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Provisional notes on the first three books I read this year

Because they were so different from each other, and because their blurbs on my book list got longer than usual, and because I’m still thinking about them.


The Lesser Blessed, by Richard van Camp. YA, though it was marketed as adult fiction. 1996. Larry, a Dogrib boy in a small town in the Northwest Territories, is trying to get through the year and cope with his traumatic past. He makes friends, or maybe frenemies, with the bad-boy new kid at school…who gets the girl Larry’s been worshiping from afar. Larry’s a mess of admiration and lust and jealousy. His mom is busy working and going to school, and the past is unspoken between them. Her boyfriend Jed is pretty great, but it’s unclear if it will all work out, no matter how much Larry wants him to stick around. It’s the 1980s, and life in town is mired in drink, drugs, bad sex, racism, poverty, violence– seriously, heavy metal music is the most reliable comfort. Beautiful writing in short sections with bursts of old memories and tribal stories mixed in. I thought the jacket copy’s “fresh, funny look at growing up Dogrib in the North” was off base… but there’s something that makes you see through the grime and teenage raunch and want to stick with this sweet storytelling kid.

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey, by Ozge Samanci. Comics. 2015. Memoir of a childhood and youth in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. Ozge’s family is middle-class: she and her sister can go to good schools if they work hard, but their parents worry that they won’t have good lives unless they study engineering or medicine and get good jobs. Meanwhile, the fight over secularism in Turkey and the nation’s youth and political fragility are the background to everything. One page includes a photograph of Ozge’s stencil, which has shapes, rulers…and the profile of military hero Ataturk, because drawing him badly is not an option. Ozge tries to fit in and please her family, when really she’s a weird artistic kid who idolizes Jacques Cousteau. My only criticism is that the resolution at the end felt tacked-on.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso. Memoir. 2015. A woman who has kept an exhaustive diary for decades writes in small sections about contemplating stopping. Also about her experience of time and memory, and how it changed when she became a mother. Mostly, this book came across to me as unbelievably self-absorbed, but every now and then one of her sentences intrigued me. There’s also a note of “and then I became a mother, and understood time and the meaning of life!” and I can take only so much (not much) of that. Can’t help wondering if she would find it all so profound if she had four kids instead of one. I think I will forget this book almost immediately, but hope to remember at least these two things: 1. When she watched her baby playing with crib toys, she suddenly remembered her own toys and sensations from before she began talking, and 2. she writes her diary in the present tense.

ALA YMAs

It happened! A book I had already read won the Newbery Medal!

Unfortunately, my notes about Last Stop on Market Street leave much to be desired: “The grandmother’s relentless positivity was a little much, and the bus riders were awfully social. Still, people are usually nice to little kids on the bus.” My memory of it doesn’t separate out pictures and text, either. (The Newbery is for the text.) But I’m happy for Matt de la Peña — I really liked his YA We Were Here, about four boys breaking out of a group home and heading for Mexico. He’s so good at emotional writing that never turns flowery.

The other award winners I’d read were Rita Williams-Garcia’s Gone Crazy in Alabama (Coretta Scott King Award winner) and Jason Reynolds’ The Boy in the Black Suit (Coretta Scott King Award honor). I liked them both a lot. I don’t think Gone Crazy in Alabama is my favorite of the trilogy– I tend to like middle books, where repercussions of book one play out and things get thorny. That’s P.S. Be Eleven all over, plus it has the most of Big Ma, the character who most intrigues me. Oh, could there be some more novels about the adults? please?

So many books I’ve seen on blogs but not read. I may seek out Newbery honor Echo, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, as an audiobook, since it also won an Odyssey honor.

Here’s the full list of this year’s honorees.

ice day

buds and limbs coated with ice

Took a careful walk around the neighborhood today– wore knee and elbow pads. Did not fall. Much beauty.

snow day!

fir trees at Mt. Scott Park with snow on the ground

no longer samesies

Portland woke up to an inch or two of pretty, powdery snow! In the afternoon it started turning toward freezing rain, and the university just notified us they’ll open two hours late tomorrow, at ten. Good job, weather, at stretching out the holiday that last little bit.

I decided to walk to the community center and do my run on the treadmill. And, since I had to carry my running clothes anyway, why not carry a swimsuit and visit the pool and hot tub afterward? This turned out to be a great plan. The ellipticals were full, but I was the only one treadmilling. I called Sanguinity when I had two miles left to go, and she joined me for the pool part. There were empty lanes in the lap pool! The changing rooms weren’t all wet, because almost all the kids were playing in the snow instead of swimming! We didn’t even have to wait to go down the water slide! And there was plenty of room in the hot tub to stretch out, while looking out at the fir trees.

