Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

I unabashedly love James Frey. Regardless of the is-memoir-is-it-fiction argument (which I'm not addressing here), this guy can write. I received Million Little Pieces as a galley when I lived in Chicago, and had already read (and cried over) My Friend Leonard when the "scandal" about Frey's veracity broke in late 2005. My glowing opinion of his aptitude as a writer was mostly fully formed when the bru-ha-ha exploded. It has not changed (and has only been strengthened) with the reading of his most recent offering, Bright Shiny Morning.

Started while housesitting over Spring Break, then put away....I knew that at 501 pages, I didn't have the capacity at the time to fully absorb and appreciate it.

The tongue-in-cheek prefaces, "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable."Fairly warned, I jumped in to discover that Frey introduces some 20-odd characters within the first 35 pages. Alternating storylines of these people with short paragraphs on the history of the city of Los Angeles, I delighted in the characteristic non-traditional prose. I've never desired to live in LA, but this book made me cognizant of the culture and revisit some preconceived ideas about the diversity of the place. Even the seemingly dry landscape became palatable at the hands of this talented scribe.

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

I have never liked Sherman Alexie's writing. Until I read this book, that is. This one was for my book club, won the National Book Award, and is perhaps my favorite read of the entire summer (uummm, maybe i said that already about another YA book? tough call, folks.).

Arnold Spirit is a middle school aged boy. He lives on the res, loves his grandma & sister, is confined by the poverty that surrounds him, questions his parents' choices, and plays most sports poorly. According to his first person narration, Arnold also has a stutter, bottle-cap glasses, a limp, a misshapen head, and his stature might qualify him as a midget. There is a self-portrait included. You see, Arnold draws. Ridiculously accurate, hysterical and poignant sketches. These are his lifeline, and at points, also the readers'.

This is a book about grace, escape, and the inevitable return home. I found myself reading passages aloud to anyone who happened to be nearby. There were so many things that resonated with me, I know that I'll return to more fully examine this heartbreakingly honest tale.

(If you're interested in the artist who rendered Arnold's drawings, check out Ellen Forney.)

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

It would be realistic to say that I'm loathe to "review" a Jodi Picoult book. I feel like a broken record. Since I was first introduced to her in 1998, she's been what I've considered my only true guilty pleasure when it comes to reading. Handle With Care marks the 16th Picoult book I've read, so I knew what to expect when I picked it up.

It would be harsh to say that she's formulaic, but she is....alternating voices of narration, New England setting, moral dilemma, "shocking" turn of events, and an emotional reaction to the conduct and/or integrity of at least one character....while the jig may be up on Picoult's writing style and plot, it is still somewhat addictive. She is virtually the only author that I will, guaranteed, always pay full price for when a new book hits the shelves. She has her craft and her niche down, and I'm a sucker for 2 days of care-free "pleasure" reading.

All of that said, this was typical of her work, but this time I put my finger on something that I struggle with, due to the market to which she panders. While the main theme of the book might be explored to a deeper degree, there are multiple ideas and conflicts that are merely presented, then dropped. There is a passage of no more than 20 lines of dialogue that I read aloud to 4 separate people, simply posing the question, "What do you think about that?," and I received 4 totally different answers. The topics my friends chose to address ranged from abortion to marriage; from divorce to predestination. All of those things were brought up in the conversation the characters were having, but not one was ever fully inspected.

While I admire her ability to write about such weighty issues, I'm bothered by the fact that I don't ever know where she stands on any of them. However, I still plan on reading House Rules.

Things Left Unsaid by Stephanie Hemphill

When I finished this book, I was sitting on the steps at a park. After closing the book, I simply sat. I feared getting up, scared that my motion would somehow cement the fact that it was over.

Sarah snuck up on me, and I wasn't prepared for her character to mark me with such an impact. Drawn into the starkness of her story, I was wrapped up in this 16 year-olds' story for one reason...

This is the story of Sarah.

The story of a "normal" 16-year-old girl.

A story of change.

A story of acceptance.

A story of struggle.

A story of friendship.

An everyman story, if you will.

It sounds so trite. The story is ordinary, really. It couldn't be more cliche, actually-these complexities mired in simplicity. Or is it the other way around? Are our pedestrian everyday interactions so easy that we forget how profound they can be?

This book didn't grab me from the outset, but it crept up on me in the quickest of ways. Seemingly an angsty young adult book (told in verse, which adds to the effect), I stopped dead at page 47, as I realized the obvious. This story is much bigger than that of a high school girl navigating the pitfalls and victories of figuring out one's self.

Frighteningly familiar, these exchanges are seen with an unfortunate regularity- along with those moments of relief veiled in effrontery. Weather it's my 4th grade students in the hallways, the senior girls I mentor confessing over lunch, or my own friends casually assaulting one another in a joking manner, females are given (and give in) to this tension.

This book made me both think critically and feel intensely. That's all I hope for when I pick up a book. Given that it was my first official read of the "summer," it set the bar high, and still may qualify as my favorite of the season.

