I Had Seen Castles

I have slowly built up a love for everything concise, starting with my first experiences with Ernest Hemingway and carrying over into my appreciation for the likes of McCarthy, Silko, and Salinger. My interest in the styles of these writers hopelessly carried over into my own writing, and as a result, my current vision of the most basic elements of "the story."

I found this book to be a remarkable gem of a story. Its spare and controlled prose paint a somber picture of the effect of War on John at the cusp of his adulthood. I could not help but compare this book to Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front and notice how similarly--and yet also how differently--the effects of war are presented.

There was much less of an emphasis on the brutality of the war than Remarque's novel, but I appreciated that. I feel as though the focus of the book was on John's transformation from "conscientious objector" to veteran, and all of the emotional weight that the war and his abandonment of Ginny puts on him.

I liked the format of the story--the memoirs of an aging and lonely veteran. I have this thing about books that try and capture real moments and relationships with real ambiguity and real heartache. I think this book succeeds in that it doesn't cross the border to "too depressing" or "unrealistically uneventful" in trying to portray these complex issues.

The Golden Compass

At some point I made a comment in class that I had held off reading His Dark Materials because I didn't think I would be "into" them. I had used up three lifetimes of a Fantasy Literature phase in my pre-teen and teen years on The Lord Of The Rings and by sophomore year in high school I had significantly moved into a more contemporary age of literary preference. Not only did I want to take a pretty significant break from fantasy for a while, but almost every other fantasy book that came out after my LOTR fascination seemed like a hasty attempt to cash in on Tolkien's impassable genre monolith, particularly books that were arranged as a trilogy.

I take a lot of advice about the quality of literature from my wife, who is a dedicated reader (much more dedicated than I could ever claim to be). I was intrigued to learn that His Dark Materials ranks about as high on the list of her favorite books as one could expect to attempt to rank books for as avid a reader as she is. She never really recommends books to me (being more aware than anyone of my combination of unplaceable reading preferences and unappeasable expectations) but I got the feeling that I should get into The Golden Compass at least.

It's great.

I loved Pullman's writing style. Coupled with the intricate universe that he has built, his storytelling really takes wing. Great description, wonderful vocabulary, and a pace that it easy to follow (a particularly important quality for young adult literature, I have come to find) as well as intriguing. The prose is well thought out, engaging, and free of that frustrating quality that seems to plague most children's fantasy: drawn out passages of detail that struggle to remain relevant to the book's plot, message and character development. In particular I liked how the point of view shifts omnisciently between characters--I felt like it brought the book together much better not having to be confined to Lyra's perspective for the whole book.

The only outside criticism I can find on this book--anywhere--is its very tangible rejection of organized religion. I know that when the movie adaptation came out, there were legions of religious groups that blindly instigated attacks and boycotts based on this element. Pullman has been pegged as an "atheist" by nearly all of this brand of critics, the most violent protestations stemming from the argument that, since this is a children's series, Pullman's main agenda must be to incite a rampant theological revolution in today's youth, using His Dark Materials as a vessel for his Godless doctrine.

Not only is this kind of accusation unfounded, I think that it is a terrible reason to argue whether a book should be read. I think that it is a shame that there is, somewhere, a kid who has been prevented from reading this book due to his parents' lack of individual discretion. Aside from the fact that Pullman is clearly not an atheist (because the admission of an "Authority" or otherwise spiritual overseer in his story would contradict this title) Pullman's willingness to express his opinions on the ramifications of a satirical composite of the cultural impact of organized religion does not qualify as a reason to attempt to prevent anyone from reading anything.

This story was original and engaging and I plan on reading the rest of the series. I feel as though this kind of story has never been written before, and I find that exciting.

Looking For Alaska

I had meant to read this book a long time ago, but I never got around to it after it received a review by my wife that was not negative but indifferent. The story is good, she said, but the way Green writes is pretty unconvincing and nothing too special.
I didn't want to waste time reading anything that I might not have been completely enthralled with, so I didn't bother.

