50-book challenge: February.
Feb. 28th, 2007 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaBooks I read in February:
Midnighters 3: Blue Noon, by Scott Westerfeld.
The conclusion of the Midnighters trilogy. I think I agree with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jinian that the second book is the best (how rare is that, for a trilogy?!), but this one was also very good. I did keep having mental intrusions of, "I could totally see this as a movie," which is sort of a compliment to Westerfeld and sort of not. I mean, yes, the action scenes were awesome, and the visual description is compelling. On the other hand, "I could totally see this as a movie" = "I am not fully immersed in this as a book."
Rise and Shine, by Anna Quindlen.
This book was only okay. It's a novel about two sisters, one who is essentially Katie Couric (the extremely wealthy and famous host of a TV magazine program) and the other who is a social worker serving disadvantaged families. The Katie Couric character gets burned out and says something honest but profane on the air, and most of the novel shows the social worker character's viewpoint on her subsequent fall from grace. Quindlen is pretty heavy-handed in the way she uses the social worker's clients' lives to show up the petty triviality of the TV star's "scandal." Case in point: the social worker has to deal with a bunch of families who are suddenly homeless because the crappy slum building they lived in was so shoddily maintained that the building's facade crumbles and falls right off OKAY OKAY I GET IT ALREADY. Also, there is a character who is too good to live, and he serves exactly the narrative purpose that one might expect such a character to serve.
Digging to America, by Anne Tyler.
Tyler doing what Tyler does best: a minutely observed and relatively plotless character study and portrait of family life. This one is about two families who meet in an airport because both of them are adopting a baby girl from Korea. One is the quintessential liberal upper-middle-class white suburban American couple, and one is an Iranian-American couple and the husband's Iranian immigrant mother. The two families become entwined through their shared adoption experience; the book is an exploration of foreignness and belonging. I love Tyler, and I liked this book quite a bit, but if you require a plot to your fiction you will probably find this unsatisfying.
Material World, by Menzel, Mann, & Kennedy.
I thought I was going to be crazy about this one, but instead I paged through it unmoved. I think it was contaminated by my irritation with Menzel's other book, Hungry Planet. In Material world, a team of photographers visits 30 families in 30 countries across the world. They describe and take pictures of the family's daily life, and then take one "big picture" of the family surrounded by all of their possessions. Only a couple of the families really stuck with me - most notably, the Bosnians. This book was photographed at the height of the war. It was shocking to see the family describing what they had once had, and then to see what they had been reduced to. I might try to read this book again in a few months, when my reaction to Hungry Planet has worn off a little.
Primary Inversion, by Catherine Asaro.
Asaro's first novel, and apparently the first in a zillion-book series of series. Battling empires, a psychic Internet, pilot warriors in flashy black leather uniforms, biologically-driven sadism, and star-crossed lovers. I understand that Asaro's physics is impeccable; that part was lost on me, but I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the story very much. I'd be happy to read the next books in the series, but they seem to be kind of hard to find. (Incidentally: the Amazon reviewer who titled his review "WOW I didn't like this book" and started off with, "In reading the other reviews of this book, I discovered the writer is female physist. That makes a lot of sense, the main character is a middle-aged very powerful woman"? Is revealing a lot more about himself than he is about Asaro. Just saying.)
The Read-Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease.
Much of this book is devoted to boosterism about the importance of reading aloud to children, which I didn't need. I still found the book worthwhile for its general philosophy and for the advice about the nuts and bolts of reading aloud. I don't ever remember not being able to read, so I was interested in Trelease's argument that learning to read sucks because the level of what you're able to decode is so much lower than the level of what you are able to understand. (For me, it was actually the reverse: I have clear memories of reading books that I completely failed to understand because my technical skill outstripped my emotional sophistication.) He recommends reading books that are above children's reading level, but not above their emotional level, and he devotes half the book to annotated lists of recommended books. He also recommends reading aloud well into adolescence - there are interesting discussions, for example, about which books are good for inner-city high school teachers to read to their students.
On a philosophical level, The Read-Aloud Handbook was probably my first ever encounter with an account of the "whole language" method of teaching reading not written by someone who vociferously disapproved of whole-language methods. Trelease hates worksheets (yay!) and phonics drill, although he acknowledges that many kids need phonics instruction to learn to read. He thinks the single most important lesson that reading instruction needs to impart is that reading is pleasurable, and that once kids figure that out, they'll slog through the hard work of actually learning how to decode text. And he very much does not think that worksheets, basal readers, and prepackaged phonics curricula teach the lesson that reading is pleasurable. (Hard to argue.) He also stresses the importance of background knowledge in learning how to read fluently; the greater the vocabulary and fund of information about the world a child brings to reading lessons, the easier it will be for them to match up letters on a page to the real world. Reading aloud is a pleasurable way of filling in vast quantities of vocabulary and background knowledge.
An Assembly Such as This, by Pamela Aidan.
If you have always wished that Pride and Prejudice had been written by Georgette Heyer, then this is the book for you. If you have very much not ever wished that, but you do like Georgette Heyer, then you, like me, will desperately wish that Aidan had just changed all of the names around. There's nothing wrong with the dripping-in-stock-Regency-set-pieces story she wants to tell - it's just not a story about Mr. Darcy.
Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill.
The last time a book made me this deeply sad, it was... hmm. Probably five years ago, when I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Lullabies for Little Criminals is a note-perfect, all too vivid and evocative description of what it's like to be a twelve-year-old girl trailing through the red-light district of Montreal after her junkie father. I've known enough foster kids and junkies and crazies and throwaways that this book was horribly, horribly real to me. It's very good - absolutely worth reading. But I kind of wish I hadn't.
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.
This is Bechdel's graphic-novel memoir about her relationship with her cold and distant father. As she's grappling with coming out, she also has to grapple with her mother's revelation that her father has had affairs with men and adolescent boys. The memoir circles around Bechdel's attempts to understand her parents' history and inner lives, and by extension, her own. Really good. For fans of Dykes to Watch Out For: this one is not a comedy.
Two books I emphatically did not read in February:
Adverbs, by Daniel Handler.
I liked Handler's The Basic Eight quite a bit, so I was happy to see that he'd written another non-Snickett. I should have read the reviews on the back cover first. Because surely, if I had noticed that Dave Eggers plugged this book by describing Handler as a modern-day American Nabokov, I would have known better than to try to read it. The dialogue is exactly like something out of Atlanta Nights (I wish I'd written down a few choice lines before returning Adverbs to the library), except that the Atlanta Nights authors wrote like that because they were deliberately trying to produce the worst novel ever written, whereas Handler wrote like that because, we are asked to believe, he is a stylistic genius.
Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer.
I have now tried twice to get past the first fifty pages of this book, with utter lack of success. Isn't it supposed to be a thing?
Edited to add:
I also read The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde, and then, apparently, promptly forgot about it. This isn't a Thursday Next book - it's another series, about the "Nursery Crimes Division" of the Reading Police Department. It's vintage Fforde: puns, literary allusions, self-referentiality, and a mystery plot, sprinkled with lots of little clever bits. But it just didn't add up to very much, for me. It felt recycled.
Total for February:9 10
Total for the year:18 19
Midnighters 3: Blue Noon, by Scott Westerfeld.
The conclusion of the Midnighters trilogy. I think I agree with
jinian that the second book is the best (how rare is that, for a trilogy?!), but this one was also very good. I did keep having mental intrusions of, "I could totally see this as a movie," which is sort of a compliment to Westerfeld and sort of not. I mean, yes, the action scenes were awesome, and the visual description is compelling. On the other hand, "I could totally see this as a movie" = "I am not fully immersed in this as a book."Rise and Shine, by Anna Quindlen.
This book was only okay. It's a novel about two sisters, one who is essentially Katie Couric (the extremely wealthy and famous host of a TV magazine program) and the other who is a social worker serving disadvantaged families. The Katie Couric character gets burned out and says something honest but profane on the air, and most of the novel shows the social worker character's viewpoint on her subsequent fall from grace. Quindlen is pretty heavy-handed in the way she uses the social worker's clients' lives to show up the petty triviality of the TV star's "scandal." Case in point: the social worker has to deal with a bunch of families who are suddenly homeless because the crappy slum building they lived in was so shoddily maintained that the building's facade crumbles and falls right off OKAY OKAY I GET IT ALREADY. Also, there is a character who is too good to live, and he serves exactly the narrative purpose that one might expect such a character to serve.
Digging to America, by Anne Tyler.
Tyler doing what Tyler does best: a minutely observed and relatively plotless character study and portrait of family life. This one is about two families who meet in an airport because both of them are adopting a baby girl from Korea. One is the quintessential liberal upper-middle-class white suburban American couple, and one is an Iranian-American couple and the husband's Iranian immigrant mother. The two families become entwined through their shared adoption experience; the book is an exploration of foreignness and belonging. I love Tyler, and I liked this book quite a bit, but if you require a plot to your fiction you will probably find this unsatisfying.
Material World, by Menzel, Mann, & Kennedy.
I thought I was going to be crazy about this one, but instead I paged through it unmoved. I think it was contaminated by my irritation with Menzel's other book, Hungry Planet. In Material world, a team of photographers visits 30 families in 30 countries across the world. They describe and take pictures of the family's daily life, and then take one "big picture" of the family surrounded by all of their possessions. Only a couple of the families really stuck with me - most notably, the Bosnians. This book was photographed at the height of the war. It was shocking to see the family describing what they had once had, and then to see what they had been reduced to. I might try to read this book again in a few months, when my reaction to Hungry Planet has worn off a little.
Primary Inversion, by Catherine Asaro.
Asaro's first novel, and apparently the first in a zillion-book series of series. Battling empires, a psychic Internet, pilot warriors in flashy black leather uniforms, biologically-driven sadism, and star-crossed lovers. I understand that Asaro's physics is impeccable; that part was lost on me, but I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the story very much. I'd be happy to read the next books in the series, but they seem to be kind of hard to find. (Incidentally: the Amazon reviewer who titled his review "WOW I didn't like this book" and started off with, "In reading the other reviews of this book, I discovered the writer is female physist. That makes a lot of sense, the main character is a middle-aged very powerful woman"? Is revealing a lot more about himself than he is about Asaro. Just saying.)
