booktastic

Know what doesn’t make sense to me? The fact that the Chicago public library doesn’t allow you to renew your books when they’re overdue. Of all the times that a person would need to renew books, it seems like that’s a rather important one!

I am also annoyed with their policy of not accepting credit cards. I mean, the library in SPRINGFIELD MISSOURI accepts credit cards - and Chicago doesn’t?

I don’t know why I’m ragging on the ChiPubLib today, except that I’m annoyed that my books are a further day overdue today and I have no way of renewing them (and I won’t have an opportunity of returning them until tomorrow). I must owe like five bucks by now.

Well, it’s the last day of the crappy year that was 2008. I don’t know about you, but I’m rather excited to put it behind me and see what the new year brings.

There’s a possibility that I may be going to graduate school this coming year. I’ve been accepted by a school in my home state; it comes down to a question of whether we want to move back to my home state or not. I’d be going to grad school for an M.A. in English, which has been one of my goals for a long, long time; I seemed to fare well in an academic environment, unlike a business/data entry environment (and here’s a place for me to share an appropriate quote: “Once humans spent most of their days doing useful things with their hands, and I realized that we were designed to get a deep satisfaction from this. As Hughes put it, ‘You have the feeling people were supposed to do this kind of work, rather than data entry, which is amazingly horrible.’” - Emily Yoffe).

So I feel somewhat inclined to do that, because I think it would suit me as a profession better than being an office flunky. Of course, I’ve been worrying that maybe it would be better for me to do something like an M.A. in Library Science - because people with that degree are surprisingly well paid.  It wouldn’t be SO BAD to actually get trained for a position where I would be making a decent salary for once in my life, would it? (Except that I think that I’m just tempermentally more suited to teaching than to something like library science which - at its heart - is mostly clerical, data-entry type stuff. *sigh*)

Well, it’s something to contemplate in this 2009. Well, not really, since I’ve been accepted to the English program and not the Library Science program. And money’s not everything, after all - but everything costs money, which always unecessarily complicates life. — Mrs. Hall

Merry Christmas!! I hope that a wonderful 25th was spent by you and yours. If you don’t celebrate Christmas… well, I hope that you had pleasant day regardless.

Christmastime (Advent and Christmas proper) effectively removed any possibility of my posting on a regular basis during the month of December. I was reduced to posting once a week (or less) on both my blogs.

That situation should improve now that January is almost upon us! Christmas purists will know that Christmas is still going on (until Epiphany) - but the most complicated parts for me (the decorating, gifting, and visit home to family) are done. Now I just have to enjoy its remaining days. I have to go to work on many of them, unfortunately, but I do have a weekend AND two days off for New Year, so I shall make the most of what I’ve got. (I plan on baking a “King’s Cake” for 12th Night, by the way. This will be a new tradition for my family… so, I guess it’s technically not a tradition at this point… but I would like it to be so in the future. I’m going to research traditional cake recipes and everything.)

Very little reading was done this month. When I wasn’t distracted with Christmas, I was sleeping. And although I did bring two books along on my Christmas vacation (A Monstrous Regiment of Women and Shepherds Abiding), I did not read them because most all of our time was spoken for. I am still in the midst of reading The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by Julie Lane, and a copy of my beloved The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum arrived with yesterday’s mail! (Thanks, Jeanne at Bookmooch!)

I have three overdue library books (forgot to return them before vacation… eep!) and also received a book from Miss Landis for Christmas…! So I suppose what I’m saying is that I have a goodly portion of Christmas reading to fit in before Epiphany, and also two other books that I wish to start reading (and would like to finish reading, and return to the library) soon.

