Would you belive I've been reading too much to blog?

Nah, I wouldn't either. I have been awfully busy teaching and mom-ing though. Here is a hideously brief list of some things I've enjoyed lately:

The Maximum Ride series by James Patterson -- with thanks to Anna, Sophia, Julianna and the rest of my students who were reading the books so voraciously that I had to spend an entire weekend catching up. Start with The Angel Experiment, if you haven't already met Max and her flock.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - by Rachel somebody and David somebodyelse. I'll look up the actual authors and post that as soon as I can. If you already have your person that makes you feel most completely like your own self, I think you'll appreciate how this novel describes the process of finding that person. If you are still looking, here's a nifty manual...

What Happened to Cass McBride - again, I'll have to go back and find the author. Very creepy, but also very very cool read. And short. I don't normally dig short in books, but this one gets in and gets out in a most efficient fashion, which is appropriate for the novel it is and the story it is trying to tell.

The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordian -- and the books that follow, although I didn't really like Sea of Monsters as much as the others. My daughter (who is nine) is gobbling up this series almost as fast as I can read them. I love that!

There are more, but I have to go do family stuff. What have you been reading?

Why reading junk is okay

I'm about half-way through my re-read of Angela Thirkell's 35 novels. A book or two ago (I'm currently reading Marling Hall, first published in 1942) I stopped by the public library to borrow some books on CD for our drive to Cincinnati last weekend. As I wandered the shelves, I found myself staring at The Book of the Dead, Patricia Cornwell's latest Kay Scarpetta book. Now, it really wasn't my fault; the book happened to be shelved right at eye level, so I couldn't help seeing it there -- also, Predator [A] (which means it's an adult book if you're following along in the category columns on the right), the book before The Book of the Dead [also A], has a neon-green dust jacket, which tends to catch the eye even if you don't find it staring at you, six inches in front of your nose.

I should explain. I'm a teensy bit of a true-crime fan. It's not necessarily a good thing, but given the number of Law & Order shows out there and the length of the original show's run, I'm not the only individual with this problem. (For the record I was watching when Mike Logan was on his first partner and Michael Moriarty was Ben Stone, the original D.A. who liked to confront every defendant with "Siiiiiir!" I'm very unclear about why I feel proud of this. I also liked Chicago Hope, but that's another blog entirely, I think.) At any rate, before my kids were born, I was a huge fan of Patricia Cornwell's work. I was also reading a great deal of Anne Perry at that point -- another [A] author -- and since I was usually reading their books concurrently, my husband and I enjoyed debating which plotline would end with a more fantastically improbable twist. Until Cornwell's Point of Origin, which we listened to in the car on the way to Cape Hatteras just before our daughter was born and found incredibly silly, Perry usually won. Point of Origin was significant on a number of levels, though, because once I had my daughter in my arms, I realized that I was far less interested in reading about crime. So Perry and Cornwell stayed at the library for the next few years.

It may be significant to note, here, that I have never actually purchased a crime novel. I don't need to own them. I don't want to be in that world full-time. I just like to visit and go home to my Trollopes and Thirkells and Pratchetts and Cynthia Voigts.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Sometimes, not always certainly, but sometimes, it can be very palate-cleansing to read some junk. Don't get me wrong, clearly some junk reading is better than others. I have, for example, never been able to get all the way through a Harlequin romance. I'm fond of romance. I like a good love story as much as the next person, but it does need to be a good love story. Same thing with a mystery or a crime novel -- make it reasonably good and I'll gobble it right up, but please don't ask me to read absolute trash.

So last weekend, heady with WWII English manners, I took a detour and read The Book of the Dead, which was confusing, so I had to go back and read Predator. I think I've gotten it out of my system now, but Patricia Cornwell still owes me an apology for Black Notice. That loup garou nonsense was just silly. Stephenie Meyer, that goes for you too! Stop with the werewolves already!!!

