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rivkaNew books I read in October:
We Band of Angels, by Elizabeth Norman.
What an amazing, stunning, compelling book. More than everything I wanted, and didn't get, from GI Nightingales. We Band of Angels tells the story of the 99 U.S. Army and Navy nurses who were serving in the Phillipines when the Japanese invaded in 1941. American and Phillipine forces were quickly overpowered, and withdrew further and further into the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor. The nurses - all of whom had signed up in peacetime, and had never received real military training - wound up running a "hospital" which was really just rows of cots and pallets in the open jungle, completely exposed to the elements. Desperately wounded soldiers didn't even have roofs over their beds. There was so little food that they were admitting hundreds of cases of malnutrition per day. Hours before the surrender of Bataan, the nurses were ordered to withdraw to another island and leave their patients helpless and alone. (Norman reports that 40 years later, every nurse interviewed wept when they talked about receiving the order to abandon their patients.)
Soon Corregidor fell too, and the nurses spent the next three years in an internment camp. At first it was tolerable, while it was run by Japanese civilian authorities; when the military authorities eventually took it over, conditions deteriorated to concentration-camp levels. In the last months, rations were down to 600 calories per day with virtually no protein, and the nurses were still voluntarily working at hard hospital duty even as they suffered from beriberi and other symptoms of starvation. When they were liberated and returned to the U.S., they were expected to serve a propaganda role as glamorous heroes... and then quickly forgotten. A military psychiatrist announced that their professional training would shield them from the psychological damage suffered by male veterans and POWs. And after running hospitals under intolerable conditions, plus keeping the nurses together under military discipline in the internment camp, their leader was robbed of the medal MacArthur recommended her for: "The position of Chief Nurse of a field command is not considered a position of great responsibility. The position is normally lacking in duty requiring the exercise of independent initiative and responsibility... it is apparent that a large share [of the responsibility] must have been carried by doctors and commanders."
Norman is a consummate interviewer. Over repeated interviews, she elicited enough detailed memories from the surviving nurses to provide an almost novelistic account of their ordeal. This book provides an extremely vivid picture of what they experienced, what they felt, what they did. Highly recommended, even if you're not a war-stories type.
How Children Fail, by John Holt.
Holt is weird. I'll be reading along, nodding, and suddenly I'll slam into something completely horrifying and unacceptable. In this book it was a passage about his utter revulsion when he encountered a mentally retarded child. Also, he categorically states that learning disabilities don't exist, and mocks people who believe in them.
And yet, I think many of his observations about education are accurate. (I use the term "observations" advisedly; most of his books are about his close observation of children in different learning environments, and his conclusions about what he saw.) His principal explanation for why children fail is that they are much more closely focused on how to give teachers/parents/testmakers the right answers than they are in learning the material. My favorite example: he tried to introduce a collaborative small-group exercise in which one child was supposed to adjust a balance-scale in a way that represented a mathematical equation, and then the other children in the group had to vote on whether they thought the scale would balance. All right answers (adjustment + votes) earned a point for the whole group. One group of kids quickly figured out that they could maximize their group score by having the balance adjuster set up an obviously wrong answer and then everyone else vote that the scale wouldn't balance. He gives multiple examples of how kids learn to laboriously apply various mathematical algorithms but haven't learned anything about how numbers actually work - for example, the children who were given 475 + 317 and 475 + 318 as successive math problems, and worked through each one in the exact same add-columns-and-carry way.
The one quote that sums up pretty much everything Holt has to say about the schools: "Most of what is taught in schools is never learned, most of what is learned is never retained, and most of what is retained is never used." The best Holt-related argument for homeschooling: his Amazon reviews written by education majors. (They're the ones with "MCC" after the name.)
Born Again, by Kelly Kerney.
Interesting YA novel about a teenage girl from a radically fundamentalist Christian family, as she moves from zealous faith to doubt. At first, as more and more was revealed about the protagonist's messed-up family, I thought that Kerney was unfairly stacking the deck against fundamentalists. But eventually I decided that she wasn't saying "all fundamentalists are deeply dysfunctional" - she was showing how one family had made a desperate flight into rigidly controlling religion as a way of saving themselves from their own inner demons, and how it worked only about as well as you'd expect.
