bookshelves of doom

Peter Sis on The Wall.

From PW:

And what was it like rediscovering some of your boyhood books?

It was interesting to see them again. I know some people recall growing up with The Little Prince, but some of the books I read as a child were awful. It was hard to get books at all, and many that we could get were of dubious quality. But still they would speak to me and I knew it was special to have any books at all. Looking at them again they preserved that moment in time for me, the same way as songs from the 1960s do. They help me to recall so many emotions, and so much upheaval.

I am THERE.  I hope my library gets a copy soon.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Just had a patron request this book:

"A relatively new memoir about a gifted woman.  The cover is green and white."

Ideas?

Jacqueline Wilson on her upcoming autobiography.

From The Guardian:

I'd made up elaborate imaginary games ever since I could remember, and by the time I was six or seven I'd started writing about them in little Woolworths notebooks. I attempted my first novel when I was nine. I was no Daisy Ashford. It was only about 20 pages long and it had hardly any plot. It makes embarrassing reading now, but it's recognisably a JW novel, about an impoverished large family with many problems. I tackled marital arguments and difficult teenagers and sibling rivalries. I was very much a girl for gritty realism, even in those days.

I'm looking forward to it -- I haven't read NEARLY enough Jacqueline Wilson.

Oprah's new book.

And here it is.

Donna Martin Graduates!

Yep.  Tori Spelling is writing a memoir*.

From another story:

She and her husband, Dean McDermott, who are expecting their first child together this spring, are shooting a reality series for the Oxygen network in which the newlyweds search for a bed-and-breakfast to refurbish and run. The plan is to write the memoir in the B&B between takes and when "the baby is napping," though she is looking to partner with a ghost writer who shares her sardonic tone.

*Is it just me, or did USA Today commit quotation mark abuse in their headline?  Or are they saying that it's not quite a memoir because it's not going to be a tell-all?  I'm so confused.

Post-Thanksgiving Book Challenge Round-up.

From WISN2ABC:

"We had a mother and father and student who questioned the book," he said. "The high school provided the student with an alternative book."

The parents were not satisfied and asked for the book to be removed from the curriculum, Maass said.

In Maryland, To Kill a Mockingbird is the subject of yet another controversy.  It sounds like the problem stemmed from a class activity that preceded any actual reading of the book.  The lesson, "Questionable Words", was meant to prevent issues with the language in the book, but seems to have backfired, resulting in the NAACP Parent's Council's call for the school to "immediately abstain from teaching this content" and to "refrain from using materials that negatively depict African-Americans."

In related news, a pro-Gilbert Grape contingent is now on Facebook.  My favorite book challenges are always the ones where students take action.  Rock on.  (Another article here.)

So Far from the Bamboo Grove -- too much for sixth graders?

From the Boston Globe:

The Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee is grappling with whether to ban an award-winning book from sixth-grade classes after complaints from some parents that the book is racist and sexually explicit.

A review committee that included the middle school librarian and two English teachers unanimously voted to recommend removing "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" from the curriculum after 13 parents complained. Superintendent of Schools Perry Davis backed the recommendation.

What?

NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Yuck.

Blow Out the Moon -- Libby Koponen

It’s funny how you can hate something in one book and embrace it in another.  I’ve been pretty blunt about my feelings regarding the Newbery winner Criss Cross (or at least about the fact that it won the Newbery), and I specifically remember especially disliking the illustrations.  I felt they were distracting and gimmicky.  Blow Out the Moon has illustrations, too.  But they actually add to and support the text – there are photos from the author’s childhood, inset definitions and explanations of British slang and customs, reproductions of letters sent home from Libby to her family.  It’s a nicely put-together book.

It’s also funny what a difference a little truthfulness can make.  Blow Out the Moon is described as a fictionalized memoir. Libby Koponen explains things even more in her acknowledgments, and oftentimes in the picture captions. (You hear me, James Frey? That’s all you needed to do.)

It’s just a nice little story about an American child going to an English boarding school.  It isn’t action-packed, although Libby is an extremely active child (both physically and imaginatively). It would make a good, gentle read-aloud for kids who like old-fashioned stories.

Playing Right Field: A Jew Grows in Greenwich -- George Tabb

From Chapter Two, A Jew vs. Jesus:

Religious symbols and the concept of evil fascinated me when I was a little kid.  I remember seeing Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, and feeling something that wasn't fear.