I also have a book that I wrote this past year that needs to be submitted to publishers in 2009…!  This looks like a busy month and year in the offing… – Mrs. Hall

“Boomtown turned out to be a place where everybody’s favorite thing to do was to blow stuff up. …They valued education more than money, worked hard, stayed married, loved their children, cared for the environment, and honored the heritage of other cultures. You may ask, ‘How is that possible?’ I see your point. A place like that can’t be real. But it should be.” - From the “Introduction” by Nowen N. Particular

Boomtown, by the mysterious Nowen N. Particular, takes place in the fictional town of Boomtown, Washington in the 1940’s. The story is told by the Reverend Button, newly arrived with his family to minister over the Boomtown Church. After arriving, he discovers two things that upset his composure: first, that the people of Boomtown are one and all eccentrics who love blowing things up; second, that all the previous ministers of Boomtown Church (some twenty four of them) died in bizarre accidents after only a year or two of ministering.

The story is almost an ensemble piece, focusing chapter-to-chapter on the individual stories of the inhabitants of Boomtown. We hear the story of Chang, the town’s founder and creator of the fireworks factory that gave the town its name; Walt, the Butcher turned Barber; Mabel, proprietress of the eponymous Mabel’s Diner (”Terrible Coffee, Worse Service”); and the Hopontop Indians.

Right off the bat, I would like to say that I essentially enjoyed reading this book. However, I did find myself wondering if it would really hold the attention of the “tween” audience that it is apparently aimed at. Yes, it is colorful and cartoony and has lots of crazy happenstances. All well and good.

But the story is told by the father. Typically, a book of this type would be from the perspective of one of his children - and, indeed, they had more adventures than he did although (as promised) his life was endangered on several occasions. I mean, I did enjoy the book - but I can’t help but wonder if I would have enjoyed it just as much at age 10, or if I would have gotten impatient with the adult main character and wanted to see things from the kids’ viewpoints instead. Even though many things that happened in the book were intentionally very outlandish, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was a grownup telling a story to another grownup. I don’t have any kids available to question and see if that approach works or doesn’t work, so I’ll just have to leave this issue open-ended.  But, what if the book Peter Pan was told entirely from the perspective of the Darling parents? It would have been a rather sad, depressing, colorless story.

The author stated in the introduction (quoted above) that he was “surprised” by the “ethnic variety” in the town. Okay, I get that this is supposed to be a Utopia of sorts; the author’s idea of the ideal town where everybody respects everybody else. But I’m also reminded of a warning on the beginning of the recently released Vol. 1 of Fleischer’s utterly wonderful Popeye cartoons:

(Emphasis on the final line, “… to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”) Yes, the author did mention something to the effect that some people had some issues with a mixed-race child who becomes involved in the story. Yes, the author did take pains to explain how the town had a Japanese mayor just a couple years after the end of WWII, when most Japanese Americans were still viewed with suspicion across the USA.

Yet, I see the main character casually accepting things like the fact that the area has a female, hispanic circuit court judge (unusual for a small rural town even in this day and age) without any question whatsoever (despite the fact this is supposed to take place in the 1940’s) to be pushing it just a bit. Yes, I know this is essentially a cartoon world, but I think it could have borne a few more comments that this was very unusual in that time and place.

However, perhaps the biggest problem I had with this book was the ending - and I will try to explain my problem without ruining it for any potential readers. The book spent a lot of time getting us used to a certain set of characters (the amusing cover announces that this is “Book One” so I’m assuming that more are planned) - and yet, this set of characters simply ditches the town at the end. I found that rather disconcerting as well as going against a lot of what they’d been setting up in the book… it was like all the lessons that had been learned about acceptance were simply discarded. I’m assuming that the next book would simply have to deal with a wholly different set of characters, which I would find even more disconcerting. I liked these characters - I wanted to spend more time with them.

