Guest Blogger: Samantha Learns a Lesson

(E demanded a turn.)

I've read these two chapters of the book a lot of times. These two chapters are called "Nellie" and "Mount Better School." But today is my first time reading the whole book.

What happens is her friend Nellie, the servant who lives two houses away, has just started school. She's nine, but she's in second grade. The teacher is mean and so are the children. And Samantha goes to Miss Crampton's Academy for Girls. Her teachers are Miss Crampton and Miss Stevens.

After Nellie's first day of school and after Nellie told Samantha how her first day of school was terrible, Samantha gets the second grade books from Miss Stevens and starts to teach Nellie. She teaches her to read and do all other sorts of schoolwork so she can move up to the third grade. She moves up to the third grade. But her desk is next to Eddie Ryland's because they sit in rows of how smart you are. Eddie Ryland isn't that smart, so he sits in like the back row or somewhere around the back row. Nellie just moved up from second grade, so she's not so smart for third grade, so she sits around the back row too.

Also at the end of the book, there's a speaking competition and Samantha is chosen to take part in it, but there's a mean girl in her class whose name is Edith Ettleton. She gets chosen too. But Samantha wins. I already told you about the part where she has a little school for Nellie. That was my favorite part. That's why I keep reading the book over and over again.

[Can I just say how thrilling it is that E now sits around and reads with us? The other day, S was cooking, and M, E, and I were reading in the kitchen with him, and I realized that my dream had been realized: everyone reads! so I can read! Can I also say that we are working on the difference between "smart" and "capable of doing the work," and it's a work in progress?]

Guest Blogger: Climbing the Mango Trees

(M wanted to guest blog about her latest read.)

A movie star, food, India: all this stuff sounded kind of cool to me when I got this book. Before then I hadn't even known who Madhur Jaffrey was. Now I think she's probably a really cool woman because she had a really cool childhood.

Imagine having lunch, dinner, and breakfast with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, as well as your small family. This is what happened in India.

Also imagine being able to have exotic fruits to us in America almost any time you wanted.

This is some of what Madhur Jaffrey enjoyed.

I did learn some interesting facts about Madhur too. Such as: she was in one play when she was five and then wasn't in another till almost high school. Also, as a child she had never been out of India. She didn't go until she was out of college.

So if you like learning about food and India a tiny bit before, during, and after World War II and when the British didn't have India as one of their colonies any more, this is the book for you. I know I loved it.

Cheat and Charmer

I'll just come out and say that I thoroughly enjoyed Cheat and Charmer, to the tune of 550 pages in three days (OK, so I spent two of those days sick in bed) and staying up till 4 in the morning to finish it (uh, not such a good idea after two days sick in bed). I get the mixed reviews, but hey, this novel has sister rivalry, sister love, Hollywood, Communists, Paris, London, writers, sex, betrayal, beaches, swimming pools, and melodrama, all wrapped up in the 1950s. If you liked Jill Robinson's Bed/Time/Story or have a secret yen for Irwin Shaw, by all means pick up this one. The story of nice girl Dinah Milligan Lasker and her glamorous younger sister, Veevi Milligan Ventura Albrecht; of their Communist pasts and the consequences of their encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee; of Dinah's husband Jake's escapades at Marathon Pictures, in Paris, and in bed; of Veevi's first husband, Bulgarian filmmaker Stefan Ventura, and her second, novelist Mike Albrecht, and all her men before, betwixt, and after; of...oh, hell, either you are ready to get it already or you're already bored. If this is a novel for you, you know who you are.

Reinventing the Wheel

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are here to present the Reinventing the Wheel Awards for writers who become parents and make the remarkable discovery of a whole new realm of textual possibility, one that nobody has ever written about before, because nobody has ever been thoughtful about parenting, or had such a special child. Nope, nobody, not ever. This year, we are lucky to have not just one but two lucky winners.

- Peggy Orenstein receives the "What's a feminist mom to do when her little girl likes pink stuff?" award, with special mention for being the first feminist mom ever to encounter the quandary that is Libby Lu, or to realize that a girl can love princesses and still want to be a fireman.