The Sons of Heaven, by Kage Baker.
So that's over, after years and years. Before I draw any ultimate conclusions, I kind of want to read through the entire series from the beginning, at a steady pace. There is just so much going on - so many disparate threads Baker is trying to weave into a universe-sized tapestry - that it was hard to keep up, reading one or two books a year. I thought Sons of Heaven was good, and a satisfying conclusion, but not the overwhelmingly compelling and absorbing experience that some of the early books were. And I was disappointed by how much Mendoza seemed to be eclipsed by the men (and the male AI) in her life.
The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.
Enjoyable, but kind of slight. Sorcery and Cecilia is still by far the best in the series.
The Mirador, by Sarah Monette.
I always get sucked right in to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny's books, and The Mirador was no exception. I was a bit lost to begin with, because it's been a long time since I read The Virtu and I think I only read it once. So it took me a while to mentally reconstruct the plot that had gone before. But the story and especially the voices (especially especially Mildmay's) were so compelling that I gulped this one down. I love the setting of the Mirador, and I enjoyed seeing more of it. One quibble: I felt, at times, as if I were hearing chess pieces click into place for the endgame. Several new characters were introduced (like Mehitabel's mad servant from St. Crellifer's) in a way that seemed to shout "these people will be important later!", but the payoff wasn't in this book. I normally find Monette's books to be an incredibly immersive experience, so this was distracting. Also, I noticed that Felix seemed to slide into the background in this book. We continued to get segments from his POV, but I felt more distanced from him, as if I was seeing his scenes from outside rather than from inside his head. I wonder if that's a deliberate reflection of his arc getting darker, and the parallels with Malkar/Stritch getting stronger. The contrast with Mildmay's and Mehitabel's POV scenes was pretty strong. I'm loving Mildmay's character arc - it's so interesting to watch him struggling out of his hole.
Total for October: 6.
Total for the year: 70.
I'm also continuing, albeit slowly, my plan to read all of Madeleine L'Engle's prose works in order of publication.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Camilla.
This wasn't one of the ones I read and re-read as a child. It's a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is watching her parents' marriage fall apart and falling in love for the first time. Like all L'Engle teenagers, she and her boyfriend discuss theology passionately and at length. The book is well-written with some extremely creepy and psychologically realistic scenes, such as when her parents have her get all dressed up for a "grown-up" dinner in a restaurant alone with her father, who plies her with alcohol and then grills her about her mother's fidelity.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all L'Engle heroines are in fact the same person - there's not much to distinguish Camilla from Katherine Forrester or Phillipa Hunter, for example. I'll have to watch more closely when we get to Vicky Austin and Meg Murray. This isn't the sort of thing I would've noticed as a child or adolescent reader.
New books I failed to read in October:
The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld.
I don't usually note the books I don't finish in my 50-book log. But given that I loved Peeps, and have wolfed down every other Scott Westerfeld book I've come across, I am puzzled by my inability to read The Last Days. This is the second time I've tried. I get about 40 pages in and lose all desire to continue. What's wrong with me and/or him?
We Band of Angels, by Elizabeth Norman.
What an amazing, stunning, compelling book. More than everything I wanted, and didn't get, from GI Nightingales. We Band of Angels tells the story of the 99 U.S. Army and Navy nurses who were serving in the Phillipines when the Japanese invaded in 1941. American and Phillipine forces were quickly overpowered, and withdrew further and further into the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor. The nurses - all of whom had signed up in peacetime, and had never received real military training - wound up running a "hospital" which was really just rows of cots and pallets in the open jungle, completely exposed to the elements. Desperately wounded soldiers didn't even have roofs over their beds. There was so little food that they were admitting hundreds of cases of malnutrition per day. Hours before the surrender of Bataan, the nurses were ordered to withdraw to another island and leave their patients helpless and alone. (Norman reports that 40 years later, every nurse interviewed wept when they talked about receiving the order to abandon their patients.)
