#8 The Waters and the Wild

by Francesca Lia Block

The Waters and the Wild is a strange little book where the protagonist, Bee, comes to believe that she is actually a fairy changeling. She get's bad grades, is left handed, and feels like an outsider. In that sense, Bee certainly seems to qualify although that would mean many teenagers qualify. Her two friends, Sarah and Haze, also feel like outsiders and identify themselves as the reincarnated slave girl and a half alien, respectively. What's not clear in the beginning, however, is whether any of them is anything other than a semi-normal teen.

That ambiguity of purpose - is it a story about an actual changeling or is it just a metaphor the character uses- is one that Block fosters to good effect. There is a dream like quality to the prose that only half resolves in the end. It was a quick read and had Block's trademark beautiful use of language and myth to create a richly textured sense of character. At 113 pages long, why not read it?

#7 The Night Circus

by Erin Morgenstern

Most of the time, I buy my books from used bookstores or check them out from libraries. Occasionally, I borrow one from a friend or coworker. I only rarely buy them new. I discovered The Night Circus while teaching. One of my usually-on-the-ball students was hiding something under her desk and ignoring the class discussion. I walked over expecting to confiscate a cell-phone and instead walked away with temporary possession of this novel. This, of course, led to a pretty interesting discussion about the book.

The Night Circus is billed as a "love story for adults" and I guess that's true but I think that's over simplifying the case. In reality, it's a story about magic and control. There's even a whiff of philosophical musing running under the surface. It's about what true immortality does to a human and it's about people pulling together to save each other. Surprisingly, it's only tangentially about romantic love at least as far as I'm concerned.

The best thing about The Night Circus is the richly developed world of the circus. It's otherwise set in the late 1800's and travels from location to location. The circus though is pretty much what I always wish circuses were. Miraculous things happen here. There are contortionists, acrobats, a bestiary, fortune tellers, and impossible structures full of clouds and wishing trees. It's a spectacle and it's the playing field to two dueling magicians: Celia and Marco. Their battle, committed to by their teachers when they were children, entangles the lives of everyone involved in the circus. Eventually it all starts to fall apart and it threatens everyone's life.

Great book. Totally worth collecting.

Unannounced Hiatus

Dear Reader,

I apologize for my unannounced hiatus. Several time-consuming things all collided unexpectedly about three weeks ago. As a result, I haven't had much time to sit down for regular meals let alone pick up a book. However, it's been a highly productive time:

• I finished my practicum binder for teaching certification. Probably the most time-consuming of all the things listed here and certainly the event that pushed my out of my groove. The binder is about 5 inches thick and fully indexed. It's the kind of thing that isn't really hard, only tedious and fully of picky details. I'm glad it's over.
• I led a school trip to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Which, if you are local and haven't been lately, are well worth a look. In the last ten years, the Gardens has put together a number of inventive exhibits and artistic collaborations to entice the public. One of my favorites was the Chihuly exhibit in 2004. The current exhibit, "Imaginary Worlds," consists of amazing botanical sculptures. I actually saw several of the sculptures when they were still wire work and scaffolding. The transformation was amazing and the kids had a great time trying to figure out how the sculptures were constructed.
• Brian Wilson & Jeff Beck Concert in Chastain Park October 4th. For those unfamiliar, Brian Wilson was one of (arguably the) the major creative forces behind The Beach Boys and Jeff Beck was a similar force to the Yardbirds. The show was split between these two power house starting with Wilson whose music I was already familiar with. Beck I was not so familiar with and was shocked by the sheer compositional richness. I guess it could be described as a rock version of instrumental jazz. It was amazing and surprising and very, very loud.
• Paid-Off my student loans. Yay. See ya Sallie Mae. (Of course with my luck I'll end up with new loans through Sallie Mae when I go to grad school.)
• Started my stint as Junior Varsity Boys Basketball Assistant Coach. It's a new role for me and I can't say whether I'm excited or trepidatious, but I know it will be interesting. 

Luckily, life moves on and the hectic times are past for a time. In the aftermath, I'm trying to reestablish my reading routines and have reduced  my massive pile of "to-read" lists into a short list of 10 books.

1. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
2. The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block
3. The Frenzy by Francesca Lia Block
4. The Waters and the Wild by Francesca Lia Block
5. The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring by Jenet Conant
6. Forgotten Garden by Kate Morten
7. The All New Square Foot Garden by Mel Bartholomew
8. Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
9. The Toss of Lemon by Padma Viswanathan
10. Monster of God by David Quammen

#5 Divergent & #6 Insurgent

by Veronica Roth

YA lit exploded in the last 15 years. When I was in highschool, I was stuck with R.L. Stine books and Goosebumps. More options probably existed but the marketing machine didn't get rolling on them, and so I didn't find them. Love it or h ate it, the marketing machine does serve a purpose. High Schoolers and Middle Schoolers today seem to have an almost limitless selection of options. Surprise surprise a lot of it is very good.

Divergent and Insurgent are a pair of distopian sci-fi novels. In this world, people live in a highly structured caste system based on idealized character traits. Each group is called a faction and there are five of them: Abnegation (selflessness), Erudite (Knowledge), Candor (Honesty), Amity (Friendliness), and Dauntless (Courage). Each faction has a role in society and, in theory, they live in peace.

Beatrice was born into Abnegation but during her aptitude test she discovers that there is something very special about her brain. Where most people have aptitude for one faction, Beatrice confounds the system and shows aptitude for three factions. This flexibility makes her something called divergent and being divergent is dangerous.

Soon Beatrice's personal problems are overshadowed when faction attacks faction and their carefully ordered society falls apart.

Overall, it's a pretty good pair of books. The plot combines elements of Ender's Game and 1984. The relationship angst got to be a little much, but the rapid pace kept the story moving.

#4 Seraphina

by Rachel Hartman

Seraphina is a musical young woman with a grave secret. She's half-dragon and the dragons are only barely trusted. So she lives her life circumspectly, trying to avoid notice in the royal court, that as a musician, she works in. Seraphina does not have a talent for circumspection.  It's not long before she's rolled up in conspiracy and her heritage gives her unique abilities which might just save the day.

It's a YA novel. A pretty good one too. The characters were engaging and the plot interesting. The end was satisfying but left the door open for more. It's definitely worth a read.

#3. This is How You Lose Her

by Junot Diaz

Some books read quickly. They suck me in and three hours later I'm reading the last page while realizing I've lost track of a whole evening. I've yet to figure out exactly what quality a book has to have for that to happen. Is it the plot? or the characters? use of language? It's a mystery.

On the surface This Is How You Lose Her is a book that I should hate. The protagonist, Yunior, is a serial cheater. The first thing he tells the reader is, "I'm not a bad guy." The defensiveness of this statement speaks on a whole other level. It's the plaintive cry of a character afraid to look at himself too closely in the mirror and I think everyone has felt that at some point. It's seductive. It's like biting down on a sore tooth. It hurts and I know I shouldn't do it, but I find myself biting down on it over and over again.

Diaz hops around from point to point in Yunior's life in little vignettes. Some are about the various women in his life, but some are about his fatally sick brother or his immigrant mother and father. The shape of his life comes into focus and reveals a tragic figure as much a victim as a predator but yet always ultimately the author of his own troubles.

I can't say that I truly liked This is How You Lose Her, but it was a powerful book, well crafted, and elegantly written. It was worth my lost evening.

The Looking Glass Wars -- #2 ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland captured the imagination of the public almost from the start. Even Queen Victoria was a fan and demanded Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgeson) dedicate his next published work to her which turned out to be an essay on mathematics. The novel's runaway success prompted Carroll to immediately craft a sequel and several adaptations. As time wore on, instead of fading out, Alice and her adventures seemed to gain traction and spawned dozens of spin-offs and adaptations including Beddor's "The Looking Glass Wars" trilogy.

I tripped across "The Looking Glass Wars" the way I find most YA lit: our school librarian handed it to me to look over. It's one of the perks of being a teacher that I have ready access to a lot of new lit. It took me a couple tries to get into the first book: Looking Glass Wars. It was too different and I wasn't in an accepting frame of mind. In this series, the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were inspired by a girl that Dodgeson meets named Alyss Heart. This girl is the princess heir of Wondertropolis in an alternate dimension which houses the seed for imagination in all worlds: the crystal heart. She ends up in our world by fleeing a coup led by her aunt, Redd Heart. Once I did get into the world though, I devoured both Looking Glass Wars and the next book, Seeing Redd, in under three days (while also finalizing grades for the 2012/13 school year!)

