Erin Reads – Page 83 – Notes on Books & Life

Read-a-What?

One day. 24 hours. Cheerleaders. Mini challenges. Prizes. Snacks. Readers around the world. And — of course — books!

What is this glorious event of which I speak? Why, it’s Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon!

Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon Badge

Twice a year, readers and bloggers around the world settle down for 24 hours of reading. Bloggers post about their reading, cheerleaders visit participating blogs to provide encouragement, and everyone participates in mini challenges hosted on blogs that have volunteered. There’s even a Twitter feed dedicated to the event. This Saturday, October 9th, is the next Read-a-Thon. It will be my first time participating, and I am pumped!

Apparently, if recent posts by past participants are to be believed, much planning goes into Read-a-Thon prep. People plan snacks, clean favorite reading areas, and comb through their bookshelves to find the ideal reading material. Schedules are cleared, commitments rescheduled. So much anticipation!

In my time zone, the Read-a-Thon runs from 8am on Saturday to 8am on Sunday. Since my husband and I will be driving to an out of town wedding on Sunday, I don’t anticipate making it much past midnight. If I’m going to help with the driving, I’d best be awake! I’m also signed up to be a cheerleader, which means I’ll be taking a break from my own reading to see what other bloggers are up to and provide encouragement as needed.

Today is my day for preparations. I have four reading spots to fix up. I have snacks to brainstorm and then procure. And, I have books to select. This last one is the hardest for me. I’m tempted to just browse my shelves when the time comes and grab whatever interests me at that moment. I have a feeling, though, that shorter, lighter books will be easier to get through during a sustained reading session than longer or denser books. It’s probably easiest to start with a potential pile and then branch out if those don’t work. Ack, so many factors to consider!

If you’re not signed up yet to read, or you’d just like to browse the (enormous) list of participants, you can do so here. There’s also a list of Read-a-Thon start times by time zone. Or, if you’d like to be a cheerleader, you can sign up for that as well! Questions? Check the FAQs. And finally, if you’re interested in who Dewey was and how the Read-a-Thon got its start, there’s a history page on the Read-a-Thon site as well.

My questions for you: If you’ve participated before, what do you do to prepare? Do you have any advice for a first-time participant? Or, if you haven’t participated in the past, will you be reading with us on Saturday?

Thoughts on “When You Reach Me” by Rebecca Stead

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (cover)

When Rebecca Stead’s middle grade novel When You Reach Me won the Newbery earlier this year, I meant to read it right away. Now, nine months later, I finally got to it. I devoured it in a single day.

Miranda is a pretty typical 12-year-old. She adores Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. She lives with her mother in a New York City apartment in 1979, goes to school with a pretty typical array of kids, negotiates the sticky social world of sixth grade. Her mother’s boyfriend, Richard, has been around for a few years now, even though he still doesn’t have his own key to their apartment. As the book opens, Miranda’s mother has just won a spot on The $20,000 Pyramid, hosted by Dick Clark. Miranda helps her mother practice for the show, and together they dream about what they’ll do with the money they win. It’s a nice story, well written but not particularly extraordinary.

Except that Miranda keeps finding the strangest notes. And then every once in a while, instead of narrating in the first person and talking about everyone else in the third, she’ll start addressing someone as “you.” These odd dissonances in her otherwise normal life are what carry the story forward.

Everyone says the Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time references are what they loved most about this book. I’ve even heard some people go so far as to say you shouldn’t bother reading When You Reach Me if you aren’t familiar with L’Engle’s classic, because you probably won’t enjoy it if you don’t understand the references. I beg to differ. Sure, the references were interesting, and the book wouldn’t have meant quite as much without them. But I haven’t read A Wrinkle in Time for a while, and I’m sure I missed a lot of the references. I still adored the book. What I loved most was not the A Wrinkle in Time connection; it was the ending.

Clearly, I am not going to tell you how When You Reach Me ends. Suffice to say that the way Stead writes, it’s like you are having every “Aha!” moment right along with Miranda. I was exhilarated, reading the final pages, finally understanding where all the pieces fit. And they fit beautifully. It is worth reading When You Reach Me just for the experience of unraveling the mystery alongside Miranda. Elegant, poignant, and bittersweet, those last pages totally made the book.

That’s all I have to say. Read it, regardless of whether you’ve read A Wrinkle in Time. Each page may not be as saturated with meaning for you if you haven’t, but it’s still a lovely book with a perfect ending. That much will be there, whether you’re a L’Engle buff or not.