- And in the dad category, the "My kid is remarkable and what a miracle it is to be a father, so let me tell you about it, in detail, and sometimes I'll even be self-deprecating" award goes to Steve Almond, who is pleased to follow in the footsteps of last year's winner, Neal Pollack, because his kid is cuter, his sex life is wilder, and he's a better writer.

Thanks for listening, folks, and remember, when you have an original idea, go for it, don't bother checking to see if anyone else has ever had it, because surely, even if their idea is some sort of facsimile of yours, it's nowhere near as original!

MotherTalk Blog Tour: Cycle Savvy

When the savvy women at MotherTalk put out a call for moms and their teen or pre-teen daughters who wanted to participate in the blog book tour for Toni Weschler's new book, Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body, I jumped on the bandwagon immediately. I am one of the legions of sworn adherents to Weschler's first book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, without which, I am quite certain, we would not have the pleasure of E. And I'm the sex-positive, pro-communication mom of a pre-teen daughter who is definitely interested in what's happening to her body. So we signed right up, the book arrived right on time, and here we are.

I have to say right off the bat: pre-teen, not so much. M was initially taken by the cartoons, the quotes from actual teens, and the first factoid which is that you actually come into being inside your grandmother's uterus (you'll have to read it yourself to find out why). But after sitting down with the book three times, M ultimately pronounced it "boring," her code word for things she can't handle as well as things that bore her, and "too old for me," which makes sense, given that Weschler herself says it's targeted for14-18 year olds, and their issues--and bodies--are quite different from ten year olds' (for the younger set, I hope the blog book tour powers that be will not take it amiss if I slip in a quick plug for The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls--yes, it's American Girl, but two of my smartest, coolest friends with slightly older daughters swore by it, and when things started to, shall we say, develop, I got it for M and she devoured it and still rereads it, as is her wont--it's a chatty, humorous, appropriately explict account of puberty and its consequences: a solid precursor to Cycle Savvy).

After M put the book down for good, I picked it up, and I was impressed. Those who are already aficionados of TCOYF, as Weschler's first book is colloquially known, know that her thing is helping people to understand all facets of the menstrual cycle (did you know your temperature goes up when you ovulate? how about that stuff in your underpants--know what it is?). Reading that book was a total eye-opener for me at 35--and I read the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves when I was ten, so it's not like I started out hopelessly uninformed. Weschler explains in her preface that she wrote Cycle Savvy because the most consistent response to TCOYF is women wishing they'd learned all this earlier, even been taught it as teenagers. So in Cycle Savvy, she does just that: teaches it to teenagers.

The book definitely aims for its target audience: it's got jokes, asides, sidebars, quizzes, pictures, and lots of italicized quotes from teens and former teens. Amidst all that teen magazine design, it packs in loads of great information--not just the details of the menstrual cycle and how to chart it, but what to expect at your first ob-gyn appointment, how to recognize and deal with PMS, first-time stories, birth control methods. Tone is hard, and I'm not a teenage girl, so I can't say if Weschler hits it (now I wish I'd grabbed my oh-so-teenage niece last night at our Hanukkah party and asked her to give it a skim), but I thought she struck a good balance between chatty and serious, humorous and informative. It seems like the kind of book a girl might resolve to skim and only look at the fun stuff, but then get seduced into reading the complicated parts (hormones, luteal cycles, and the like).