And the rest of you, if you are a 7th or 8th grader, let me know and I'll find you some fun reading that doesn't involve true crime. Don't worry about waiting a while, like their Law & Order TV counterparts, Patricia Cornwell and Anne Perry aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

Kate - the Hepburn biography

I finally finished reading Kate.

Here's the scoop (problematically placed spoiler alert!!!): everyone in Katharine Hepburn's life was gay. Really. Everyone. Except John Wayne. Which is the one part I think William J. Mann may have gotten dead wrong.

Wasn't that nice of me to save you 656 pages. It really is a very big book. If you are fascinated by Katharine Hepburn (like me) you probably have to read it just to say you have. Otherwise, whew, that's a big chunk of pages. It's just so heavy... to hold up I mean... my arms got tired...

Also continuing to read Thirkell. I'm up to Before Lunch (1939) at this point. I think The Brandons is next, but I'll have to check before I start reading.

I know that's not much reading, but there was the premiere of The Dark Knight to see and this silly hooded sweater to finish...

Procrastination is the thief of time (well duh!)

You know how frustrating it is when you finish a book and it's late at night so nobody is awake to talk to about it? That's what a book blog is for, right? But when it's that late it just feels like so much trouble to fire up the laptop and talk to the blog. If, instead, a person decided to just blog in the morning, can you see how it would be that much more frustrating to wake up and realize that all of the brilliant ideas and insights of the night before are gone? That's essentially what happened to me last Saturday night. I finished Meg Rosoff's What I Was (YA/MYA?) and I'd practically written the entire blog entry about it in my head but I was too tired to actually get the stupid thing on electronic paper. Trying to reconstruct those thoughts now is immensely frustrating and just points to the fact that I (and maybe you too) need to write when the muse arrives to bring brilliance with a thump on the head, not later.

Meg Rosoff writes strangely compelling (or possibly just strange) books. Her 2004 novel How I Live Now (MYA) was a book I considered for the seventh grade dystopia list last year but discarded, reluctantly, because it was a little graphic on a number of levels. I wandered across What I Was (MYA?/YA) a couple of weeks ago in the public library and checked it out just to see if Rosoff followed the same pattern. This book, published in 2008 by Viking Adult press, does offer a similarly weird and otherworldly flavor, but the writing style and plot progression are both dramatically different.

The main character, whose name we don't learn until the end of the book, is a young man on the brink of, well, even he's not sure about that. As the book opens, our seventeen year old protagonist is beginning what should be his final academic year at St. Oswald's School. St. Oswald's is his last-chance for graduation, following expulsions from three schools in as many years. And, while our hero's parents expect their son to follow a typical, if mundane, upper-middle class British career path but he is, at best, ambivalent about his future plans. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this lack of ambition, though it is a lifeless sort of wailing (Rosoff's strange style comes through particularly in the colorless fog that is the future for her main character). The action begins, perhaps predictably, as the main character meets his destiny while trying to escape from P.E. class. Here's our hero pondering that moment as an old man: "We know now that time leaps and skids and suddenly stops short, as it will soon for me, as it did once on a day in the middle of the twentieth century when I met the person I wanted to be and asked him for a drink of water." (p. 204) Read it and let me know what you think. Post a late night comment if you finish reading and nobody else is awake...


What I'm reading right now: At the moment I am cruising back through, in chronological order, Angela Thirkell. A friend lent me Wild Strawberries which I had never read (thanks KWK!) and I've been diving back in to Thirkell with enormous delight (as usual). I'm also trying to finish William J. Mann's biography of Katharine Hepburn, Kate, which I borrowed from a colleague about a year ago. I need to finish that one before school starts, because it's 656 pages long and I'm only on about page 200 or so. I think I'll go see what progress I can make.

What I've finished lately - with few comments

Ravens-Gate - Anthony Horowitz
What I Was - Meg Rosoff
Daniel the Half Human and the Good Nazi - David Chotjewitz
The Wave - Todd Strasser

More on these later. What are YOU reading?