The Read-Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease.
Much of this book is devoted to boosterism about the importance of reading aloud to children, which I didn't need. I still found the book worthwhile for its general philosophy and for the advice about the nuts and bolts of reading aloud. I don't ever remember not being able to read, so I was interested in Trelease's argument that learning to read sucks because the level of what you're able to decode is so much lower than the level of what you are able to understand. (For me, it was actually the reverse: I have clear memories of reading books that I completely failed to understand because my technical skill outstripped my emotional sophistication.) He recommends reading books that are above children's reading level, but not above their emotional level, and he devotes half the book to annotated lists of recommended books. He also recommends reading aloud well into adolescence - there are interesting discussions, for example, about which books are good for inner-city high school teachers to read to their students.
On a philosophical level, The Read-Aloud Handbook was probably my first ever encounter with an account of the "whole language" method of teaching reading not written by someone who vociferously disapproved of whole-language methods. Trelease hates worksheets (yay!) and phonics drill, although he acknowledges that many kids need phonics instruction to learn to read. He thinks the single most important lesson that reading instruction needs to impart is that reading is pleasurable, and that once kids figure that out, they'll slog through the hard work of actually learning how to decode text. And he very much does not think that worksheets, basal readers, and prepackaged phonics curricula teach the lesson that reading is pleasurable. (Hard to argue.) He also stresses the importance of background knowledge in learning how to read fluently; the greater the vocabulary and fund of information about the world a child brings to reading lessons, the easier it will be for them to match up letters on a page to the real world. Reading aloud is a pleasurable way of filling in vast quantities of vocabulary and background knowledge.
An Assembly Such as This, by Pamela Aidan.
If you have always wished that Pride and Prejudice had been written by Georgette Heyer, then this is the book for you. If you have very much not ever wished that, but you do like Georgette Heyer, then you, like me, will desperately wish that Aidan had just changed all of the names around. There's nothing wrong with the dripping-in-stock-Regency-set-pieces story she wants to tell - it's just not a story about Mr. Darcy.
Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill.
The last time a book made me this deeply sad, it was... hmm. Probably five years ago, when I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Lullabies for Little Criminals is a note-perfect, all too vivid and evocative description of what it's like to be a twelve-year-old girl trailing through the red-light district of Montreal after her junkie father. I've known enough foster kids and junkies and crazies and throwaways that this book was horribly, horribly real to me. It's very good - absolutely worth reading. But I kind of wish I hadn't.
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.
This is Bechdel's graphic-novel memoir about her relationship with her cold and distant father. As she's grappling with coming out, she also has to grapple with her mother's revelation that her father has had affairs with men and adolescent boys. The memoir circles around Bechdel's attempts to understand her parents' history and inner lives, and by extension, her own. Really good. For fans of Dykes to Watch Out For: this one is not a comedy.
Two books I emphatically did not read in February:
Adverbs, by Daniel Handler.
I liked Handler's The Basic Eight quite a bit, so I was happy to see that he'd written another non-Snickett. I should have read the reviews on the back cover first. Because surely, if I had noticed that Dave Eggers plugged this book by describing Handler as a modern-day American Nabokov, I would have known better than to try to read it. The dialogue is exactly like something out of Atlanta Nights (I wish I'd written down a few choice lines before returning Adverbs to the library), except that the Atlanta Nights authors wrote like that because they were deliberately trying to produce the worst novel ever written, whereas Handler wrote like that because, we are asked to believe, he is a stylistic genius.
Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer.
I have now tried twice to get past the first fifty pages of this book, with utter lack of success. Isn't it supposed to be a thing?
Edited to add:
I also read The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde, and then, apparently, promptly forgot about it. This isn't a Thursday Next book - it's another series, about the "Nursery Crimes Division" of the Reading Police Department. It's vintage Fforde: puns, literary allusions, self-referentiality, and a mystery plot, sprinkled with lots of little clever bits. But it just didn't add up to very much, for me. It felt recycled.
Total for February:
Total for the year:
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 10:00 pm (UTC)I might've liked it when I was 7, but I'm not sure.
in completely bizarre book-related news
Date: 2007-03-01 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 12:09 pm (UTC)Glad to see/hear about a book about teaching reading that, from your description, actually makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 01:40 pm (UTC)Indeed. Okay, so I'm not wrong about it being a literary phenomenon - I was just missing the context. I will now continue to fail to read it with an untroubled heart.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 03:18 pm (UTC)I do like some of her later books in the series, but I haven't kept any.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 03:20 pm (UTC)Also, I gave up on An Assumbly Such As This because I found it so infuriating. I just cannot read Austen sequels, prequels, or retellings - they always fall *way* too short of the mark.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:24 pm (UTC)You'd think I would have learned this by now.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:41 pm (UTC)Wrong.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 04:24 pm (UTC)She also has a book of short stories about the Company that just came out called Gods and Pawns but my library doesn't have it yet.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 12:31 am (UTC)