Of course, now I have to remember what was on the list.
September: ?????? I can't remember! September is forever ago!
October: Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier and Ghost by Jason Reynolds
November: The Seventh Wish by Kate Messner
December: Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
January: The Memory of Light by Francisco X. Stork
February: Samurai Rising by Pamela S. Turner
March: The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
April: The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
May: The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
It's been a good year. I have to pat us on our collective book club back for getting The Girl Who Drank the Moon on our list long before it won the Newbery.
I also keep thinking about my Serpent King / Oedipus thoughts. Can Dill be Oedipus and Oedipus' children? Because then it works pretty well - Oedipus has that apotheosis at the end of Oedipus at Colonus, which would parallel Dill's leaving Forrestville behind, moving on to a higher plane of existence (so to speak). But generationally speaking, Dill's father would be Oedipus, which also makes sense. Oedipus saves the people of Thebes, Dill's father is a preacher who tries to save his congregation. Fate brings Oedipus down, but it uses sexual taboo (incest) to do so; same with Dill's father (in his case, pedophilia); you could also say that hubris played a big part in taking them both down, obviously.
We're meeting on Wednesday to talk about The Serpent King. As I mentioned, our conversations never go very deep - we tend to stick to classroom applications of the books - but this Oedipus thing may be something I have to bring up.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Has it only been a day?
I'm trying to rediscover my purpose for this blog. It wasn't actually to review books. It was to have a place to spill all of my immediate reactions and thoughts about what I was reading, as if this blog were the fellow reader I never have, a reader who was reading the same books at the same pace and who would know what I was talking about when I said it.
So I'm going to try to get back to that. It was easy and fun to write that blog.
Over the last couple of days, I took a break from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I am reading as part of the project I mentioned yesterday, which I am once again punting down the road) to rip through The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner. It's the final book for my teacher book club and a brilliant way to close out a year of really awesome books (list below, if I can remember it).
Number one, I think I'd like to just hang out with Jeff Zentner and talk books and music. The Secret History is name-checked in the first few pages of The Serpent King. And then a bunch of other books and bands that I love. I won't list them - just read the book. I wrote years ago about music in books and every time I read a book that's heavy on dropping names of musicians (it happens a lot in YA) or movies or books I think kind of similar thoughts. First, it usually comes off as trying to hard to prove the cred of your characters, and your own by extension (I think Zentner escapes this, but not by a lot). Second, I prefer less explanation to more explanation (this Zentner does really well). I want the music referenced to make me curious enough to look it up. Finally...well, a new paragraph for this finally.
In The Serpent King, Zentner mixes up some fictional artists with his real artists, both musicians and authors. I'm never sure how to feel about that. So, like, Lydia listens to lots of great real music, but when she interviews a pop star for her blog, it's the fictional Laydee (terrible name, BTW). And Travis is obsessed with an obvious George R.R. Martin ripoff* - so obvious that I found it a little distracting. Why not just have it be the man himself? Or, flipside, why not make up all fictional celebrities (Daniel Handler is great at this - I'm still crushed that Hawk Davies doesn't exist)?
Fictional books and music aside, mostly when my thoughts drifted from The Serpent King, they drifted to Greek mythology and politics (as my thoughts so often do since November - it's amazing how politically charged even innocuous things are now).
First, myths. The Serpent King as a name seems like it's straight out of ancient lore, and clearly the story of Dill's grandfather has a place in his town's mythology. But I was mostly thinking about Oedipus and everything the Oedipal trilogy has to say about fate. That it's inescapable. That the sins of the father will be visited on his children, whether or not they've done anything to deserve it. (I was trying to remember if there were snakes in the Oedipus story - aside from the snakes that played a part in Tiresias' blindness, I don't think so?)
Of course, we aren't quite as bound to the idea of fate as the Greeks. Probably a good thing.
So, politics. Or religion. Politics and religion? They seem inextricably linked for so many people and I myself can't separate fundamentalist Christianity from conservatism. Dill's parents trying to convince him that education wasn't necessary because he had religion? Ugh. That seems to be the thing Trump and his ilk want the unwashed masses to believe. They don't want the lower classes to strive, to dream of more. They want them to be satisfied with as little as possible, misled by the belief that to want more is to be prideful, something to avoid, and that their reward for that miserable, humble life is in heaven. My favorite thing about this book is that it shows just how toxic those beliefs are.