The one thing that makes me sad about the book (I've searched for the right adjective and sad, I think, is it), is the way contemporary mores force Weschler to equivocate more than I sense she wants to about teenage sexuality. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of realistic, positive rhetoric and information, from first-person stories of teens who regret being pressured into sex (and first-person stories of teens who had great first experiences) to descriptions of how different birth control methods work. But the goal of TCOYF is, as the title states, to help women take charge of their fertility, whether they want to avoid or facilitate getting pregnant, and that book helps you use all your newfound knowledge for precisely that purpose, via the Fertility Awareness Method. Apparently, though, urging teens to chart their cycles so they know when they are or aren't fertile is way too edgy in this abstinence-only climate, so in the "Note to Moms" Weschler provides feeble reassurance that this isn't her goal, and later on she gives similarly weak rationales for charting (so you won't be surprised by your period on a trip to the beach! so you can tell if you have an infection!). Like I said, I don't fault her for this, and she is pretty brave to include a lot of the material she does, and HarperCollins deserves kudos for publishing the book at all; it just makes me sad, once again, that we have come to this.

All in all, then, thumbs up from me, and I think in a couple of years, M will be glad to rediscover this one on her shelf.

It's Pronounced Dice-K

You've just got to love Boston and the Red Sox: where else would a police cruiser be waiting on the tarmac to accompany the almost-signed (cross fingers, knock wood) star pitcher to his physical? (It's not Red Sox blogging; it's reading blogging: I READ the article.)

So Long, Paris

I was just thinking about Paris Hilton this morning. Actually, I was thinking about Nicole Richie, which led me to Paris, and the general gist of the thoughts was how totally useless they are, and how sick it is that we allow them to waste so much of our bandwidth, literally and metaphorically. But Rebecca Traister says it better than I could, so I'll just let her.

Hanukkah Books

 I've always admired parents who rotate the toys.  You know, the ones who only keep, say, one third of the toys out at a time, so the kids actually play with them, and then when they start getting bored, out come the next third and it's like new toys all over again?  At least, I think that's how it's supposed to work, and it sounds admirable, though, in fact, I'm not sure I know anyone who actually does it.  Oh no, that's not true, M and E's old daycare provider did it, and she was Admirable, at least very much so in her own mind, but we parted with her on bad terms, so maybe the rotation thing isn't all it's cracked up to be, though, then again, the toys had nothing to do with the bad terms...

Anyway, the only realm in which I have ever rotated is the Hanukkah books.  And you can't really call it rotated if there's nothing to rotate with, because really what it is is putting them away from about two weeks after Hanukkah till maybe two weeks before, because we have--thanks to doting grandparents and Jewish friends in No-Longer-Red State with almost-grown-up kids--what is probably the world's largest and most beloved collection of Hanukkah books, and there is nothing more boring than reading Hanukkah books--except reading Hanukkah books in July!  (Is it like that with Christmas books?  God knows, the No-Longer-Red State Capital City Suburb library had the world's largest collection of Christmas books, every single one of which I believe I refused to check out, because while I am highly ecumenical on many things, and, yes, we have checked out Barbie books, I simply do not do Christmas books, so I wouldn't know.)

Anyway, I thought I would offer my opinion of the Hanukkah books worth reading (or rereading, as the case may be), which is to say: my favorites.

Sammy Spider's First Hanukkah.  I love Sammy Spider (we also have Passover, and either Shabbat or Rosh Hashanah, I'm thinking Shabbat)  (you know, I've been clicking on www.powells.com frequently these days, and they list the top five bestsellers of the hour on the home page, and The Gourmet Cookbook and the new Joy are always up there, but today #1 is Don't Let the Pigeons Drive the Bus!  Go figure.).  Sammy is--duh--a spider who lives with his mom in the Shapiros' house and learns about the holidays by watching Josh and his parents celebrate.  These are really about holiday practices, not so much beliefs, and they have bright colors and not a lot of words and are great for toddlers, though my kids still love them, albeit perhaps sentimentally.

When Mindy Saved Hanukkah.  Another tradition one, though it nicely weaves in the Hanukkah  story as brave little Mindy fights Ahaseurus the mean cat to get the candle.  The schtick here is that Mindy's family, the Kleins, are tiny people who live behind the wall of the Eldridge Street Synagogue in the Lower East Side, ca. tenement days.  I love books about tiny people, from Mistress Masham's Repose to The Borrowers and even The Littles, and in this one Mindy is brave and tough and the denouement features a piece of herring.  Fun pictures too, with bottle cap lamps and Mindy scaling the ark with the aid of a paper clip.