It’s also a good day to curl up and read Yuletide stories. Two I enjoyed from kidlit fandoms:

The Force Hums Along

Sanguinity and I went to see Star Wars today, with Evan & Kristi! People have been so good about eschewing spoilers that I can only return the favor… so I’ll just say this movie had an incredible knack for pandering to me without being irritating! Usually a lot of winks and in-jokes and shout-outs make me feel manipulated and grouchy, but somehow it all worked and had just the right mix of nostalgia and freshness for me.

We debriefed afterwards– I sipped a milkshake under the curiously intense ceiling heaters of the Bagdad’s restaurant, and we speculated on what Stormtrooper nurseries might be like.

To avoid detailing our many excellent (but spoilerish) queries and theories, I’ll end with a link to an internet friend’s recent essay that I found poignant and true: Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: Death, Survivor’s Guilt, and the Power of a Well-Timed Story.

Samesies!

sunny Mt. Scott Park on New Years Day

Mt. Scott Park, cold and sunny on New Years Day 2015

sun through fir trees at Mt. Scott Park, with green lawn

Mt. Scott Park, cold and sunny on New Years Day 2016

I cooked up black-eyed peas and the limp but tasty chard from the garden. At first the black-eyed peas smelled like dirt and not in a good way…but liberal bacon and onion redeemed them.

The Secret Life of Book Lists

My list of books read in 2015, with a line or three about each. And even more briefly, here are my ten best for the year, which I added to my LibraryThing archive:

    • Bright Morning, by Margery Williams Bianco. Her 1939 YA Other People’s Houses was also good.
    • Kiss the Girl, by Melissa Brayden. Also enjoyed Waiting in the Wings and Just Three Words, and successfully poked the library to acquire the next one.
    • Landing, by Emma Donoghue. Audiobook.
    • Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight, by Janet Edwards.
    • We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. Audiobook.
    • To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han. (Sadly, the sequel had only a fraction of its charm.)
    • Lulu and the Hedgehog in the Rain, by Hilary McKay. I’ve read them all (I think), but this one was special because of the community organizing!
    • Stuff Matters, by Mark Miodownik. Nonfiction (materials science).
    • The Turtle of Oman, by Naomi Shihab Nye.
    • The Martian, by Andy Weir.

I read an interview with Meryl Streep once– I think maybe it was a Bob Greene column?– in which she said all her movies were secretly home movies. She’d watch a scene from Kramer v. Kramer and remember what her kid was up to that week, or who she’d been hanging out with, and all the things that were going on when the scene was filmed.

My book lists are like that for me. I’ll look at So You Want to Be a Wizard and remember how excited KP was to hear I was reading it, and how she visited Portland later in the year and presented me with the sequels after one of her many trips to Powell’s Books. And how Sanguinity and I went up to Olympia to dogsit for Sara and crew, and they had a copy on their shelves, so I was reading it in the backyard while Sang designated the dogs Horrible Thing One…

Sanguinity pointing at Molly

and Horrible Thing Two…

Sanguinity pointing at Beezy

and gave them stern looks…

Sanguinity considering Molly

…that didn’t fool them one bit.

Sanguinity kissing a happy Molly's head

 

Or how I read Gone Crazy in Alabama in Wyoming, decompressing on a sunny morning at my friend Jenny’s house after she left for work.

Some books have webs of people associated with them– I decided to read The Martian because every single member of the Maki family liked it, and then my co-worker lent me a copy from the first meeting of her new book club, and then I gave a copy to my father-in-law that he binge-read even though he hardly ever reads fiction.

Then there are all the online discussions like the one about The Hired Girl, and audiobooks whose performances and the setting I heard them in are inextricable from the text. (Tiny Pretty Things while striding home in the dark amidst headlights and big trees and rain!)

It’s impossible to know all that’s coded into anyone’s book list but my own, but I still like reading other people’s. Here’s hoping for rich secret home movies for us all in 2016.

 

tricksy books

I just did the bulk of the work of alphabetizing and categorizing my “Books Read 2015” list. A few times I had to override my brain’s first inclination:


I listened to the audiobook version of World War Z, performed multivoice as a series of interviews. It was very hard not to categorize it as nonfiction.


Ditto for The Martian, even though I read it in print. (Haven’t seen the movie.) I’d say it was because of all the technical details, but Steven Gould’s Exo had that too, and didn’t trip the nonfiction switch.


I read Falling From Horses in print, but the first-person narration was so sure and real that my brain is convinced I heard it as an audiobook.

I expect to add at least one more book and clean it all up a bit…will post a link and my favorites in a few days!

Dear person who ordered a blueberry bagel with honey butter this morning,
I discovered when I got to my desk that I had your bagel. It was the only one on the counter when I picked it up, which probably means you had just left with my order, a nine-grain bagel with salmon cream cheese. The two are very different, but turns out I was okay with the bagel fate dealt me. I hope you were too.

sign on fence: BARKING DOG

I walk by here all the time but have never encountered this sneaky dog. For some reason, the sign always reminds me of the one at the Convention Center:

Attention: Bell Will Ring Without Warning

photo by Eric Fischer