family members who still think they are the headstrong and troublesome youngsters of years past. Hank's dog chases Maggie's cat. Hank's best friend stops by for breakfast way too often. Then there are all Hank's old girlfriends who think nothing of dropping in for dinner at the farmhouse. Finally, there is a totally unprecedented rash of attempted break-ins at the farm after Maggie comes to stay--could they possibly be after Aunt Kitty's diaries? Of course Maggie and Hank fall for each other; with Hank being quicker to acknowledge this while Maggie is absolutely determined NOT to give in to her historically unreliable passions. The wacky characters and plots twists presage the more well-developed family nutcases and predictably insane personal catastrophes in the Stephanie Plum numbered series that still make me laugh out loud.

Psychological Mysteries

The best mysteries, for my taste, involve not just a well-conceived and conveyed plot, but an examination of the psyche of the characters involved. Sometimes the focus is more in the mind of the killer, sometimes more in the tortured soul (don't forget soul and mind have common etymological roots) of the investigator. Blood Memory by Greg Iles is definitely in the latter category as the protagonist's own history becomes credibly interwoven with solving a series of bizarre murders in New Orleans. Forensic investigators of all sorts are popular main characters (e.g., Patricia Cornwell's medical examiner, Iris Johansen's forensic sculptor) and Iles' forensic odontologist, Catherine Ferry, is a well-developed and complex woman who finds out that the sexual abuse angle of the murders has some very personal meaning for her. Sexual abuse of children is a much more common crime than most people realize--or want to realize--and its conflicting emotions and outcomes are well drawn here. To his additional credit, Iles follows the text with a plea to hear out and support victims of sexual abuse.

The Lion and the Mouse

If you are at all interested in children's literature, read this article in the New Yorker, "The Lion and the Mouse," brought to my attention by my dear friend Sara. It tells the story of Carroll Anne Moore who made it her goal to create libraries for children and established the Central Children’s Room at the New York Public Library. It effectively set the standard for what a children's library should be. She also promoted borrowing privileges for children, inaugurated the first Children's Book Week, and offered inclusive literature and reading experiences for children of immigrant families. Moore also effectively became the first to legitimize children's literature by writing regular critical reviews in a number of well known publications (e.g., the NY Herald Tribune and The Horn Book) She harassed E.B.White to write his first children's book, Stuart Little, and then panned it. Fascinating story!

Italian mysteries

I discovered a new mystery series by Italian author Andrea Camilleri recently when I read The Patience of the Spider. I love to read mysteries where I also get to learn something about another country, culture or time period. Inspector Montalbano is apparently an aging and rather eccentric but clever member of the constabulary in Sicily who is recovering from recently being shot. In fact he was traumatized psychologically as well as physically and now wakes up in the dark hours of the morning at precisely the same time that he was shot. But occasionally he does his best thinking then. He's trying to solve a puzzling kidnapping...the perpetrators have taken a young woman whose immediate family is virtually penniless. Then it turns out that her uncle is rich and he is the real target of the ransom demands and of a campaign to destroy his reputation and his potential candidacy for political office. The side stories about Inspector Montalbano's tempestuous love life, his love of good food, and the Sicilian countryside all make this an enjoyable if somewhat lightweight read. I love Italian food, too.

I've read some other good mysteries set in Italy that I would recommend. The early works by Iain Pears (e.g., The Raphael Affair, The Titian Committee), before he got into writing more substantial historical mysteries (An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio), center around a couple of art theft investigators (Flavia di Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Squad, and consulting British art historian Jonathan Argyll) operating out of Rome. Because Pears is in fact trained as an art historian, these are also chock full of factual information as well as local color.