It was jealousy.

I wanted to be Mia Farrow's devilish offspring.  I wanted to be Damien, to have cool dogs around me, to kill people with plates of glass.  I especially wanted to be Damien in Omen II, where he went to boarding school and killed tons of bullies.

No such luck.  I was stuck being a Jew in Greenwich, Connecticut.  The only antichrists around were the other kids, who kicked my ass every day.

I don't think that book covers get much better than this.  I remember also really digging the cover of Drugs Are Nice, so maybe it's a Soft Skull thing.  In fact, I'm sure of it.

Playing Right Field is an extremely funny book about an extremely miserable childhood.  I responded to it the same way that I responded to Running with Scissors:  I smirked and giggled my way through the book, but after finishing, when I let it all sink in...  Ooog.  George Tabb even got beat up by a blind kid.  A blind kid. 

His father and stepmother were peaches:

My stepmother, pissed as hell that now she couldn't stay home in the mornings listening to Carole King or fucking the carpenter, yelled at us for the next few weeks.  My dad got so angry about my stepmother yelling, he grounded us for a month.

And beat the shit out of me.

It took me a little while to get into his rhythm -- I suspect that he dislikes commas as much as I love them -- but once I fell into it, I just read and read until I was finished.   It very definitely doesn't have to be read like that -- each chapter is pretty self-contained.  He's an excellent storyteller.

There were some odd editing glitches that I found distracting -- a word repeated occasionally, or a 'the' instead of 'they' -- but nothing that made me feel violent.  I'm really looking forward to his next installment.  (I'm especially hoping that there will be a story that more fully covers the (many) brief references to his father wearing ladies' underwear.  So sue me.  I'm immature.)

How Angel Peterson Got His Name -- Gary Paulsen

I howled.  It's the funniest book I've read in a long, long time.  I read the funny parts (most of the book, really) out loud to Josh as I read and we were both in hysterics.  Teary-eyed-gasping hysterics.

In How Angel Peterson Got His Name, Gary Paulsen writes about being a thirteen-year-old boy in Minnesota in the 1950's.  More importantly, he writes about the stupid, stupid things he did at that age.  Like his attempt to ride over a waterfall in a barrel:

And so I found an old wooden pickle barrel with oak staves, and after carefully reinforcing it by wrapping it with about two hundred feet of clothesline and miles of electrical tape (this was before duct tape) I lined the inside of it with an old quilt, set it on the bank near the top of the spillway, climbed into the barrel, wedged the lid in place over my head and threw myself back and forth inside until the barrel wobbled off the bank.

I'm not exactly sure what I expected.  I might have had a thought that the barrel was made of wood, which floats.  Therefore the whole craft would float, bobbing to the edge of the spillway and then over to drop to the water below, and would lead me to everlasting fame as the first boy to go over the Eighth Street dam in a barrel.

Instead the barrel sank.  Like a stone.  Straight to the bottom, which was about six feet down, where it bumped around a bit while I panicked.  To my horror, I discovered that the lid had swelled enough with the water to be sealed in place, that the barrel was fast filling up with water, that pickle barrels were amazingly strong and you could not kick them apart from the inside, and that I would gain fame only as the first kid stupid enough to drown himself in a barrel.

Obviously (also surprisingly and thankfully) he survived his thirteenth year.  Barely.

This book has been challenged a number of times.  My assumption is that parents are worried that it'll give kids ideas.  If anything, this book might make the kids cross a couple of amazingly idiotic things OFF of their lists of Things To Do.  On the other hand, if it does give 'em ideas, is that so bad?  So what if they end up getting dragged halfway across town (above the tree line, mind you) by a WWII target kite?  At least they'd be off their butts and outside.

I haven't read a ton of Gary Paulsen.  I've read Hatchet, of course, and some of the Tucket books (which I loved), but I don't tend to go in for the wilderness/survival genre very much.  I hadn't realized that the man was so damn funny.  If Harris and Me is available, I'm totally taking it home tonight.

Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir -- Lisa Crystal Carver

Due to Drugs are Nice, Lisa Crystal Carver has been added to the ever-growing (yet still exalted) list of Authors-That-I-Must-Read-In-Their-Entirety.  She has two other books, The Lisa Diaries and Dancing Queen.  I will read them.  I will own them.