Thoughts on “Rose in a Storm” by Jon Katz

Rose in a Storm, which goes on sale today, is Jon Katz’s first novel in 10 years. It’s also the first book of his I’ve read. I received an advance copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program and was looking forward to giving Katz’s books a shot, as I’ve heard very positive comments in the past.

A little background on the author: Katz runs Bedlam Farm, where he currently takes care of four dogs. Rose is actually one of his dogs, a border collie, and I believe the fictional Rose is at least partly based on her namesake. His extensive experience with dogs makes me think Katz knows what he’s talking about, that I should’ve just believed in the fictional Rose and her incredible instincts and abilities because he’s probably seen similar behavior in his own Rose. But I just couldn’t.

Sam, a farmer, and Rose, his working dog, are the novel’s primary characters. There are a few other people who drift in and out of the story, including Sam’s wife Katie, who is no longer around and appears only in Sam’s and Rose’s thoughts. As the book opens, a massive storm is about to hit, and Sam and Rose are preparing the farm: getting animals into their shelters, hauling food and water, ensuring the de-icers and backup generators are running. When the storm arrives, it’s worse than anything either of them has experienced before. Completely isolated in the middle of the blizzard, they must find a way to keep as much of the farm alive and running as they can.

The plot wasn’t particularly complex. In fact, to me, it felt a bit like an afterthought, a way to tie together a commentary on the inner workings of dogs. Katz explores in great depth what goes through Rose’s mind as well as her relationships with the farm and its animals, her work, and Sam. The book, which is only around 200 pages to begin with, would have been quite slim without these meditations.

Some of the reflections were interesting: Rose’s interactions with the sheep, the way she understands that it’s time to work, how she keeps looking for Katie because she never actually saw Katie leave the farm. However, there were a few moments that stuck out as being particularly hard to swallow. The first was about 80 pages in, when Rose has a bizarre sort of dream sequence. She experiences herself as a wolf cub, watches her mother and siblings be killed, then follows the smell of food to some early humans and eventually befriends them, switching her loyalty from nature to man. It seems to suggest some sort of primal knowledge shared by all dogs, that without living through it themselves they would have some residual memory of their species’s gradual domestication. 70 pages later, as Rose gazes into the eyes of a fellow animal who is dying, Rose experiences the animal’s past, shared with her in images, as though it was Rose’s own story. And then there was a sort of half dream in which Rose travels to the land of blue lights / dog souls and communes with her mother before returning to her body and the farm. She later returns to escort another animal’s soul there. It was a little too much for me.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with Katz’s writing, either. To me, Rose in a Storm read like fiction written by someone who’s used to writing nonfiction. Which, if he hasn’t written fiction in 10 years, is probably an accurate description of Katz. There was too much straightforward narration for the story to flow, too much repetition. There were times when Katz referred to two male or two female characters in the same sentence using only pronouns. Yes, you could figure out which “she” referred to the woman and which referred to the dog, but each time it caused my attention to snag a little instead of flowing continuously. Pardon me for splitting hairs, but these are some of my pet peeves.

There were also small inconsistencies that stuck out to me. When I read, I tend to imagine the scene in my head, noting where characters and buildings are located, the state of various objects, and so forth. So when a bowl of water that had begun to crust over with ice mere moments after being set out in the frigid farmhouse was miraculously thawed and and drinkable hours later without the addition of heat, it irked me. The snow is ice-covered, sharp enough to cut a dog’s paws, yet the author points out that thank goodness the snow is soft enough for the dog to dig through. The dog ignores the sheep by…looking at them? For me, little discrepancies like these can cause the reality of a story to unravel.

I also felt disconnected from the book, the characters. I felt the narration was extremely objective; I didn’t feel at all attached to the outcome. And though I never thought I’d get to use the term deus ex machina again after high school lit class, I was rather annoyed to discover something resembling one near the end of this tale.

One redeeming factor of the book for me was Katie, even though she is not physically present on the farm during the storm. Her relationship with Rose, as remembered by both Rose and Sam, was the one I found most believable.

I really wanted to like Rose in a Storm, but it just wasn’t my thing. People who enjoy heartwarming / heart-wrenching stories about animals and who have a high tolerance for what I would call the very slightly supernatural will most likely enjoy this novel. Jon Katz has tons of fans out there, and I’m sure Rose in a Storm will find many satisfied readers. I encourage you to check out his website to read about the dogs and see some of his exquisite photography from around the farm. I may end up trying some of his nonfiction someday; I think it might go down easier. The novel just wasn’t for me.