Vampires with an historical twist

By now, probably everyone but me has already read and reviewed The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I like some vampire books and I usually like historical novels, so when my sister gave this to me, it moved to the top of the reading pile (well, except for the books I was supposed to review for the children's literature database:-) Although set in the 20th century, this novel is all about delving into the history of eastern Europe and Turkey in the 15th century. The plot is driven by the appearance of apparently very old books with no text, but only a compelling woodcut image of a dragon with the word Drakulya underneath. Are the books delivered as an invitation or a warning or perhaps both? Is the image really a map that indicates where the real Dracula is/was buried? The mysterious volumes invite investigation into the life of Vlad Tepes (aka Dracula) who supposedly ruled an area of eastern Europe around current day Romania in the 1400's. He was at war with the Turks but was expansive in his legendary cruelty and both his own subjects and the enemy were recipients of grisly tortures. It's a fascinating insight into how historical scholarship might be pursued--through interviews, primary source documents, local folklore and songs, connections with other scholars. The problem is that those pursuing the inquiries, or more often those close to them, seem to keep dying or disappearing or worse. And just when you think things have finally been resolved (and it is a long book), Kostova twists your tail/tale and you have to start looking over your shoulder all over again.
p.s. While hunting down an image for this post, I ran a whole website devoted to books on vampires, so if this just whets your appetite for more, check it out.

In the Wind

It's just not fair to run across someone so talented in multiple arenas. The author of this book, Barbara Fister, just happens to be a librarian I admire greatly for her passionate participation in discussions about libraries, about fostering collaboration between librarians and other disciplinary faculty, about how to best teach college students and much more. And now I discover she writes really good stories as well. I'm sure the comparisons between her work and that of Sara Paretsky abound: they both have a former cop, now private investigator as the protagonist, both are set in Chicago and convey realistically the good and the bad of that city, both tackle thorny social issues. In the Wind is sort of a cold case mystery, since the woman that Anni Koskinen is trying to help is accused of murdering an FBI agent 30 years ago. There's a lot going on in this story--white supremacists, former members of the American Indian Movement, the socially disenfranchised under our very noses. But at its core, this is about the current incursions on our civil liberties that are reminiscent of earlier and equally bad episodes in our history when Americans were spied upon and persecuted, largely because their beliefs and behaviors weren't convenient for the Executive powers.

Was Kant a serial killer?

Or maybe he wasn't the actual killer, but had just created one? Somehow this premise of Critique of Criminal Reason by Michael Gregorio just stretched me the wrong way, so even though I had read several positive reviews (Booklist, Washington Post, & Publishers Weekly) the book has not inspired me to read additional works. According to Amazon.com, Michael Gregorio is the pen name for two academics, Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. She teaches philosophy, he teaches English (www.michaelgregorio.it or www.michaelgregorio.info). It is certainly a dark and brooding consideration of the limits of rationality in dealing with out-of-limits human behavior. Set in early 19th c Konigsberg on the eve of Napolean's threatened invasion, paranoia about spies is intense, the weather is brutally cold, and someone is killing ordinary citizens without appearing to leave a trace of how it was done--leading some to suspect supernatural forces. Immanuel Kant recruits a young protege to investigate the murders and passes along the strategies which would later inform forensic investigations.

On the bright side, I read a young adult book by Neal Shusterman called Unwind, which I can recommend. This is set in a future century, following the Second Civil War, when a compromise has been reached by the pro-life and pro-choice factions. From "The Bill of Life":

• ...human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.
• However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively "abort" a child...
• ...on the condition that the child's life doesn't "technically" end.
• The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called "unwinding."

Unwinding is a euphemism for disseminating all their body parts to those needing replacements, somewhat reminiscent of Nancy Farmer's story House of the Scorpion. The protagonists of this tale don't agree with the parents and state home authorities that they should be unwound and so escape, at least temporarily, via a system somewhat like the earlier underground railroad, to a safe haven in the Arizona desert. It's an interesting speculation on how far people can go to rationalize irrational behavior. The main characters, two boys and a girl, are well-developed, flawed as you would expect of children in such a situation, and yet remarkably resilient. I defnitely will find more of Shusterman's books to read.

I've moved and so...