I loved her voice.  I loved her (totally conscious) excessive use of exclamation points.  I loved how her idealism came through even when she wasn't talking about things that are traditionally associated with idealists:

The local punks rather formally rejected me, and the goths never laugh at my jokes.  There's not much chance of me making it in the real world, either.  I don't even have one skill, and I can't take the thought of going to college to get one.  I look for how to live in magazines.  People has an article about Karen Finley pouring ketchup on her head and shoving yams up her business, but she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to do so.  Applying for one of those seems as mysterious and laborious a process to me as going to college.  I want to shock people too, but performance art seems so out of context.  Why did Karen Finley put those yams up there?  There should be a story.  And stories should be about real things, even if they aren't real.  And the stories should be big.

Later on she amazed me even more by describing shows where she would do things like urinate in a litter box on stage, or lubricate her bum to allow a plastic flower to slide in easier (in the show, the flower represented the ultimate triumph of nature).  Don't get me wrong here.  It wasn't the actions that amazed me so much as the fact that she still sounded idealistic.  After reading her perspective, the Suckdog shows make a whole lot more sense to me than performance art ever has.

Her humor is wonderfully deadpan.  I especially liked these two sentences (taken from completely different parts of the book:

I was scared the Portsmouth punks would boycott the show if they knew I organized it, since they deemed me a poseur for wearing too much pink.

The fact that smoke from the sitter's joint was always being blown back at me by the wind might have contributed to my delirium.

Like any other memoir, this book is the chronicle of a journey.  Like most memoirs, this book is also the chronicle of a coming-of-age.  Lisa Crystal Carver constantly fights forward in her own way--like anyone else, sometimes stumbling, sometimes slogging--but always fighting.  I rooted for her the whole way. 

Two thumbs way up.

Globe article about Lisa Crystal Carver.

Otherwise known as, the author of that book I want to read.  (Which is, I believe, on its merry way to me as I write this!  YEE-HAW!)

From The Boston Globe:

Her book coincides with the release of a DVD of the same title that includes visceral, sometimes disturbing, footage of her avant-garde band, Suckdog; operas staged with her then-husband, the French performance artist Jean Louis Costes; and recent film shorts made with friends. ''I think it's an awesome, entertaining hour of stuff," she says. ''I never see anything like this. And I know it has a real impact on people, because I played an old video one time at a party, and a good friend of mine sobbed and left, and it cleared the entire room. . . . And I just thought, you know, when was the last time there was a good room clearer? And I just thought that I should give this gift to the American public."

A Million Little Pieces -- James Frey

Phew.

I walk toward a door where a Nurse stands waiting for me.  As I walk past her she is careful not to touch me and I am brought back from the happy afterglow of pachyderm memories and I am reminded of what I am.  I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal.  I am missing my four front teeth.  I have a hole in my cheek that has been closed with forty-one stitches.  I have a broken nose and I have black swollen eyes.  I have an Escort because I am a Patient at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.  I am wearing a borrowed jacket because I don't have one of my own.  I am carrying two old yellow tennis balls because I'm not allowed to have any painkillers or anesthesia.  I am an Alcoholic.  I am a drug Addict.  I am a Criminal.  That's what I am and I don't blame the Nurse for not wanting to touch me.  If I weren't me, I wouldn't want to touch me.

That passage comes just before James has his four front teeth replaced.  (He lost them when he fell face-first down a fire escape.  His friends found him hours later, crack pipe still in hand).  Two of the teeth only needed to be capped.  The other two required root canals first.  As he said, without anesthesia.  It's one of the most physically painful things I can imagine.  And his description of it is incredible. 

Not surprisingly, the pain doesn't stop there.  It was a hard book to read--but riveting at the same time.  I do think, though, that if I hadn't read the sequel (which I LOVED) first, I would have had a harder time finishing it.  Knowing how things ultimately turned out made reading about his time in rehab (somewhat) easier.  But only somewhat.  It's a powerful book.

Sing a Song of Tuna Fish: Hard-to-Swallow Stories from Fifth Grade -- Esme Raji Codell

I loved Esme Raji Codell's other two books.  Adored them.  I was really, really looking forward to this one--not only did I love the others, but Booklist had given it a starred review.  I was the one who actually requested that the library purchase it.

It's a collection of essays (more a collection of her memories, really) about growing up broke (never poor) in Chicago.  The description on the book flap mentions a story about Esme and her mom egging a fancy car and another one about staging a fist fight with her best friend to avoid her dreaded piano lessons.  Sounds great, right?