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo by Stieg Larsson

Let's be honest: I don't usually read thrillers. There are really only 2 reasons that I ever do: Michelle Hall recommends it, or it's lying around one of my families' houses and I need to be completely escapist, not thinking about anything (even the book i'm reading). It is rare that I admire an author who writes purely mystery. Much like musical theatre, it's an art form that I can appreciate, but I certainly don't admire. Purely entertainment. (Maggie, if you're reading this: YES, I know how pompous that sounds.)

Essentially, this book didn't stand a chance from the beginning. Skeptical would be an understatement. It was "highly regarded" and received mainstream media attention. I was perplexed by the fact that NPR reviewed it favorably. That didn't sit with my initial judgements. I bought it, it sat for a long time. Then an old Chicago friend prompted that "it's worth it" and that the first 200 pages are the backstory that you need to get to the meat of the series. [INSERT RANT HERE. oh, okay...i will actually insert it. dag blain if i shouldn't have trusted my gut on this. since when can i justify reading for more than 15 minutes if it's inane blather? poorly written at that. geezalou does that get my goat. if the second book is so spectacular, then why isn't the first? and do i really have to read it? anger.]

I will admit that there was a point when I was hooked. Excited, even, to read the last 150 pages into the wee hours of the morning. That lasted for approximately 20 pages. Then it turned to shite again. Upon finishing it, I was not satisfied and my opinion has not changed. Mostly I want to make fun of the ridiculous translation and the notion that, apparently, if your novel is published posthumously you don't get an editor. At least not one worth a paycheck.

"What she had realised was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst." -p 584 (That's so deep and well spoken, it makes The DaVinci Code seem intimate.)

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

There aren't really words for me to express the admiration I have for Virginia Woolf. This, being the book the cemented her place in my esteem, was read in the winter of 1999. I'll let a few underlined passages from my beloved copy be their own review here:

"I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me."

"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction."

"A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history."

"Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband."

"and.....the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment."

"Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind...She will be a poet."

HOW WE ARE HUNGRY By Dave Eggers

The thumbnails that I could find online for HOW WE ARE HUNGRY do no justice to the aesthetic of this book. The physicality is representative of my experience as a whole with it-and Eggers in general. Every time I touch it, every time I look at it, each time that I attempt to negotiate these stories I react differently. Sensory overload, in the best of all possible ways.

Similar to poetry, short stories haven't been a medium that I've long identified with; however, when done well and in my language, I relish in all of their offerings. I won't try to classify or summarize Eggers' writing. Simply said: If you haven't, you should.

love is a mix tape by Rob Sheffield

No capitalization on the cover or the title page? Man after my heart. Cassette tapes as the cover illustration? Stop it. A memoir of an editor for Rolling Stone? Seriously....check, check, and check.

When I first stumbled upon this book, I was hesitant to even pick it up. My elitist and pessimistic self almost couldn't stand it. I purchased it before going to Wisconsin in the spring of 2008, and waited until I had fully settled in to start it. Almost 6 weeks later, wearing my headlamp after my campers had gone to sleep, I devoured this thing huddled in my mummy bag on the top bunk.

Filled with everything from anecdotes about cheeseball Top 40 to poignant passages on the connections between love, loss and lyrics, I can say with a bit of confidence that any true Hornby fan will delight in these pages as much as I did. With chapter titles like "tape 635", "sheena was a man", "dancing with myself" and "mmmrob", how could I not? I honestly found myself picturing Jim Knipfel with each arch and turn in the story. (um, hello...now I've got to do a review of Slackjaw.) AND there are mixes on printed cassette sleeves at the beginning of every chapter....c'mon now, you know you're intrigued.


As I've recently been reveling in the glory of all that is early 90s grunge, I'll leave you with a smattering of Sheffield's musings on Nirvana and their illustrious frontman (sparing you my vivid recollections of that fateful April day).

"Nobody was surprised, so nobody was depressed. People cracked jokes, even those of us who loved him. ...Renee and our friend Gina sang 'Kurt Cobain' to the tune of 'You're So Vain.' For people who were into music, which meant almost everybody hanging around all weekend, the Kurt Cobain who kicked it was the celebrity, as opposed to the guy who had written all the songs and sung them-the musician. The celebrity was dead. The guy who sang on the Unplugged special was a little harder to bury.
...The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn't sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says. People liked to claim that his songs were all about the pressures of fame, but I guess they just weren't used to eharing rock stars sing love songs anymore, not even love songs as blatant as 'All Apologies' or 'Heart-Shaped Box.' And he sings, all through Unplugged about the kind of love you can't leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn't want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn't see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn't be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.
...when I listen to Kurt, he's not ready to die, at least not in his music-the boy on Unplugged doesn't sound the same as the man who gave up on him. A boy is what he sounds like, turning his private pain into teenage news. He comes clean as a Bowie fan, up to his neck in Catholic guilt, a Major Tom trying to put his Low and his Pin Ups on the same album, by mixing up his favorite oldies with his own folk-mass confessionals. I hear a scruffy sloppy guitar boy trying to sing his life. I hear a teenage Jesus superstar on the radio with a song about a sunbeam, a song about a girl, flushed with the romance of punk rock. I hear the noise in his voice, I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did."