And I would also like to point out that despite this book being told by a minister (and being published by a Christian publishing company) I thought the religious message, if there was one, was a touch on the covert side. Perhaps the author was aiming at that to avoid “preaching” to the kids… but, really, if I’m buying a book from a religious publishing company, I kind of expect there to be a clear-cut religious theme…

I’m afraid this is going to be a half-and-half sort of review… because I essentially enjoyed reading it. I thought Boomtown sounded like a nice place to live in spite of the fact that it had no Catholics. I was entertained by most of the colorful characters - and wouldn’t want to live in an idyllic small town where everybody loves everybody else and enjoys setting off fireworks?

But, as I said, I had issues with both story elements and fact that we are getting everything from the perspective of the stodgy father character (which as an adult I had no problem with - but which as a kid, whom this story was ostensibly aimed at, I might have been bored).

So what is my final word? As I originally stated, I essentially enjoyed reading this book. I would recommend it to other adults who are looking for light, colorful reading and enjoy escapism - but I don’t think I can whole-heartedly recommend it for kids.  — Mrs. Hall

At that book sale last week, I happened to pick up a copy of a brand new children’s picture book called Ocean Wide, Ocean Deep, by Susan Lendroth, published August of this year by Tricycle Press.

Now, I didn’t buy it for myself, even though I have a “thing” for well-made children’s books (my minor at university actually focused on children’s literature. When my fellow students were struggling with Henry James, I was reading Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.) I picked it up for a baby I know.

I chose this book over several other picture books because this one had very nice illustrations and a sweet story. It’s about a girl, in the olden days, waiting for her Dad to get back from the sea.

Pretty simple story, right? Well, it’s a picture book for small children. It’s SUPPOSED to have a simple story. When your book is less than twenty pages long and has fewer words than this blog post, you have to be pretty concise in your story structure: You announce the problem, deal with the problem, and at the end of the book, resolve the problem. The problem is announced - girl’s dad is going away to sea. Deal with the problem: girl misses her dad. Resolve the problem: Dad comes home. Everybody’s happy.

Unfortunately, although I really like this book, I haven’t got a lot to say about it… because it’s less than twenty pages long and has fewer words than this blog posting. But let me reitterate: sweet story, BEAUTIFUL illustrations. If the book has one flaw, it’s that some of the vocabulary used in it is a bit advanced for the “picture book” age group… but I suppose that would be a good opportunity for vocab building, too, so I can’t even really complain about that.

So, to sum up - if you need a pretty, sweet, new picture book for a young lady you know this Christmas: pick up Ocean Wide, Ocean Deep. Definitely a keeper. (Although I’m not keeping mine, darn it. Lucky baby!) — Mrs. Hall

A few posts ago, I told you my opinion of The Cereal Killer by Diane Mott Davidson. That was a pretty decent book and I enjoyed it quite a bit (even though it was slightly disconcerting when - listening to the audio book - the main character described details of a physical romantic encounter. Up until that point I could totally pretend that this was friend talking to me about her life… but that kind of weirded me out. But - that was just a minor issue, and I probably wouldn’t even have cared if I had been reading, rather than listening to, that book.)

Well, as I mentioned, that was the third book - so I went to the library and picked up the first, Catering to Nobody. It is so-named because in it, the main character’s business is temporarily (for almost the entire book) closed down.

This means that one of the main things I liked about the third book — the fact that the main character was constantly talking about food –  was more or less absent from this one. Oh, don’t get me wrong - food did come up on a good number of occasions, and the actual recipes are featured in case you are interested in making them - but it just wasn’t there as much as in the third one. (Which is another problem with reading books out of order!! I hate reading a book from “later in the series”, then going back and reading the first book and not liking it as well!!)

However, as a mystery novel it was pretty interesting. I didn’t find the setting of the mystery (an ObGyn doctor scandal) quite as personally interesting to me as the focus of The Cereal Killer (which was a higher education scandal, an area I have more experience with and more interest in. Higher education, I mean, not higher education scandals). However, that is not to say that it wasn’t interesting at all, or that you would only enjoy it if you spend a lot of time at your ObGyn… Just a personal preference there.