I loved the illustrations.

The text was kind of a disappointment.

Like quite a few memoirs geared toward the younger set, I don't think that this one will be particularly attractive towards the intended audience.  Not only because of the references that they won't catch (she explained some of them, but I thought she came off as pretty condescending), but because of the voice she used.  I just don't think that the reminiscent voice works well in juvenile literature.  I'm sure that there are exceptions, but for the most part, I don't like it.  It's fine in adult books.  Maybe it goes back to the condescending thing?  I'm not sure.  Either way, it doesn't work for me. 

There were essays that I really enjoyed--the ones on religion and education, specifically--but overall?  Pretty weak.  I'll still watch for her next book, though.  Her first two were so wonderful that I won't give up on her easily.

This Boy's Life -- Tobias Wolff

People are so lame.  I know that the school that yanked this book pulled it because of a curriculum overview, but they wouldn't have done the overview if some freakazoid hadn't complained about the book in the first place.  Not that I take issue with the idea of curriculum overview--I just can't help feeling that this book and the Walter Dean Myers book were the school's attempt to throw the censors a bone. 

My assumption is that the "objectionable content" would be the f-bomb (and variations of it).  It pops up about seven times over a page and a half, which is, I'm guessing, all the that the complainers actually read of the book.  For the record--the swearing really isn't gratuitous.  In that specific case, it's necessary to the telling of a specific story, and that specific story is necessary as a turning point in the whole journey.

Oh, wait.  They might have also taken issue with a one-time split-second kiss between two boys.

But other than that, I don't get it.  I don't get how someone could read this entire book and take issue with it.  It's a fantastic book.  Which, having read Old School, I expected.  But I had no idea that it would be anything like this.  It was funny, it was heartbreaking, it was impossible (you should read this book IF ONLY to see how Tobias Wolff got into prep school), it was heartening.  Even his foreword was wonderful: 

I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology.  Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.  I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a story of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.  But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

My first stepfather used to say that what I didn't know would fill a book.  Well, here it is.

So don't listen to the Jackass Patrol in Kansas.  Read this book.

My Friend Leonard -- James Frey

Call me crazy, but I don't think that the cover art really fits with the text.  Try the first paragraph:

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray.  I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming.  I went down.  When I got up, I turned around and I started throwing punches.  I landed two or three before I got hit again, this time in the face.  I went down again.  I wiped blood away from my nose and my mouth and I got up I started throwing punches again.  Porterhouse put me in a headlock and started choking me.  He leaned toward my ear and said I'm gonna let you go.  If you keep fighting me I will fucking hurt you bad.  Stay down and I will leave you alone.  He let go of me, and I stayed down.

This book is the follow-up to Frey's first book, A Million Little Pieces, which chronicled his time in rehab.  My Friend Leonard picks up with James leaving rehab to serve a short stint in jail and then, after jail, trying to put the pieces of his life together and stay sober.  The title character is a mobster that James met in rehab, a man that decides that James is his adopted son, a man that continues to support James (emotionally and sometimes financially) after they both re-enter the real world.

I loved this book.  I loved the story--sometimes it would seem so unreal that I had to remind myself that it was a memoir, that it was true.  I loved Leonard and Snapper.  I loved James.  I loved his writing style.  He ran words together to describe mixed feelings in a way that I found extremely effective--in another, different book it wouldn't have worked, it would have felt lazy, but in this book it seemed right and perfect. 

It made me cry--at some points my eyes would just well up and at others I would sob.  I cried all over the damn book.  Highly recommended.

The Glass Castle -- Jeannette Walls

The memoir seems to be the publishing industry's favorite genre lately.  Apparently, everyone and his brother has been busy at the typewriter.  While many of them don't look like they're worth reading, a few stand out--The Glass Castle being one of them--as stories of extraordinary lives.

It has an super wonderful hook of a first sentence:

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.