*By the by, this is the second YA book I've read in the last year with a fictional take on George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones. The other was Morgan Matson's The Unexpected Everything, which I unexpectedly enjoyed, although the fantasy novel excerpts were one of the things I liked least about it.
So I'm going to try to get back to that. It was easy and fun to write that blog.
Over the last couple of days, I took a break from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I am reading as part of the project I mentioned yesterday, which I am once again punting down the road) to rip through The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner. It's the final book for my teacher book club and a brilliant way to close out a year of really awesome books (list below, if I can remember it).
Number one, I think I'd like to just hang out with Jeff Zentner and talk books and music. The Secret History is name-checked in the first few pages of The Serpent King. And then a bunch of other books and bands that I love. I won't list them - just read the book. I wrote years ago about music in books and every time I read a book that's heavy on dropping names of musicians (it happens a lot in YA) or movies or books I think kind of similar thoughts. First, it usually comes off as trying to hard to prove the cred of your characters, and your own by extension (I think Zentner escapes this, but not by a lot). Second, I prefer less explanation to more explanation (this Zentner does really well). I want the music referenced to make me curious enough to look it up. Finally...well, a new paragraph for this finally.
In The Serpent King, Zentner mixes up some fictional artists with his real artists, both musicians and authors. I'm never sure how to feel about that. So, like, Lydia listens to lots of great real music, but when she interviews a pop star for her blog, it's the fictional Laydee (terrible name, BTW). And Travis is obsessed with an obvious George R.R. Martin ripoff* - so obvious that I found it a little distracting. Why not just have it be the man himself? Or, flipside, why not make up all fictional celebrities (Daniel Handler is great at this - I'm still crushed that Hawk Davies doesn't exist)?
Fictional books and music aside, mostly when my thoughts drifted from The Serpent King, they drifted to Greek mythology and politics (as my thoughts so often do since November - it's amazing how politically charged even innocuous things are now).
First, myths. The Serpent King as a name seems like it's straight out of ancient lore, and clearly the story of Dill's grandfather has a place in his town's mythology. But I was mostly thinking about Oedipus and everything the Oedipal trilogy has to say about fate. That it's inescapable. That the sins of the father will be visited on his children, whether or not they've done anything to deserve it. (I was trying to remember if there were snakes in the Oedipus story - aside from the snakes that played a part in Tiresias' blindness, I don't think so?)
Of course, we aren't quite as bound to the idea of fate as the Greeks. Probably a good thing.
So, politics. Or religion. Politics and religion? They seem inextricably linked for so many people and I myself can't separate fundamentalist Christianity from conservatism. Dill's parents trying to convince him that education wasn't necessary because he had religion? Ugh. That seems to be the thing Trump and his ilk want the unwashed masses to believe. They don't want the lower classes to strive, to dream of more. They want them to be satisfied with as little as possible, misled by the belief that to want more is to be prideful, something to avoid, and that their reward for that miserable, humble life is in heaven. My favorite thing about this book is that it shows just how toxic those beliefs are.
*By the by, this is the second YA book I've read in the last year with a fictional take on George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones. The other was Morgan Matson's The Unexpected Everything, which I unexpectedly enjoyed, although the fantasy novel excerpts were one of the things I liked least about it.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Slow reading
Apparently I started writing a post here when I was sick about a month and a half ago. I don't have any recollection of doing that. Since that time, I've been sick again and I have not read many books. Really, I haven't read many books since, like, October.
Let me interrupt myself here to acknowledge that my not-many-books is still quite a few books. I just haven't been reading at the breakneck pace of last summer (none of which was recorded here, so you'll just have to take my word for it).
I had been thinking for quite a long time that it was the election that knocked me off my reading pace (still a strange thing to say, but I willfully admit that I spend a lot more time since November 9 watching and/or reading the news and thus, a lot less time reading books), but looking back at my reading log (or Book of Books), it seems I lost some steam before that terrible night. I've had some spurts of renewed literary energy (especially over breaks from work), but I'm still not back to my old self, reading-wise.
Maybe I just needed a break.
That said, summer is fast approaching and I am finding myself increasingly excited about having lots of time to read. I have some good books lined up for summer book camp (and I may actually bring myself here to talk about them, because we never dig very deep at book camp - conversation tends to be limited to classroom applications), a few titles I bought over the year that are looking very tantalizing on my book shelf, and a reading project I started in January that should keep me busy well past this summer.
I'm going to hang on to that project for my next post (an optimistic pronouncement, given the likelihood of that post materializing in any kind of timely fashion, but whatever, I choose optimism).
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