I enjoy and like the main character, Goldy, even though her views on things are rather different from my own. However, now having read two books, I must say that I take mild issue with the fact that the character often doesn’t push some points hard enough… Let me explain. Let’s say, for example, she has an idea that her friend Marla knows a clue which may solve the mystery. Goldy asks her about it surreptitiously,  Marla stonewalls her a bit or says she’ll talk about it later… and Goldy just lets it slide, feeling she can’t pursue the matter.

Things like that happen a lot in the book - so much that it almost feels a touch forced, like it’s a device to draw out the length of the story. Oh well, I suppose there are worse ways to draw out the length of a mystery story… like by shoving a semi-unrelated short story about cannibals or Mormons into the center of the book.

Mid-way through, I was on the verge of saying that I wasn’t excited enough by Catering to Nobody to track down the next book in the series. However, by the ending I was thoroughly engrossed and found the ending good and satisfying, so I will be locating the next book. Although it must be said that after discovering the title of the next book is Dying for Chocolate, I really had no choice in the matter.

I can’t resist a book with chocolate in the title. I seriously can’t. — Mrs. Hall

I had a stroke of book-related good luck day before yesterday. On my way down the hallway to my office, I happened to notice signs up in the hallway indicating that there would be a book sale in the building at some point that day. I’m not entirely clear on my way around the building so I thought no more of it until my office mate pointed out that it was at the conference room right across from our office, and would I like to head over there with her during lunch?

I have no objection to book sales (even though money is tight right now) although I had no idea what sort of books they might be; I have wide-ranging inerests, but I do have my limits.  But regardless I headed over with her at noon and we perused the tables.

Well, this is where it took a turn for the delightful. For one thing, the prices were exceedingly reasonable: if the original cover price were up to $10, the price of the book was $1; if the original cover price up to $20 the book was $2 and so on. For another thing - the tables were covered and overflowing with brand new books. Well, perhaps not brand-new - some were a year or two old - but most were within the first year and a half since publication. And for another thing - there was a pretty decent selection!

Turns out that the book critics at the newspaper (I’m purposefully not saying which Chicago newspaper to avoid being stalked - and because they’ve been in the news for other reasons lately and I don’t want to give them any more trouble) receive any number of free books from publishing companies every year for review purposes - but they feel it’s not in their journalistic integrity to actually keep the books (as it smacks a little of bribery in their opinion; not in mine but that’s neither here nor there) so every year they have this big book sale and donate the money to charity. (Let’s not even discuss whether selling books that are labeled “Not To Be Sold” is better than keeping a book that a publisher sent you to keep. I guess since it goes to charity it’s okay.)

Perhaps the best (and worst) thing about the sale was… this sale isn’t  open to the public, not really. It’s on an upper floor of the building and you can’t just walk in here - you need a special pass to get past the security guys. So it was really only employees who got to pick over the tables.

If only I had more time and a bigger budget! I could have spent hours there - and spent considerably more than the $21 dollars I wound up spending. (And I only had $20 in birthday money on me - I had to borrow that last dollar from my office mate.)

It strikes me suddenly that it may seem like I’m gloating - “I got to go to the super secret book sale and you didn’t!” kind of thing. That was not intended: I simply offer this as an interesting book-related story (and let you know so that if you happen to be in the area - and have a pass to get into a certain Chicago newspaper building - at this time next year, you should totally come to this sale). I also did want to share what it was that I picked up - as you are some of the few people who will appreciate my finds, as they are rather eclectic. I found:

Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon

Genius and Heroin by Michael Largo

Stop Whining and Start Living by Dr. Laura Schlessinger

The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Sandiford

Foyle’s Philavery by Christopher Foyle

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar … by Thomas Cathcart

Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder by Gyles Brandreth

I also picked up a couple other books, but I’m not talking about them because they are going to be finding their ways under my Christmas tree this year. (No, I’m not giving them to myself, in case you were wondering.) — Mrs. Hall

Sorry that I haven’t been posting much this past week… It’s been snowing, which means that I’ve been staring out of the bus at snow rather than reading.