The Rights of the Reader

At the last minute, I added Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader to my Banned Books Week reading. I blame it for derailing my plans to read all three previously selected books in one week (I have about 30 pages of The Catcher in the Rye left to go), but Pennac’s book has been interesting enough that I don’t mind.

I have an advance reading copy of Candlewick Press’s 2008 edition; it’s translated by Sarah Adams and illustrated by Quentin Blake. I’ll post a full review soon, but I don’t like to quote too much from ARCs, so I’m waiting for a real copy to arrive from another library.

Instead, today, I bring you Daniel Pennac’s 10 Rights of the Reader, as translated by Adams, with commentary by yours truly. As a bit of background, Pennac is an author and former teacher in France. The Rights of the Reader is really written for teacher and parents about kids and reading, though a lot of what he says can be applied to readers in general. These Rights come from the fourth and final section of the book, after he has explained lots of things I’ll get to in my actual review.

And now, without further ado, The Rights of the Reader:

1. The Right Not to Read

Pennac’s take on this first Right is that educators are in charge of “introducing [children] to the world of literature and providing them with the means to judge freely whether they feel a need for books or not.”

For me, since I’ve already made this decision for myself (heck YES I need books!), The Right Not to Read means that I can choose not to read any book I want. It’s so easy to get caught up in thinking I “should” read the next novel by so-and-so, or this really important bestseller, or whatever. But if I don’t have any interest, then I have the right not to read it. And I (and everyone else) should be okay with that decision. It means I also shouldn’t beg someone else to read a book they’re not interested in.

2. The Right to Skip

Pennac begins this chapter by explaining that he read War and Peace for the first time at age twelve or thirteen. Well, really, he only read the bits he cared about: namely, “love and battles.” He skipped the politics, theories, and strategizing. He loved the book and was able to pare it down to what held his interest. In Pennac’s eyes, this self-filtering is highly preferable to letting someone else strip a story down to its bare, abridged bones and then giving that to a young reader.

I still feel like I haven’t really read a book if I haven’t read every word in it. I’ve read a few novels where the author (drily) waxes poetic on politics or history or some other topic that’s not really among my interests, but I nearly always slog through it so that I can say I’ve read the book and be sure I haven’t missed anything important. I’m not a kid, so I don’t really feel I have any excuse. But that’s me exercising my Right…you can do as you wish!

3. The Right Not to Finish a Book

Hey! It’s okay that not everyone loves every book! This is one of my favorite Rights, and one I’d been firm in allowing myself to exercise well before I read Pennac’s book. My version is that life is too short to read bad books. If I’m not trying to find time alone with a book, if reading becomes a chore when it’s supposed to be for pleasure, I will absolutely set the problem book aside. I may pick it up later, or I may be done with it completely, but to me, it’s just not worth soldiering on if I’m not into it. Pennac points out that, as a bonus, you get “the rare satisfaction of not caring when some prig bellows in your ear, ‘Hoooww can you not like Stendhaaaal?’ You just can.”

4. The Right to Read It Again

Pennac’s point is that, as children, we loved to be enchanted by the same story again and again. Why would we not desire this as adults as well? Whether you loved the book the first time you read it or you struggled with it and are giving it a second chance, you deserve The Right to Read It Again.

I absolutely agree that readers have this Right, but I don’t often exercise it. It’s hard for me to reread one book when I have a hundred unread volumes watching reproachfully from my shelves! As Nick Hornby says in The Polysyllabic Spree, ”I don’t reread books often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality.” But I like knowing that, if I ever want to, I do have this Right.

5. The Right to Read Anything

In this section, Pennac argues that there are, indeed, good and bad novels; that we usually start out with the bad ones; and that, eventually, we’ll get sick of the bad ones and find ourselves craving something of quality (the classics, of course). While we are finding our way from bad novels to good, we can read anything.

I agree with the Right, but not so much with Pennac’s argument. I don’t think it should be The Right to Read Anything (Which, Once You’ve Developed Any Sense At All, Will Be Classics Only). I think that if you want to go on reading books from the “Bestseller Factory,” as Pennac calls it, then by all means, read away. It’s each reader’s Right to decide what s/he wants to read, period.