Three pages later, she goes back to the beginning.  Well, to the beginning of her memory.  At age three, she burns herself so badly while making herself boiled hot dogs that she is taken to the hospital for skin grafts:

The nurses and doctors kept asking me questions:  How did you get burned?  Have your parents ever hurt you?  Why do you have all those bruises and cuts?  My parents never hurt me, I said.  I got the cuts and bruises playing outside and the burns from cooking hot dogs.  They asked me what I was doing cooking hot dogs by myself at the age of three.  It was easy, I said.  You just put the hot dogs in the water and boil them.  It wasn't like there was some complicated recipe that you had to be old enough to follow.  The pan was too heavy for me to lift when it was full of water, so I'd put a chair by the stove and pour the water into the pan.  I did that over and over again until the pan held enough water.  Then I'd turn on the stove, and when the water was boiling, I'd drop in the hot dogs.  "Mom says I'm mature for my age," I told them, "and she lets me cook for myself a lot."

After her dad sneaks Jeannette out of the hospital to avoid the bill, the family skips town.  Skipping town is a pretty regular occurrence in the early years:

Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end.  That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in the ashtray, they'd find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him.  Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn't really after Dad; he just liked to say that were because it was more fun having the FBI on your tail than bill collectors.

Her father was brilliant, charismatic and charming.  After Jeannette and her brother blow up an abandoned shed doing a chemistry experiment, he doesn't get angry:

He said it was an incredible coincidence that he happened to be walking by.  Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage.  Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order.  "It's a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven't figured 'em out yet," he said.  "You-all got a little too close to it today."

The problem is that he spent all of his time dreaming up his big plans, drawing up designs for his various inventions or playing poker.  And, as Jeannette's mother put it, he had "a little bit of a drinking situation".

I haven't even gone into what her mom was like.  Or what happened when they left the desert to move to Welch, West Virginia, her father's hometown.  Or how the kids finally got out.  Or what happens when their parents follow them to New York.  Or how things got to the point described in the first sentence.

[Later]  Sarah was just in here, looking for books, and I was rambling on and on, talking about the book.  I realized, that basically, what I got out of it was this:  If these kids made it, anyone can.  (It does help to be really smart, though).

Dry -- Augusten Burroughs

In Dry, we get Augusten Burroughs' take on rehab and alcoholism in general.

Not surprisingly, the rehab part of the book is pretty surreal:

Two of the patients reach behind their chairs and retrieve two large, well-worn stuffed animals; one is a monkey, one is a blue kitten.  They hug the dirty plush toys to their laps and wear great big smiles.

At once, the entire room breaks into an alarming musical chant.  It's Monkey Wonkey time . . . Monkey Wonkey was a lonely monkey.  Then Blue Blue kitten became his friend . . . now Monkey Wonkey and Blue Blue Kitten want to make friends with . . . YOU!!"

When he gets back to work after his month away, things are pretty weird:

I've never seen her look so bizarre.  The vein on the side of her forehead seems to actually be pulsating.  It's awkward to be around her, because I feel like she's walking on eggshells.  Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl's boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it.  Then somebody says watermelon in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps.  That's how I feel.

An extremely handsome crack addict in group therapy is hitting on him, his best friend is dying, and someone is trying to sabotage his sobriety by hiding bottles of gin in his office.  Things are rough.

It was totally different than Running with Scissors.  It wasn't laugh-out-loud funny like RwS--it was more of a wry smile book.  But a really good one, both just as a book in general, and as a book about addiction.

Now I really want to get a hold of Sellevision, which is his novel about the Home Shopping Network.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence -- Paul Feig

Fans of Freaks and Geeks will find a lot of the stories in this book familiar. Remember the stuff that Sam and Neil and Bill went through? The creator of the short-lived best-show-ever lived most of it--and in most cases, even more painfully:

More laughs exploded, and I knew that I had just witnessed the birth of something horrible. It was bound to happen and, in all honesty, I don't know why it didn't happened sooner. The word "fag" had started to float around on the outer fringes of my peer group right around the fifth grade. But I guess that in grade school, a fig-filled cookie was funnier that a cruel term for something we didn't understand. However, as I was about to find out, junior high was where the term flourished, and I had just been dubbed the Keeper of the Flame. As Mr. Parks tried in vain to quiet the class and regain order, I sat in the stunned realization that I had just seen the next several years of my life laid out for me.

Fig Newton was dead. Long live Paul Fag.

Oddly enough, at points, it really reminded me of the Wonder Years--but never syrupy and often excruciatingly painful (and funny--don't forget that it's hysterically funny!). I've always considered my middle school experience to be pretty miserable, but I'm not sure if I can really claim that anymore--compared to Paul Feig, my 5th-8th grade years were all sunshine and daises. Read it, cringe and laugh. Then watch Freaks and Geeks again.