Having finally read it, I can't say that I proved her absolutely wrong. I did like the book, but I think that I've picked up on a few things that I liked that my wife either didn't notice or forgot to mention:

While the teachability of this book has been hotly debated, I think that one positive aspect of the book in an educational setting is Green's ridiculous penchant for inserting very challenging vocabulary and phrasing into Miles's narrative. I got a great deal of satisfaction reading the observations that Miles makes because of the advanced level of intelligence that prompts them.

At the same time that I praise this element in Green's writing, I think that it makes his characters unbelievable. I really liked Alaska as a character, and Green definitely sets her up as a strong catalyst whose personality is bigger than any writer could attempt to capture on paper. Still, in order to make Alaska a likable rebel/intellectual, that same process of inflating defining characteristics makes Alaska & Co. altogether unlikely as accurate representations of real people.

This is where I would say that this is okay by me--if Green wanted to create real people in his book, then we would have a completely different (albeit boring) novel--but since it is clear through additional notes, quotes, forwards and afterwards that Green models nearly every character, place or situation after his own experiences, the attributes that he builds his characters from become shoddy imitations of genuine characteristics.

The best thing that this book has going for it is Green's ability to enter the mind of an adolescent. Green is a fairly young author, and I think that this has a lot to do with his ability to sympathize with the complex emotions that accompany the teenage years--particularly the ambiguity of relationship drama between 18 year-olds. He really hits the nail on the head with an underrated grasp on the fundamentals of teenage angst, and he pairs this nicely with the roller coaster of emotions that follow a teen's first experiences with death. Because of this strong element, I can see why so many high school students are raving about it.

Here is the best instance of this:

"The silence broke: 'Sometimes I liked it,' I said. 'Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.'
'You mean it felt good?'
'No. I don't know. It felt. . . pure.'
'Yeah,' he said, dropping his usual eloquence. 'Yeah, I know. Me, too. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural.'
It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things" (226).

I think that it is important for kids to understand the last bit of that quote--that there are thoughts and emotions that sometimes bombard you after significant events that everyone deals with. Green manages to not sound like a motivational speaker when telling us this, so it works.

Though my wife and I are still convinced that he was hired by tobacco companies to make smoking look like something only dramatically cool kids do.

Living Dead Girl

After hearing Erin and Tim book talk this novel, I picked it up because I wanted to see if I could get through it. It sounded so intense and disturbing that I decided to make it my "stretch" book. It is technically in that category of YA that can be referred to as "issue lit," and I only say this because while books in this category might all share certain elements, I don't think there is a universally accepted formula for what constitutes an issue book. In this case, let me just say that the girl in the story goes through traumatic events that count as issues that some unfortunate young girls might go through.

The girl is abducted at 10 years old and is physically and sexually abused for the next five years by "Ray," a controlling psychopath who calls her Alice and threatens her with death if she tries to leave him or seek help from anyone.

There are different ways that an author can create a world that is hopeless and depressing--which fills the reader with an intense unease and feelings of dread--but I found that a tasteful presentation of these methods of writing is not present in Living Dead Girl. The intent of the voice and style is clearly meant to be "in your face" (as so many internet reviews like to vaguely describe it) but in this case the entire work seems more like an unrelenting foray into the personal experiences of a victim of sexual captivity. While there is an amount of interesting word play scattered throughout Alice's broken and emotionless narrative, that narrative as a whole is a monotonous litany of seething meditations on graphic, overly-explicit scenes of abuse.

I find that my preference for literature almost unfailingly includes stories where I never actively think--mid-story--about the author penning the book one page at a time. It is my experience that the mark of good literature is that it removes the author from the equation completely, leaving the reader to experience the world the author has created as a separate experience than something that was made up by the person writing it.

In this case, from beginning to end I could think of nothing but how Elizabeth Scott, the author, was at some point in time researching first-hand events and thinking up one brutal scene after another so that she could compile them all into this one tedious novel. Scott has said in interviews that she had recurring nightmares about Alice's story and felt as though she needed to write it down.