Judah Who Always Said No.  Hanukkah is a tough one for the not-quite-not-Zionist pacifists among us, who don't want to buy into the nationalist rhetoric with which the minor holiday of Hanukkah has been imbued (it's not all counter-Christmas).  Then again, we can always go with resistance to tyranny and oppression, which is our preferred ideology.  When we first got Judah, I was not so happy with the indoctrination aspects.  Then I started going into preschool to do Hanukkah.  I went to preschool and kindergarten and afterschool to do Hanukkah more times than I can count--and then we moved to Blue State and were no longer the only Jews around, or at least, the only Jews in preschool, kindergarten, and afterschool, and I didn't have to do Hanukkah any more.  But you haven't done Hanukkah with little kids unless you've led them in a rousing chorus of "No!" as Judah resists his mother, his father, his brothers, and, eventually, the evil Greek king.  There is even a battle scene with elephants and bows and arrows.  I'm a convert--to the book.

The List

I keep a list of the books I want to read in the back of my datebook (I still buy a datebook every year--and it's time to get one, because the tiny lines for each day of next year are getting crowded--and inn the back of the book I rewrite, every year, my phone numbers, and everyone's social security number--I know, I shouldn't--and an updated version of the list.)

The list includes books people tell me about, books I see reviewed or read articles about or glance at on the table at the bookstore, books I hear about in conversation.  Sometimes I write down the title, but sometimes just the author, and then later I look at the name and wonder who on earth it is.

The problem is: I keep the list, but I rarely refer to it.  I get sucked in by the new books shelf, or someone gives me a book, or I pick up a book at someone else's house.  So the list gets longer, and rarely shorter.

Here's the 2006 version, exactly as it looks in the back of the datebook (crossed-off books are, obviously, the ones I've read [uh, nope, I actually have no idea how to cross things out in Blogger--I thought it would be obvious, as everyone seems to do it, but it's not, so let's just go with asterisks for the ones I've read, or abandoned, which is in fact more visually accurate, as on the list itself I just make a dash at the beginning of the item, kind of ticking it off, rather than crossing it off]):

Laura Waterman, Losing the Garden
Donald Hall, The Best Day The Worst Day
Housekeeping [I know, isn't it scandalous?!]
* Wesley Stace, Misfortune [abandoned]
Towelhead
*Ruth Reichl [this was Garlic and Sapphires]
*Ian McEwan, Saturday
Andrea Levy, Small Island [I have taken this one out of the library many times, to no avail]
Christine Schutt
Lydia Davis [I wrote "short stories" by these two]
Patrick Hamilton [???]
Alice Mattison
*Jude Morgan, Passion [abandoned]
Lily King, The English Teacher
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document [got this one from the library yesterday]
*Jay McInerney [read a few pages at the bookstore--yuck]
*Ayelet
Poppy Z. Brite
Octavia Butler
*Steve Almond
Deborah Eisenberg
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica [sitting on my desk since August]
Sarah Gran, Dope
I Capture the Castle [I know, I KNOW]
Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts, etc. [I'm pretty sure I'll never read this one]
*Justine Picardie, My Mother's Wedding Dress [referenced here]
*Michael Walker, Laurel Canyon [abandoned and blogged]
*Shari Goldhagen, Family and Other Accidents
Lee Server, Ava Gardner
Edward P. Jones
Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls [I'm working on it]
Naomi Alderman, Disobedience
Alan Moore, Lost Girls
Elizabeth Frank, Cheat and Charmer [got it from the library]
Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog...
Rodrigo Fresan, Kensington Gardens
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Jim Crace
The Plot Against America
Cancer Vixen
*Alison Bechdel, memoir

Family and Other Accidents

 I fell off the wagon.  I failed the non-fiction challenge.  I went to the library, took out three novels and stayed up till 2 finishing the first one.  At least they were novels from The List (to which eventually I will devote a post, maybe even this morning).