Running with Scissors -- Augusten Burroughs

To everyone who recommended this book to me:

THANK YOU!!

I loved it. I marked so many pages (with bookmarks, I hate dog-eared pages) that I finally had to stop because I ran out of scrap paper. I read so many passages out loud to Josh that he went to work the next day talking about the book I was reading--not the book he himself was reading. I laughed so hard and so often that I had to put the book down at points. I LOVED IT.

Tracy, what was it that the people in the book group objected to? Was it the sex? Because, damn it, there was only about 6 pages of it. Out of 304! Granted, it was graphic, sketchy, and disturbing, but come on! Or were they upset about something else?

For the uninitiated, Running with Scissors is Augusten Burroughs' memoir of his childhood. Things start out semi-normally, with his parents on the verge of divorce:

My father's face grew red as he added a splash of tonic water to his glass. "Deirdre, will you settle down. You're hysterical, just hysterical." Because he was a professor, he was in the habit of repeating himself.

She stood up from the sofa and walked slowly across the white shag carpeting, as if finding her mark on a soundstage. "I'm hysterical?" she asked in a smooth, low voice. "You think this is hysterical?" She laughed theatrically, throwing her head back. "Oh, you poor bastard. You lousy excuse for a man." She stood next to him, leaning her back against the teak bookcase. "You're so repressed you mistake creative passion for hysterics. And don't you see? This is how you're killing me." She closed her eyes and made her Edith Piaf face.

You may notice that his mother is a tad dramatic. Well, don't get the idea that the father lacks drama--a few pages later, he chases her around the house and tries to brain her with a fondue pot. Shortly thereafter, they split up and Augusten's mother decides that she can't handle the strain of raising him--so she gives him to her psychiatrist. Keep in mind that this is a man who believes that he's receiving messages from God through his own poop.

What about Hope; would she ever get married? "See all that corn? Hope's going to marry a farmer."

The house is filthy, filled with the psychiatrist's many children, his aptly-named grandson Poo and quite a few of his patients--former and current.

This is completely unrelated, but one of my favorite passages was about smoking:

Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. No wonder my parents smoked, I thought. The part of me that used to polish my jewelry for hours and comb my hair until my scalp was deeply scratched was now lighting cigarettes every other minute and then carefully stomping them out. It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.

LOVED LOVED LOVED it. More than David Sederis. Much more, actually. So, again, thanks for the recommendation!

Educating Esme: diary of a teacher's first year -- Esme Raji Codell

November 3

Assembly today. National anthem. Oh, no, I thought. Will they...?

"...land of the free and the home of the brave!: A small group of voices enthusiastically added the postscript. "Play ball!"

Mr. Turner stepped up to the mike. "All right, who did that!" Nobody peeped.

They had no homework today, as a reward for showing good judgment when it counted most.

Apparently, Miss Pointy in Sahara Special is not a fictional creation. She IS Esme Raji Codell. The book was a riot--I laughed out loud on a pretty consistent basis, and kept interrupting Josh's reading to read him parts, which is always a sure sign of greatness in a book.

It chronicles her first year teaching--a fifth grade class in Chicago. She deals with a horrible principal, very little funding, a major lack of enthusiasm on the part of many of the volunteers and other teachers, abused kids, a book thief, as well as the regular teacher stuff. Add to all of this the on-going war with the principal about whether or not she's allowed to have the kids call her Madame Esme:

"The ACLU?" His eyebrows draw up fearfully. "Is that the teacher's union? You didn't call the teacher's union, did you?"

A lot of people that reviewed the book at Amazon seem to think that she's really conceited, too hard on her co-workers, etc. She didn't strike me like that at all, she seemed more frustrated than anything--and if you can't vent in your diary, where can you vent?

Let Me Go -- Helga Schneider

I don't read non-fiction very often, but someone recommended this one to me, and I'm glad that I read it. Well, as glad as you can be about reading a Holocaust memoir.

When Helga Schneider was four years old, her mother abandoned the family to join the SS, specifially to be a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbruck. She only saw her two more times. The first visit (thirty years later) didn't go well, to put it very mildly:

"Hold your hands open," you said. I'll never forget that. You had pulled me by one arm, as though to tell me a secret, into the bedroom of the little apartment in the suburb of Mariahilf; and you had opened a little box: It's a standard gesture, one that usually heralds a present of some kind.