It is not my intention to put aside the gravity of the issue of child abduction and abuse, nor do I want to wrongly assume anything about Scott, but by the way the story dives into such tortured and nihilistic prose with its endless examples of abuse, I feel like Scott may have been too enamored with the "idea" of a sex slave while writing, using Alice's situation as a channel through which she could explore her ability to push the envelope of controversial writing.

My stance on this book is not that it is controversial. On the contrary, I find very little about it that is controversial. There are untold millions of books that have gotten negative press for far more graphic and sensitive subject matter. I think that the book is just a big letdown, to tell you the truth. I don't feel as though the overall "message" is one that anybody can learn from, particularly anyone in grades 9 and up. I think Scott could have done a lot with her chance to shed light on an as-of-yet untouched societal hazard, but she squandered that chance to instead portray a hopeless narrative which ultimately falls under some sort of shock-horror-fiction genre. My ultimate stance is still that Living Dead Girl is a tasteless exploration of human depravity. Many other books have handled darker subjects, though through their quality of writing they have become masterpieces.

"There is no such thing as a 'moral' or an 'immoral' book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all."
-Oscar Wilde

The House on Mango Street

Part novel in pseudo-verse, part short story collection, Cisneros's short work is a snapshot of life through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl living in the Chicago projects. Told in a series of vignettes, usually a page to a page and a half in length, the book is a well-crafted and selective portrait of the world for young hispanic immigrants.

One of the most effective stylistic choices in the book is Cisneros's mastery of narrative voice. The story is told through a young teen's eyes, and the narrative reads as a closely-edited stream of consciousness that subtly illustrates the wonder, mystery, and innocent despair that accompanies adolescence.

Each story is at once a beautiful photograph of a small corner of Esperanza's ever-expanding world--and a poignant expose of looming issues of maturity, prejudice, and cultural expectations.

The book is not nearly as preachy as it could have been, opting instead to shed light on these overarching issues rather than dwell on them. Esperanza's narrative shows us a young fill who longs to escape the social, cultural, and sexual expectations that everyone else in the neighborhood so easily gives in to. Struggling to hold on to her innocence as long as she can, the plight of each story is to unearth the beauty in the poverty-stricken bubble that Esperanza lives in.

The book's greatest strength is Cisneros's ability to personalize every character in the book, whether their influence is great or small. Whether the reader loves or hates the characters that float--often wordlessly--in and out of Esperanza's stories, they occupy significant space in the book's weighty experience.

A Wind In The Door

This book, though it involves the same characters from A Wrinkle In Time, seems like it is somehow separate from the themes of its predecessor. It feels more metaphysical than A Wrinkle In Time, delving into subjects like the nature of telekinesis, different planes of existence and the realms of consciousness. The majority of the book is involved with "kything" a telepathic form of non-verbal communication.

Though these ideas seem really big, something that stood out to me in A Wind In The Door is the language that L'Engle uses to describe the concepts. It seems as though she went out of her way to explain the abstract issues and ideas in the story in a "dumbed down" way, even going so far as re-wording her explanations later in the story, as a way of helpfully reminding her readers about the general details of her lofty cerebral plot devices.

It is this new development in L'Engle's writing that makes me think she decided to act on some of the criticism she received after publishing A Wrinkle In Time, which claimed that there were too many challenging sentences and vocabulary words for a young audience. This book was published a little more than 10 years after the first installment in the series, so she would have had considerable time to re-work her writing style, but I feel like she missed the mark with A Wind In The Door.

The story was still well presented, though because of the removal of any challenging prose and the over-emphasis on kything, it quickly got slow and uninteresting. There were few worthy sub-plots or mind-bending time travels, though there are instances of altered perception that are intuitive. It just somehow felt like more of a forced children's book than A Wrinkle In Time.