6. The Right to Mistake a Book for Real Life

I interpret this Right — and Pennac seems to agree, more or less — to mean that it’s quite alright to get lost in a good book. It’s okay to get caught up in the story to the point that you forget that you’re sitting in your living room and you have to start making dinner in a few minutes and you have a big paper due tomorrow that you haven’t even started yet. These are my favorite books, the ones that sweep me away so thoroughly that I have trouble getting my bearings in my actual life.

7. The Right to Read Anywhere

The whole of Pennac’s explanation of this Right is comprised of two examples of people getting a lot accomplished while on the john. Which, yes, read in the bathroom if you so desire, but it seems a bit anticlimactic to say you have The Right to Read Anywhere! And then suggest only the toilet.

This Right reminds me to always have a book and to never be ashamed to whip it out. I’ve read on the bus, in line at the store, at the DMV, at my kitchen table, waiting for food at a restaurant, in the bathtub, on planes and trains, standing next to my oven waiting for the timer to go off so I can take the bread out of the oven…

8. The Right to Dip In

Pennac sums this Right up beautifully: “It is our right, as readers, to grab a book from anywhere on our shelves, open it wherever we like, and dive straight in, just for a few minutes, because that’s all the time we’ve got.”

Yes! Amen! I love doing this. It keeps me familiar with my books, it gives me a thrill of anticipation, and it makes me happy to experience, even in little bites, the variety of reading material that awaits me.

9. The Right to Read Out Loud

Pennac seems to have a thing for reading out loud. His point is that we love reading aloud as children, so why do we (a) stop reading aloud to our own children while they are still so young and (b) stop reading aloud ourselves?

I adore being read to (which, in my adult life, has translated into a love of audiobooks), but reading aloud has never come easily to me. The only time I employ it, on occasion, is if I’m struggling with a particular dialect or accent in a book. But I do think it’s a marvelous practice, a way of sharing books and the reading experience with one another, so I’m all for it, if it’s your thing.

10. The Right to Be Quiet

Pennac: “Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one’s place, but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life.” This relationship with our books is our own, and no one has the right to question it. In this way, we have The Right to Be Quiet, not to explain ourselves.

I agree, but I also interpret this Right in another way. You know that quiet you feel after you read the final word and close the back cover of a particularly absorbing book? For me, I need a few moments to absorb what I’ve read, process it, and make my peace with it before I can move on to the next book. And that’s just fine.

——–

I guess I didn’t do so well with the whole not quoting thing. It’s just so darn quotable! I promise to check everything against the finished edition, when it arrives, and make any corrections that need to be made.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with Pennac’s Rights? Would you change anything? Do you have any rights you’d like to add? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Sunday Salon: Celebrating One Year

Today my husband and I are celebrating our one-year anniversary. To kick off our anniversary weekend, yesterday morning we went to our first library sale in our new city. At $2 a bag, how could we resist? Between the two of us we ended up stuffing 17 books (mostly hardcovers) into an undersized brown paper grocery bag. Must’ve been all the packing practice I’ve had lately! Here are the new volumes I’ve welcomed into my home:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak

Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer

Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Run by Ann Patchett

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

It’s appropriate that we started our first anniversary weekend with books, as they’ve been a theme throughout our relationship. We have completely opposite tastes in reading; for the most part, anything I read, my husband doesn’t, and vice versa. Still, even if we don’t share literary tastes, books have always brought us together.

During one of our first conversations, my husband recommended Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to me, which I promptly purchased and read. We didn’t live in the same city until a year and a half into our relationship, so every time I visited him, we made a trip to Half Price Books and combed the clearance section for bargains. On one of his trips to Boston to see me, I organized a Boston Used Book Tour, during which we made our way to seven different used book shops around the city. When we finally moved to the same city, we began haunting library sales (booksalefinder.com is our favorite site!). We’ve been known to double back if we drive past an unknown independent bookstore while driving; when we visit his family in India, I always have to see what treasures I can find there. (Last time it was a new copy of Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree for about $2!) We even spent time on our honeymoon in Maine browsing second-hand books at antique shops. I love that we share our bibliophilic tendencies.

As for reading, I’m wrapping up my Banned Books Week picks (a tad late!). I finished The Great Gatsby and Speak, am nearly finished with The Rights of the Reader, and have passed the halfway point in The Catcher in the Rye. I’m participating in my first read-along this month (Dueling Monsters, Round II!), for which Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray awaits me. I also got two books out of the library I can’t wait to read. It looks like October is shaping up to be a wonderful month!