Somebody recommended Family and Other Accidents (if the text on the cover is all lowercase, should I write it like that? it's also in lowercase on the title page, but in caps on Powell's...if it's not e.e. cummings, or been down so long it feels like up to me [which has caps on Amazon, but was in lowercase typescript on the cover of my parents' paperback from the 60s], I'm going with the conventions).  I'm thinking the recommender was A (not California A, the other A).

This is an interesting book that made me think about the nature of the novel.  Actually, I'm not sure it's such an interesting book, but it kept me interested.  It's a relationship novel--about men: two brothers, orphaned when one is 15 and the other 25, and the next 25 years of their life, which includes a bit of career, a lot of ambivalent brotherhood, and some women, and a lot of ambivalence about them too.  What makes the novel worth reading is the ambivalence and complexity of the relationships, and the characterization, which is convincing and captures how we both change and stay the same over long periods of time.

Technically the book interested me because it was so completely focused on Jack and Connor, and, to a lesser extent, Anna, Mona, Kathy, Beth, and Laine.  That is, though the point of view shifts from chapter to chapter, this is a single-focus novel: there are no subplots, no side characters (is that a term or did I make it up?), no history or politics, hardly any description, albeit quite a lot of rain.  The characters are embodied: Jack and Connor are dark, Mona has red hair, Laine and Kathy are blond; Jack rubs his eyebrows when he is stressed; Connor's hair is long and lank; there is quite a lot of throwing up (really, I don't think I've ever read a book with so much throwing up).  Some of this embodiment is compelling--actually, the throwing up, though it is oddly persistent, and thus perhaps meant to be thematically meaningful??--but some--the hair--seems like characteristics hung upon characters.

I think Family and Other Accidents could be made emblematic of the anemic bourgeouis (sp.?) domestic novel, probably in a critique-of-MFA-programs kind of way, but, still, it's a fine portrait of a family and a handful of psyches, and I'm not sure whether that is damning with faint praise.

[Just to compound my reputation as nitpicker: two things were glaringly wrong: ca. 1998, nobody used pins for diapers, and a former AmeriCorps volunteer now getting a master's at the Kennedy School would never read the Herald at home.  Also, the novel is strangely atemporal.  It happens in the present--lots of cell phones--but if Jack, Connor, and Laine talk about dead John and Carolyn Kennedy the first time Jack meets Laine, when Laine is pregnant with Jorie, then the novel must end several years in the future, for Jorie is 16 in the last chapter.  It's just kind of odd.]

Fun Home

You know, I read Fun Home almost two weeks ago, over Thanksgiving, and I even thought about what I would blog about it, and I have no idea why I never got to it, because it's not exactly like I've been blogging up a storm about other things I've been reading since then (perhaps this is the dwindling of the blog...).

So I thought Fun Home was very good.  I've been an Alison Bechdel fan since way back when (I have the first several Dykes to Watch Out For collections, which I bought when they first came out), but it was kind of odd to realize that she's just a few years older than me...OK, now all the things I was going to blog about are coming back to me.  Let's just go for the list format.

1)  I've actually dipped in and out of comics and graphic novels for maybe 20 years, generally on the feminist end of things--I also bought Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art when it first came out, and that one's so old you can barely find it on the internet.  But I'm not quite sure why I've been interested in comics--probably because they are cool, and then there was the feminist angle--because I am, as I've said many times, the most hopelessly verbal person on the planet (quick illustrative anecdote: I was completely amazed when my art major best friend my first year in college said that he sat on the subway and took pictures in his head, because I had just assumed that everyone else also sat on the subway and made up stories about people in their heads).  So I would read comics, but I would focus completely on the words--like I read fashion magazines and glance at the picture then turn quickly to the words.  Illustrative example: it wan't until maybe the fourth time I read Maus that I realized that the Nazis were CATS.  Get it?  Mice--cats?  I know, everyone got it immediately, it's that obvious.  Except for me.