The Giver

The Giver was the designated re-read on my list, and I'm very glad that it was. I remember being in 5th or 6th grade last time I read it, and even back then I knew that it was special somehow. It easily falls into the category of books that I love simply for their originality, diction and presentation. So far, out of all the books I have read this semester, it is my favorite.

Among some of the things that stood out to me upon re-reading it, I focused closer on the details of the dystopian community in the book. I feel as though, over the years, The Giver has been lumped along with other books in a genre simply labeled something like "YA Dystopian Sci-Fi" but now I find I have a hard time classifying it. I don't want to label it, really. I think that the book, its message, its presentation and its tone are all in a category of their own. That is undoubtedly why I enjoyed it so much.

But what really intrigued me this time was the fact you can so easily argue that the society of "the community" is not the kind of dystopia that makes every shred of humanity in you squirm with discomfort (unlike many traditionally dystopian books). Especially during the first half of the book, I found myself sympathizing with many of the community's methods and reasons for operating the way it does. When, in the course of the unraveling story, unnerving new facts about the society were brought up, I waged a little conflict with myself, trying to decide whether or not the community had more faults than virtues.

Lowry's unique tones of ambiguity and mystery in this book are ideal for generating discussion topics for a class of young adults. My mind was working overtime with all of the activities I could come up with about this story, particularly activities that encouraged my students to take a look at their own community.

The book is unusually brief, in fact it is much shorter than I remember, but this in no way affects its ability to reach out to the reader and draw them into the story. I feel as though Lois Lowry chose her words very carefully (another quality in writing that I prefer) and the story is a perfect balance between correctly chosen scenes and carefully omitted details.

It has come to my knowledge that Walden Media, of Bridge to Terabithia and The Chronicles of Narnia fame, is now in the process of producing a movie adaptation of The Giver. Last I heard, Jeff Bridges was set to star as Giver. Its tentative release date is 2011, but having just been reminded of the richness (and film-ability) of the story, I want it to be out sooner!

Little Brother

I'm not quite sure what to make of Little Brother. I think a lot of my initial wariness stemmed from the fact that I have little in common with Marcus, the main character. Of course, this shouldn't necessarily dictate whether or not I enjoy any book, but in this case it had a lot to do with my connection with the story and the way the book was written. Marcus is a supergeek who has no problem rattling on about the technical specifications of certain types of computer coding and all the mathematical theory that goes along with that. Or, I guess I should say, Cory Doctorow doesn't have a problem doing that.

You see, at no point in the story did I feel as though the narrative I was reading could have actually come from a 17 year old rebel--I was always aware that, at some point, Doctorow was sitting behind his computer, up late at night googling hacker methodologies and trying to break them down in a way that young kids could understand. That made the unraveling of the extremely slow-developing plot harder to get through.

Pages and pages of nothing but copy-and-pasted how-tos about computer hacking. Most of the time they are for fictitious technological devices, so all the passages end up becoming useless or too convoluted to remember exactly what function they serve when they reappear in the story.

Doctorow tries to make a diverse group of sub-characters, but they are never very well developed--they are given a lot of dialogue, but their place within the convoluted homeland security crisis that Doctorow dreams up (which seems contrived and implausible at best) makes their dialogue seem strained and inauthentic. Also, he drops Marcus's three supporting main characters like obsolete VHS tapes before the end of the first half of the book.

Maybe I didn't like it because the tech-savvy geek world that all the characters inhabit is either all too real and beyond my comprehension, or else it doesn't feel nearly plausible enough that anyone would do the things they do in this book. The usage of text-speak and internet lingo in conversation never happens (really it can't happen, at least to the extent that it does in this story) but its use in narrative never should happen, no matter who the audience is.

The initial rising action gripped me and it was surprisingly well written, but then it petered out and the next 3/4 of the book was a compendium of hacker-happy yammering sessions. Praise should be given to Doctorow for attempting, at all odds, to make Marcus's fight against the DHS more plausible, but in this instance, the extra passages of detail cannot hold every reader's full attention.