It’s my birthday today. I am officially almost not a kid anymore. Next year is the big three-oh… I’m not sure how I feel about that. I wax and wane between excited, confused and bewildered.

I went to Borders on Friday to try and do a little more Christmas shopping and just finish off a couple of people… with no luck. I wound up purchasing myself a book (as per usual, only this time I justified it as a “to myself” birthday gift) - but, really, it’s not much of a book: it’s called I’m Just Here For the Food: Cook’s Notes and claims to be “brought to you by Alton Brown“. It was on the clearance rack for $2.99, if you’re interested.

Thing of it is - this is a empty book. It’s ruled with lines so that you can put your own recipes and cooking notes into it; it doesn’t even have, like, funny quotes from him or anything. It’s not “brought to you by Alton Brown” any more than your math homework is brought to you by Pikachu. However, I didn’t buy it for the Alton Brown-ness; I’m copying all my random recipes into it so that they won’t be floating around the kitchen on random bits of paper and sticky notes anymore, which is a Good Thing. No more will I have to hunt through the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook for the back of an envelope that I wrote my recipe for meatloaf on: now it is safely ensconced in a bound book of Mrs. Hall’s foods. Tra-la.

I am, however, thinking of putting Gremlin stickers all over the place where it says “Brought to you by Alton Brown”, because it kind of irritates me to have Alton Brown claiming credit for all of my recipes.  — Mrs. Hall

I have a shameful confession to make. When I was a child, I owned the complete set of Paddington Bear books…

And I never read them.

I don’t know why I never read them. After I learned to read I became a voracious reader and consumed almost every book I owned and many I didn’t (thanks, West Plains Public Library) - including an entire series of rather crappy “Solve it Yourself” mysteries and “Choose Your Own Adventure! ” books.

But not Paddington. There were just a handful of books I owned that I never read (including Misty and King of the Wind because I could just never get into a book about a horse. I liked horses, like all eight year old girls do, but I was never interested in reading stories exclusively about them. I mean, who cares what a horse is thinking about? In my experience growing up on a farm, horses think about two things: eating and finding things they can use to knock off/crush the people riding them. But I digress.)

I don’t remember why the books never interested me. I was always interested in the British Isles, so it kind of surprises me that I didn’t take to the books… I seem to recall, at some point, asking my Mother where they had come from and if she had ever read them; I don’t remember her reply, except that it can’t have inspired me to read them. But I do remember what happened to those books - I wound up giving them to the children of some friends of ours who were even more poor (poorer?) than we were (!!). They were excited to get them.

And so I have gone through my life Paddington-less. The story would have ended there, but for the fact that recently I was searching for audiobooks to download from the public library website. I searched, on a whim, for “Stephen Fry” (a British actor of whom I was overly fond at one time; he was half of the team of Fry and Laurie, the other half being Hugh Laurie of House fame)  - and discovered that Stephen Fry was the narrator for a copy of A Bear Called Paddington, available for download. Somebody else had it checked out, so I patiently waited my turn for it, and downloaded it last week.

It only took me a few hours at work (data entrying) to finish it… but it was delightful. This kind of story was made to be read by someone like Stephen Fry: so quaint and distinctly British, with lots of emphasis on subtle puns and wordplay. Mr. Fry has an amazing speaking voice and was able to do all the different characters (with different accents and intonations, depending on the case) perfectly.

As far as Paddington goes… I am very sorry, now, that I did not read these books as a child. This one at least was very cute and enjoyable, and I even chuckled out loud a couple times. As far as the narration by Stephen Fry goes - it was fabulous.

If you’re in the mood for a sweet, light, enjoyable, entertaining book - and want to hear it narrated by a great voice actor - buy or download this copy of A Bear Called Paddington!! – Mrs. Hall