...my reading has been on a bit of a hiatus. Whenever I get really stressed with too much too do--like pack and move my household from one state to another, or start a new job--it seems my reading takes a break. It shouldn't I know, but in some ways, it reaffirms for me that when I read, I exert more mental energy than when I watch TV. And I have a bit of catching up to do with books I need to review for various folks so that has to take some precedence over leisure reading. I did try reading Beautiful Children while involved in moving since my new job and abode are in Las Vegas. But it was quite grim, at least in the part I got to, so I had to take a break. However I'm still alive and kicking and will be back to it soon, especially since I read some intriguing book reviews and have already ordered a book through interlibrary loan :-)

Reading the YA award winners

Hard to believe it's been a month since I last posted notes on my reading. In my defense, I am in the process of moving to a new job and a new state, so I've been a little pre-occupied with trying to finish up projects at work and home. But we recently got in a batch of young adult books that have won awards so I dipped in and here's what I came up with.

The Michael Printz Award is sponsored by a publication of the American Library Association (Booklist) and intended to exemplify “literary excellence in young adult literature” (ALA YALSA website). This year’s winner is The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean, the first ever 3-time winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now Costa Book Awards) and a previous Carnegie medal winner—in other words, this woman knows how to write YA books! Here’s an excerpt from page 1: “I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.” And this from the book jacket will give you the basic storyline: “Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears. But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.” Symone is a resourceful and tough 14-year old who will engage male as well as female readers, not least of all because she has struggled with being bullied for her hearing loss, and had to live in recent years without a dad. This is an incredibly intense survival story that so compellingly conveys the harsh reality of this frozen wilderness that you will relish anew being in a safe warm place when you read it.

Last year’s Printz winner and the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award is American Born Chinese by former comic book creator Gene Luen Yang. I am new to graphic novels—The invention of Hugo Cabret being my first (see earlier blog). This book is largely about the impact of discrimination against ‘the other’ on the sense of self. There are 3 apparently separate story lines that all come together in the end. Each character, the monkey king of Chinese legend and two teenage boys, wants desperately to be something other than what he is—to transform himself. The moral of the story is that it’s best to accept and be who you are, and I have to say that I found it a bit simplistic and heavy handed on that score. Perhaps the format also limits how deeply one can explore the very real prejudices faced by those in non-dominant cultures.

I’d heard a lot of positive raves about The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt on the YA listserv I monitor. It was an Honor book for the Newbery Award, and, of this batch, it was my favorite. Above and beyond being stuck with a name like Holling Hoodhood, our seventh grade protagonist is the only non-Jew and non-Catholic in his class. This means he is stuck with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, on Wednesday afternoons when his classmates all disappear for religious instruction at their various places of worship. Initially she tries to get him transferred back to 6^th grade math class, then she consigns Holling to cleaning not only the blackboards and erasers in her room, but in every other 7^th grade classroom—the story is set in 1967 so they still have chalk and blackboards. Eventually her “torture” settles on making him read Shakespeare, and Holling discovers he likes the stories so much that he takes a role in a local theatre production of “The Tempest.” Schmidt brilliantly captures the angst of being a teen, being the son of an aggressively ambitious father, being the brother of an older sister who is opposing the war in Vietnam, and being at the top of the hit list for the local school bully.

By far the winner in the “heavy book category” is Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe, which also won the Batchelder Award (given to the publisher of a book originally published in another language and translated into English). Weighing in at 816 pages, I doubt I am the first reader to think it is too long. It’s a fantasy adventure about a 12 year boy who passes through a temporary portal into an alternative world, Vision, which is created by the cumulative imaginings of people in this one, the real world. Again this tale struck me as a bit simplistic morally; our protagonist Waturu is more considerate of others instead of being totally selfish, and so achieves the ultimate prize in the end. The fantastic creatures he encounters and befriends in Vision range from a Barney-like giant lizard to a seductive cat girl. Still it is commendable that the protagonist gradually and believably comes to act and see himself as more brave and competent than he did before his series of adventures, and so can serve as an engaging and worthy role model for young boys.