Not to mention, most of the time, Marcus is fighting for his cause like the short-sighted, idiot 17 year old he is. He is, of course, entitled to his character flaws. But his half-baked reasons for inciting mayhem for the authorities only instigate more DHS crackdowns, and they more often than not get people killed, tortured, or sent to secret prisons. After 400 pages of high-risk, low probability rioting and hacking, the book is brought to a coldly realistic resolution that feels out of place and unsatisfying.

meh

A Wrinkle In Time

I was very impressed with this book. I remember being fascinated by it when I read it in 5th or 6th grade, but I'm glad I chose to read it again--I picked up on L'engle's superior writing much more this time. Her ability to describe emotions, actions, beings, and events that would otherwise defy explanation (and which, most of the time, are either complex abstract ideas or elements which, by definition, do not exist) makes the reading enjoyable and enlightening. She has an extensive and well-expressed vocabulary and an imagination that, were this book written by any popular author fifty years later, it would only be described as "drug-fueled."

The elements of magical realism in this book are through the roof, though they have a firm ground in the notion of physics and other branches of very real science. The religious undertones are certainly there, but because of L'engle's excellent grasp of subtlety, she is able to insert a twelve-line hymn in the middle of the story without the tone of the book ever coming off as preachy.

The elements of fear and confrontation are deep and are made the basis of nearly all the action of the book.

The characters are extremely well developed, and though they border on being too romanticized, their personalities and characteristics end up fitting well with the style of the story.

Overall, the book hesitates on the diving board of character introduction and plot set-up, and then it plunges into the deep end with suspense, mystery, and psychedelic descriptions of mind-bending trips through the fabric of time-space, but the reader never feels as though they will drown.

A criticism (among only a few less mentionable ones) is that the elements of mystery sometimes take precedence in the unraveling of the action, so that the whole book seems as though it never really gets to answer every issue to the greatest extent that it could. I'm not sure how long it was before L'engle wrote the sequels to this book, but it doesn't really stand up on its own that well, given its occasional convolutedness and its abrupt and nearly unresolved ending.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

I really enjoy Sherman Alexie. I read Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for my American Lit class some time ago, and I instantly liked his style. I have read little else by Native American authors, but I feel as though Alexie's style is unique, yet calculated. I find myself enjoying his tone as it shifts back and forth from cynical and deviant to terse and elegiac. Alexie captures every confused and muddled emotion that has become so associated with Native American history, and his ability to articulate each and every ounce of heartache, loss, satisfaction, or comedy rivals many other authors.

Absolutely True Diary did not disappoint in these areas, despite my initial wariness. I thought going into this book that, since it starred a wise-cracking teenager that it would read as if it were geared specifically towards young adults in a way that took away from what I have grown to appreciate so much in Alexie's writing. Instead, the book dives in headfirst to every last Native American issue, and it doesn't just scratch the surface. Arnold Jr. spells out the adversity he faces in every day life, all along speaking with the tongue-in-cheek sense of self-deprecating humor and dropping signature truth bombs that Alexie has long ago mastered.

The age group of this book's intended audience might float around in the late teens, but anyone, of any age, can get satisfaction from it. I think that this is a great accomplishment. It is also, on some levels, educational. I say this, but I know that it is only educational to the extent that it brings the reader to a certain state of awareness of the Native American situation. Particulars of reservation life are explained, but they are all from Arnold Jr.'s point of view. While the perspective is enlightening, it should be understood that it is only enlightening insofar as it can make readers aware of what is really a much more serious and long-standing problem in America.

There are a few complaints that I have about this book, but they are minor. I think the one that stands out to me the most is the fact that Alexie clearly either read The Catcher in the Rye immediately before penning this book, or he thought that his high-school aged audience would have been able to connect with Arnold better if they had been assigned the book in school. Either way, Arnold uses phrases that, word-for-word, Holden Caulfield uses in Catcher, and I think that it is pretty much an inexcusable oversight on the part of Alexie and his editor.