Soon Corregidor fell too, and the nurses spent the next three years in an internment camp. At first it was tolerable, while it was run by Japanese civilian authorities; when the military authorities eventually took it over, conditions deteriorated to concentration-camp levels. In the last months, rations were down to 600 calories per day with virtually no protein, and the nurses were still voluntarily working at hard hospital duty even as they suffered from beriberi and other symptoms of starvation. When they were liberated and returned to the U.S., they were expected to serve a propaganda role as glamorous heroes... and then quickly forgotten. A military psychiatrist announced that their professional training would shield them from the psychological damage suffered by male veterans and POWs. And after running hospitals under intolerable conditions, plus keeping the nurses together under military discipline in the internment camp, their leader was robbed of the medal MacArthur recommended her for: "The position of Chief Nurse of a field command is not considered a position of great responsibility. The position is normally lacking in duty requiring the exercise of independent initiative and responsibility... it is apparent that a large share [of the responsibility] must have been carried by doctors and commanders."
Norman is a consummate interviewer. Over repeated interviews, she elicited enough detailed memories from the surviving nurses to provide an almost novelistic account of their ordeal. This book provides an extremely vivid picture of what they experienced, what they felt, what they did. Highly recommended, even if you're not a war-stories type.
How Children Fail, by John Holt.
Holt is weird. I'll be reading along, nodding, and suddenly I'll slam into something completely horrifying and unacceptable. In this book it was a passage about his utter revulsion when he encountered a mentally retarded child. Also, he categorically states that learning disabilities don't exist, and mocks people who believe in them.
And yet, I think many of his observations about education are accurate. (I use the term "observations" advisedly; most of his books are about his close observation of children in different learning environments, and his conclusions about what he saw.) His principal explanation for why children fail is that they are much more closely focused on how to give teachers/parents/testmakers the right answers than they are in learning the material. My favorite example: he tried to introduce a collaborative small-group exercise in which one child was supposed to adjust a balance-scale in a way that represented a mathematical equation, and then the other children in the group had to vote on whether they thought the scale would balance. All right answers (adjustment + votes) earned a point for the whole group. One group of kids quickly figured out that they could maximize their group score by having the balance adjuster set up an obviously wrong answer and then everyone else vote that the scale wouldn't balance. He gives multiple examples of how kids learn to laboriously apply various mathematical algorithms but haven't learned anything about how numbers actually work - for example, the children who were given 475 + 317 and 475 + 318 as successive math problems, and worked through each one in the exact same add-columns-and-carry way.
The one quote that sums up pretty much everything Holt has to say about the schools: "Most of what is taught in schools is never learned, most of what is learned is never retained, and most of what is retained is never used." The best Holt-related argument for homeschooling: his Amazon reviews written by education majors. (They're the ones with "MCC" after the name.)
Born Again, by Kelly Kerney.
Interesting YA novel about a teenage girl from a radically fundamentalist Christian family, as she moves from zealous faith to doubt. At first, as more and more was revealed about the protagonist's messed-up family, I thought that Kerney was unfairly stacking the deck against fundamentalists. But eventually I decided that she wasn't saying "all fundamentalists are deeply dysfunctional" - she was showing how one family had made a desperate flight into rigidly controlling religion as a way of saving themselves from their own inner demons, and how it worked only about as well as you'd expect.
The Sons of Heaven, by Kage Baker.
So that's over, after years and years. Before I draw any ultimate conclusions, I kind of want to read through the entire series from the beginning, at a steady pace. There is just so much going on - so many disparate threads Baker is trying to weave into a universe-sized tapestry - that it was hard to keep up, reading one or two books a year. I thought Sons of Heaven was good, and a satisfying conclusion, but not the overwhelmingly compelling and absorbing experience that some of the early books were. And I was disappointed by how much Mendoza seemed to be eclipsed by the men (and the male AI) in her life.
The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.
Enjoyable, but kind of slight. Sorcery and Cecilia is still by far the best in the series.
The Mirador, by Sarah Monette.