So anyway, reading Fun Home, I decided that I was going to focus on the pictures, and they were fascinating.  Now I see why the graphic novel (or graphic memoir, as the case may be) is graphic.  I mean, duh.  I was particularly taken with the maps and how she drew her father's body hair so meticulously, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what it must have been like to draw those frames, and the same people and places over and over and over (not that she doesn't have practice with the Dykes, but still) (hmm, would you call these thoughts turning the production of pictures into a story?).  I also liked the historical visual details--like those Norwegian sweaters everyone (at least everyone on the east coast, of a certain socioeconomic bracket) used to wear in the late 70s and early 80s.

2) The book did not convince me that her father committed suicide.

3) Of course I liked all the literary motifs and intertextuality.

4) I also liked the way she captured lesbian/feminist college life of the early 80s.  Her stacks of books reminded me of a lot of things I haven't read in a long time.

5) Is it better to have a fascinatingly weird and hard life that you can make art out of, or a relatively easy and pleasant life, that's pretty darn boring?  Is that the eternal question of the would-be artiste, or what?

6) The book also made me think a lot about being in one's 40s.  Her father was 44 when he died.  So was F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Her father was frustrated and disappointed.  Fitzgerald was successful, for a while, and frustrated and disappointed.  Bechdel published this book when she was 46.  She is much beloved by a subsection of contemporary American society, but she has no money.  I am 42.  I don't know what I am.

Like I said: good book, thought-provoking, highly recommended.

Mies

Not sure I'd want to live in it for good (at least with the chaotic packrats I live with) (now there's a thought: life without the chaotic packrats), but I am loving this house ( I READ about it, so this counts as reading) (which means I could have been blogging about Britney all along, but I'm not, though I do have to say that the happiest thing I read yesterday was this article) (and I wish this made me optimistic, which it could, especially after Gates's testimony [don't be silly, of course I haven't read the whole thing, but I did read the money quote], only there's this little problem of the president, and it just doesn't).

Dave Alvin--Not

I'm wondering why, in all the (ridiculous) discussion of whether the situation in Iraq has become civil war, nobody seems to be mentioning Orwell (one of the best essays ever--go read it now, if you never have; you will be a better person for it). Actually, I have no idea if nobody is mentioning Orwell, since I haven't read everybody. Mainly I was just shocked that Frank Rich didn't mention Orwell yesterday in his Times-Select-protected op-ed. So of course people are talking about Orwell, though not really a lot, which I still think is odd.

But that isn't what I want to write about. I want to write about why we love certain music. OK, really I want to write about why I love certain music. And really, if we get right down to it, I want to write about why I love Dave Alvin, which might, perhaps, offer some insights into the larger issues.

And, no, this is not an excuse of a post to make up for the fact that I haven't been reading so much. I read Frank Rich. I've decided to read non-fiction and I've started three non-fiction books, all of which I like, none of which are keeping me up late reading, which is probably worth considering, in the endless consideration of my novel habit. I've also been spending a lot of time reading this pattern, but the reading doesn't seem to be helping much, as I've already ripped it out seven times. I read Jenny's story which I quite liked, especially because I'm in it (can you find me? I'm subtle--or rather, Jenny is subtle, at least in her deployment of me) and, indeed, the whole story walks a lovely line between the real and the fictional, which is a good piece of its point, as well as one of Jenny's ongoing themes, and it also works the place where desire meets the literary, which is huge for Jenny, and quite relevant for me too, given that I spent much of my childhood wishing my books wouldn't end.

OK, out of time, I guess we should call this a reading update. More on Dave Alvin later, which is good, because it gives me more time to think about it, and also because I can figure out if "Fourth of July" skips on the CD player at home, not just the NEW CD player in the NEW car, because all this started with me wanting to hear "Fourth of July," which made me pull out Out in California and then listen to the whole CD and think about how much I love Dave Alvin, but then I got to "Fourth of July," which was the whole point, and it skipped. Luckily, I was driving at the time, not ripping out knitting, so I was not overly reminded of the futility of existence.