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

This book had long been on my list after word of mouth (or should I say word of blog/facebook) from several people who actually have taste in literature. So I suggested it for my book club. Twice. The second time it was finally added to our rotation. I preface with that simply to indicate exactly how long I had wanted to read this book.

I finally sat down to read it at the beginning of February (yes, it's currently August) and stopped reading at page 36. Why? Here you have one of the protagonists, Renee, who is a bitter concierge, resigned to her "post" in life regardless of (or perhaps in spite of) her extreme intelligence. She was dealt a bad hand and then let that hand chafe her raw. Early in the book the reader sees her depression, which appears to be cyclical with her resentment of society and the structures imposed upon her by it. Which all just hit a bit too close to home for this reader. A woman not fulfilling her potential in life? Gack. So I put it down for what I had intended to be a week(ish), or until my headspace could handle seeing the (extended foreign version of) my own failures in print. Then my grandfather died and that week(ish) turned into a few months. I'm not exactly sure when I finished the book, but there are show bills from late April tucked into page 275.

Needless to say, I can understand why the aforementioned folks reveled in this book. At points I did as well, but the majority of my reading felt like an assignment. It was the kind of book I love to love, but in actuality I didn't even consistently like the book. There are brilliant passages that resonated with me and my experiences, but there were also some that struck a heavy hand of discord. I've spent my last 3 years working in a Title I school during the mornings and then nannying for a family who sends their kids to the poshest private day schools around in the afternoon. My everyday experiences with kids are as varied as their ages (4-18).

The second protagonist here, Paloma, is a 12-year old girl. Paloma is a savant, to be sure, but she still isn't convincing as an adolescent. That was a distraction for me. It wasn't until a noticeable shift in her narration (well into the later third of the book) that I figured out why I was struggling with the text. Being translated from the French, I did enjoy the phrasing, which led to my own near-constant thought about grammar, spelling, and punctuation....but I'm a megadork when it comes to that.

Although I'm not glowing about this one, I'd still recommend it to any true reader. It sounds as if I'm selling it short, which will be contradictory when I post umpteen passages from it....elitist and hypocritical. Yup, that's me.

Harvest Poems 1910-1960 by Carl Sandburg

(Just under the wire to close out National Poetry Month)

Let's be honest. I've spent the majority of my life not "getting" poetry, and therefore not loving poetry. If we're examining that honesty, I most likely wasn't taught poetry well or widely enough. Realizing that poetry is actually a giant love of mine, and always has been in non-traditional forms (when was poetry ever traditional, anyways? geez.a.lou.), has only fully sunk in recently. All that to say...for the first 20-odd years I was a poser when it came to Sandburg. Growing up in the shadow of this man's legacy, I thought I was familiar with him. Although his profile and Alfalfaesque haircut where prevalent and recognizable, his work (beyond "Fog" or references to the "City of Big Shoulders") was not.

Tucked in between the copyright and contents pages of this paragon is a faded receipt dated 04-15-04. It's not quite dog-eared, but close. The title on the cover is partially encircled by a coffee stain. Over the years, I've read it with mixed thoughts and responses. As of late, I've actually perused it for digestion. Guess what? "I lock it a lot." I'll include some stanzas that resonate below, but do yourself a favor and educate yourself first. Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sandburg


Every time I journey to the 61401, I walk the 3 blocks down the street and past the Hi-Lo grocery (holler.) to Remembrance Rock and Sandburg's birthplace. If I'm lucky, the museum is open and I can go read my handsdown favorite: the original typewritten version of his unpublished "Definitions of Poetry", which you can read a bit about here: http://www.litkicks.com/PoetryIs/

"It is something to face the sun and know you are free.
To hold your head in the shafts of daylight slanting the earth
And know your heart has kept a promise and the blood runs clean:
It is something." -Clean Hands

"Freedom is a habit
and a coat worn
some born to wear it
some never to know it."

"Maybe he believes me, maybe not.
Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.

Maybe the wind on the prairie,
The wind on the sea, maybe,
Somebody, somewhere, maybe can tell.

I will lay my head on his shoulder
And when he asks me I will say yes,
Maybe."


"Be a brother, if so can be,
to those beyond battle fatigue
each in his own corner of earth...
each with a personal dream and doorway
and over them now the long endless winds
with the low healing song of time,
the hush and sleep murmur of time.

Make your wit a guard and cover.
Sing low, sing high, sing wide.
Let your laughter come free
remembering looking toward peace:
'We must disenthrall ourselves.'

Be sad, be kind, be cool.
Weep if you must
And open and shameless
before these altars."
-The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany

"I am the grass. Let me work." -Grass

*Apologies for the links not being embedded. Blogger apparently doesn't want them to, and the formatting buttons are gone. Grrr. HTML is not my friend.