I always get sucked right in to
truepenny's books, and The Mirador was no exception. I was a bit lost to begin with, because it's been a long time since I read The Virtu and I think I only read it once. So it took me a while to mentally reconstruct the plot that had gone before. But the story and especially the voices (especially especially Mildmay's) were so compelling that I gulped this one down. I love the setting of the Mirador, and I enjoyed seeing more of it. One quibble: I felt, at times, as if I were hearing chess pieces click into place for the endgame. Several new characters were introduced (like Mehitabel's mad servant from St. Crellifer's) in a way that seemed to shout "these people will be important later!", but the payoff wasn't in this book. I normally find Monette's books to be an incredibly immersive experience, so this was distracting. Also, I noticed that Felix seemed to slide into the background in this book. We continued to get segments from his POV, but I felt more distanced from him, as if I was seeing his scenes from outside rather than from inside his head. I wonder if that's a deliberate reflection of his arc getting darker, and the parallels with Malkar/Stritch getting stronger. The contrast with Mildmay's and Mehitabel's POV scenes was pretty strong. I'm loving Mildmay's character arc - it's so interesting to watch him struggling out of his hole.Total for October: 6.
Total for the year: 70.
I'm also continuing, albeit slowly, my plan to read all of Madeleine L'Engle's prose works in order of publication.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Camilla.
This wasn't one of the ones I read and re-read as a child. It's a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is watching her parents' marriage fall apart and falling in love for the first time. Like all L'Engle teenagers, she and her boyfriend discuss theology passionately and at length. The book is well-written with some extremely creepy and psychologically realistic scenes, such as when her parents have her get all dressed up for a "grown-up" dinner in a restaurant alone with her father, who plies her with alcohol and then grills her about her mother's fidelity.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all L'Engle heroines are in fact the same person - there's not much to distinguish Camilla from Katherine Forrester or Phillipa Hunter, for example. I'll have to watch more closely when we get to Vicky Austin and Meg Murray. This isn't the sort of thing I would've noticed as a child or adolescent reader.
New books I failed to read in October:
The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld.
I don't usually note the books I don't finish in my 50-book log. But given that I loved Peeps, and have wolfed down every other Scott Westerfeld book I've come across, I am puzzled by my inability to read The Last Days. This is the second time I've tried. I get about 40 pages in and lose all desire to continue. What's wrong with me and/or him?
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 09:01 pm (UTC)I'm bemused by the Holt reviews.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 09:13 pm (UTC)I'll be interested to know how you like it. It broke my heart.
I'm bemused by the Holt reviews.
I can't decide if my favorite line is "The ideas John Holt gives in this book How Children Fail are somehow true" or "Why couldn't he write something positive about children on why they fail?"
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 09:49 pm (UTC)(People, do you not *read* what you've written?)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 09:51 pm (UTC)My girlfriend and I have been hashing this out ourselves over the past week. The preliminary verdict is that: 1) five viewpoint characters is Just Too Many and they don't get the attention they really deserve, so the characterizations feel flat; 2) the band story isn't all that compelling, and doesn't live up to the promise of the fairly exciting opening scene; 3) the awesome spooky stuff doesn't get started until fairly late in the book. [Also, 4) it's only tangentially related to Peeps. The differences in the worlds the characters inhabit reduce the feeling of being in the same world.]
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 10:17 pm (UTC)Fabulous idea. I love it.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 12:26 am (UTC)(1) On public transportation to and from work.
(2) On my lunch break.
(3) While at the clinic waiting for research subjects who aren't showing up.
(4) While supervising Alex's play.
(5) Before bed. I should mention here that I get much less sleep than I should.
(6) In lieu of housework. Our house is, frankly, dirty.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 03:17 pm (UTC)I just read his newest one, Extras, but you'll have to wait to read my November post to hear what I thought ;-)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 06:41 pm (UTC)I'll be breathlessly awaiting your November post!
no subject
Date: 2007-11-11 04:45 am (UTC)(Er, hi. I found you through
no subject
Date: 2007-11-11 01:37 pm (UTC)