"Hold your hands open." And then you filled them with rings, bracelets, cuff links, pendants, brooches, a watch, and a handful of necklaces, large and small. For a moment I looked uncomprehendingly at all that gold. They I understood, and it was as though my hands were on fire. I pulled my palms apart, and the jewelry clattered onto the floor. You stared at me, puzzled.

Another thirty years later, they met for the last time. Her mother was 87 years old, dying, and unrepentant. About everything. There are moments that it seems like she might almost be putting on a show for Helga, but overall, no. She was unrepentant.

It's a little book, easily read in one sitting, but I had to put it down and walk away from it a few times. I read it a few days ago, but it's stayed with me--parts of it keep coming back to me. Rough, emotional, raw. But worth it.

Naked - David Sedaris

I'm still working on reading all of the Sedaris books. (We don't have all of them at my library, so I've been ILLing them, which takes time). This time around, I read Naked. Although I liked Me Talk Pretty Some Day more (probably because so much of it was about his childhood), I'm starting to think that most everything that this guy writes is worth reading. (Before anyone can say anything, I have Running with Scissors at home on my TBR pile. (For all of you non-nerds out there, that would be my To-Be-Read pile)).

I will say that this one made me laugh out loud more than MTPSD. The story "c.o.g."--where he's working at the apple packing plant--almost killed me. When he goes over to his co-worker's house for a beer, and is horribly surprised by what he finds:

Whatever Curly's theatrical fear, it could not begin to match my genuine horror as he opened the door to his bedroom, which served as a showplace for his vast collection of artifical penises. They hung from the walls, jutted from plaques, and stood upright, neatly spaced upon shelves and tabletops. Duplicated in wood, plastic, or fleshy rubber, what they had in common was their substantial size. Some were detailed to include veins and curly-haired testicles, while others existed as a minimal idea. Black or white, buffed aluminum or flesh-tone, electric or manual, the message was the same.

"So what do you think?" Curly said, lowering himself onto the waterbed.

"That's really some...bedspread you've got there, " I said, hoping to focus the attention toward the color scheme. "It's a real...orange orange, isn't it?"

I can't help it. I'm laughing again. The story "something for everyone", about working with Dupont, the black man who puts on the Uncle Tom act whenever the boss is around, and constantly tries to get David fired. The title story, about his week-long stay in a nudist colony. And, "a plague of tics", which was (yay!) another story about David's childhood.

Now I need to get a copy of Barrel Fever.

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris

Am I hip now? Or is it too late?

Lauren, don't answer that. I finally broke down and read a David Sedaris book. What can I say? I loved it. Enough that I'm going to read all of his other books and possibly use one for my high school reading group.

I knew that I was going to really, really like Me Talk Pretty One Day when I found out that David Sedaris lisped as a child. While the descriptions of speech therapy brought back some bad memories for me, they were also hilarious:

I didn't see my sessions as the sort of thing that one would like to advertise, but as my teacher liked to say, "I guess it takes all kinds." Whereas my goal was to keep it a secret, hers was to inform the entire class. If I got up from my seat at 2:25, she'd say, "Sit back down, David. You've still got five minutes before your speech therapy session." If I remained seated until 2:27, she's say, "David, don't forget you have a speech therapy session at two-thirty." On the days I was absent, I imagined she addressed the room, saying, "David's not here today but if he were, he'd have a speech therapy session at two-thirty."

While all of the essays are worth reading, "You Can't Kill the Rooster", "City of Angels" and "Jesus Shaves" were my particular favorites. "Jesus Shaves" tells the story of the day that David's immersion French class talked about Easter. A Moroccan student asks, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?" The attempts that the other students make at explaining the holiday, in very, very basic french are hilarious. "City of Angels" is a story about David's friend Alisha, who comes to visit him in New York, and brings along a friend of hers (a friend that she's only known for a short while) from North Carolina:

The two women arrived in New York on a Friday afternoon, and upon greeting them, I noticed an uncommon expression on Alisha's face. It was the look of someone who's discovered too late that she's either set her house on fire or committed herself to traveling with the wrong person. "Run for your life," she whispered.

I don't even want to give you a taste of "You Can't Kill the Rooster". Just take my word for it and read this book if you haven't already. And if you have, maybe you should read it again.