ArchEnemy, the final book in the trilogy took me significantly longer. I started it August 13th and just finished it a couple days ago. I simply couldn't get immersed in it the way I did the first two. I think the fact that all the characters were supremely unhappy for the first half of the novel had something to do with it and I think that the final novel felt rushed. While it was still a good book, it would have been better extended to two books and needed more levity inserted to break-up all the character angst. The overall finish satisfied me both for not being too obvious and for satisfying a mystery well seeded through-out the novel.

I've recommended the series to a couple students and so far they seem to enjoy it.

"Looking Glass Wars" Trilogy is:

• The Looking Glass Wars
• Seeing Redd
• ArchEnemy

#1 The Long Earth

By Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

It has been a busy start to the school year and I haven't had a lot of time for reading. However, I'm quite pleased with my first book of year 33. I was introduced to Terry Pratchett a little late, in college, and so didn't fall in love with his Discworld series to quite the degree that so many of my peers did. I have, however, always appreciated Pratchett's sense of word play and character development even if I got frustrated with his plot pacing. Stephen Baxter I am not so familiar with. I suspect though that I would greatly enjoy his writing.

I had a teacher once who felt that collaborative novel were a publishing gimmick. He said that usually all the work was done by one author, usually the less known one, and that the well-known author was attributed simply to get the lesser-known author's name out there. I can see his point and I don't doubt that this happens. However, in the case of two well known authors collaborating on the piece, I think it can be a beneficial thing.

In this specific case, I think Long Earth benefited from the collaboration. I saw all the character development and rich use of language that I expect out of Pratchett but without the slow plot and the tendency to play with language to the point of being irritating which I can only expect was due to Baxter.

The premise is half sci-fi and half fantasy. One day, plans for a mysterious device hit the web and in short order young people disappear into a parallel earth. Except that there isn't just one parallel earth. It turns out that there is a whole continuum of these parallels. Soon everyone is stepping into these parallel earthswith the aide of these easy to make devices and recreating the days of the frontier. Only this mass migration has far reaching effects. The economy is predictably compromised and humanity is split into three groups. Those who can step with the aide of a device, those who can't, and natural "steppers"(those who need no device.)

It's not long before the sheer mystery of the phenomena launches the most famous of the natural steppers, Joshua, and a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated into a high-tech gel based computer, Lobsang, into an exploratory mission funded by the monolithic and slightly sinister Black Corporation.

The characters are interesting but several readers posted reviews saying they found some of the secondary characters' motivations unbelievable. I didn't find them unbelievable. I did find them alien but the opening of an infinite frontier of land and resources would cause some interesting behavior. People are complex and I think Pratchett & Baxter did a good job of depicting a range of responses.  Long Earth has also received some criticism for failing to develop on its themes. I, however, suspect that this was always envisioned as a series and that the themes will be developed over successive novels. Since The Long War is scheduled for release January 2014, I guess I'll get a chance to test my theory.

Author Discovery: Boris Akunin

No matter how much I enjoy reading, I occasionally get bored. With all the ever-available information, lists, recommendations, and predictive algorithms embedded so helpfully in online vendor sites, I occasionally feel robbed of the sense of discovery. It is at these times that a well stocked used bookstore is particularly dangerous to the household budget.

On route to Maine earlier this summer, I was overcome by one of these moods while stopped in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Fortunately for my mood and unfortunately for the budget, Portsmouth has a couple of nicely stocked used bookstores and while browsing RiverRun Bookstore I was drawn to the cover art on a slim trade paperback in the mystery section. The book in question was Boris Akunin's Murder on the Leviathan which is, as it turns out, book three in the "Erast Fandorin" Series. I enjoyed it and searched out the two preceding novels in the series.

Akunin is a popular author in Russia who's several dozen books only recently have begun appearing in U.S. bookstores. Out of the 13 Fandorin novels, for example, only 9 have been translated and published here. Two of Akunin's "Sister Pelagia" series are available. The rest are unavailable as yet.

Akunin has a style of narration reminiscent of nineteenth-century works that fold character commentary into the flow of the story. Each mystery I've read so far uses a different point of view, often through a secondary character or series of secondary characters. The mysteries themselves are well crafted and the characters are intriguing. Having read the first three now, I have high expectations for the rest of the series and hope that the publisher continues to translate and release them. That being said however, there have been no new releases since 2008 and I suspect the publisher, Random House, has abandoned them.

Here's to hoping I'm wrong.

Birthday #33

Birthdays are funny things. They are a great time for reflection and reevaluation. They are also great excuses for parties. It's been a great day and a great week. I think it's time to restart the blog.