Category: Books

Booking it a bit late: Highlights, 2007

Booking Through Thursday a bit late this week:

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

My goal this year was to read 52 books. And I read … 52 books.

I read a lot of good books this year. Just about every book on my list below had something to offer. A few I was “meh” about. (If you’re thinking about reading one, email me, and I’ll let you know if it was a “meh” book–although, one person’s “meh” is another’s “wowza.”)

My wowza this year includes:

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

I Am the Messenger, also by Markus Zusak

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, which actually, I read twice. If you look on Amazon, you can see it’s truly one of those love/hate books. Did it have flaws? Yeah, it did. But I felt the good outweighed those. Plus, some of the “flaws” vanished on the second read. Or at least, they did for me.

All in all, it was a good reading year for me.

Books read in 2007 (in sort of alpha order):

A Certain Slant of Light (Whitcomb, Laura)
A Northern Light (Donnelly, Jennifer)
Amazing Grace (Shull, Megan)
Devilish (Johnson, Maureen)
Elsewhere (Zevin, Gabrielle)
Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature (Brande, Robin)
Fever 1793 (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Girl at Sea (Johnson, Maureen)
Hacking Harvard (Wasserman, Robin)
How I Live Now (Rosoff, Meg)
How to Be Popular (Cabot, Meg)
I Am the Messenger (Zusak, Markus)
Just Listen (Dessen, Sarah)
Keturah And Lord Death (Leavitt, Martine)
King Dork (Portman, Frank)
Last Siege, The (Stroud, Jonathan)
Life As We Knew It (Pfeffer, Susan Beth)
London Calling (Bloor, Edward)
Lottery (Wood, Patricia)
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (Zevin, Gabrielle)
Prom (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Pygmalion (Shaw, George Bernard)
Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party (Compestine, Ying Chang)
Skylight Confessions: A Novel (Hoffman, Alice)
Speak (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl, Marisha)
Stargirl (Spinelli, Jerry)
The Alibi Club (Mathews, Francine)
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Lyga, Barry)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Anderson, M.T.)
The Book of Lost Things: A Novel (Connolly, John)
The Book Thief (Zusak, Markus)
The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear (Keyes, Ralph)
The Gospel According to Larry (Tashjian, Janet)
The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family (Raddatz, Martha)
The Luxe (Godbersen, Anna)
The Nature of Jade (Caletti, Deb)
The Off Season (Murdock, Catherine)
The Probable Future (Hoffman, Alice)
The Queen of Everything (Caletti, Deb)
The Rest Falls Away: The Gardella Vampire Chronicles (Gleason, Colleen)
The Road (McCarthy, Cormac)
The Stolen Child (Donohue, Keith)
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel (Setterfield, Diane)
The Virginia Woolf Writers’ Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing (Jones, Danell)
Thirteen Reasons Why (Asher, Jay)
Tomorrow #1: When The War Began (Marsden, John)
Tomorrow #2: The Dead Of Night (Marsden, John)
Uninvited (Marrone, Amanda)
Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Black, Holly)
Vote For Larry (Tashjian, Janet)
Wild Roses (Caletti, Deb)

Again with the banning

This disturbs me. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked or surprised by people passing judgment on something they haven’t read for themselves and instead, taking the word of someone they don’t even know. Because it fits neatly with their worldview? This is the part I really don’t understand.

In short, the Hillsborough County School Board is considering removing/restricting Sarah Dessen’s book Just Listen from its shelves because of a passage that describes a sexual assault. The objection is the passage is graphic/repulsive.

I read this book a few months back. Sarah Dessen writes incredible YA fiction. I want to be Sarah Dessen when I grow up. The passage in question comes late in the novel. Everything builds to that point. It’s a flashback, and we’ve seen the damage that incident has done to the main character Annabel.

The passage is stark, and honest, graphic but not gratuitous. There’s nothing voyeuristic about it, nothing glamorized about it, nothing excused. It’s meant to be an uncomfortable scene. Take it away or gloss over it, and the story loses all credibility. Annabel needs to confront what happened to her. It’s part of the story and character arc.

Diana Peterfreund (who went to high school in Hillsborough) has a terrific post about this book and sexual assault/date rape statistics as they apply to teens.

I want to cover a few other aspects of the book that go beyond this admittedly important issue.

Spoiler Alert–if you want to read this book and don’t want know how Annabel resolves some of her issues, this cut is for you.

Continue reading “Again with the banning”

Booking Through Thursday: Wild Abandon

Booking Through Thursday:

Today’s suggestion is from Cereal Box Reader

I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why?

I am one of the few people who never made it through The Da Vinci Code. I put it down at page 79 and never picked it back up again. This has less to do with the writing than the subject matter. I’m also one of the few people in the western world who is “meh” on the subject matter. Yawn. Whatever.

If I were into the story, the prose wouldn’t have bothered me as much. Sure, the gold standard is excellent story/characterization + prose that matches. But I’ll hang in there with a book if there’s a two out of three combination. Characters I love, even if the story moves a little slowly, a pot boiler, even if the characters are a little flat. And so on.

I tend to be a mood reader. I also try to respect a book for what it is. If something’s a lighthearted romp full of camp, I’m not going to get upset when the characters don’t bleed their emotions on the page. Ditto something that’s angst-ridden and angry. It is what it is.  

I’m also an “aspiration” reader. I will read something because it was a NYT notable book, or won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, A Newbery, and so on. I like to understand why something received that honor, even if I end up not really liking the book.

My (highly personal) bias is a writer should read outside her comfort zone once in a while.

Who knew there was so much to say about not reading.

Booking through Thursday: Gotta catch ’em all

Booking through Thursday this week:

You may or may not have seen my post at Punctuality Rules Tuesday, about a book I recently bought that had the actual TITLE misspelled on the spine of the book. A glaring typographical error that really (really!) should have been caught. So, using that as a springboard, today’s question: What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?

As a writer, I really, really sympathize. Since I have this (freakish) thing for pronouns, I generally catch those errors. The ‘h’ left off the she and dialogue being attributed to the wrong character. That happens once in a while.

But the worst (or funniest, depending on how you look at it) was one of my own. It was for installation guide. The phrase I meant to write was something along the lines of: It does not …

What did I type instead?

It’s doe snot …

Not one of the features in our software offerings, I’m afraid. So here I sit, not throwing any stones today.

What, you haven’t read that?

All the cool kids (Jen, Marianne) are doing this book meme.

106 Books You’ve Never Read and Probably Should:

The basic premise is that it takes the top 106 unread books from Library Thing, and you mark whether you’ve read them or not (and various other offshoots on that… see below).

The instructions are:

Bold what you have read
Italicize those you didn’t finish
Strikethrough the ones you hated
*asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once
+ cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf
Underline books that are on your “to read” list.

*+Anna Karenina

+Crime and Punishment (I’m a very bad Russian major; I couldn’t make it to the end.)

+Catch-22

+One Hundred Years of Solitude

+Wuthering Heights

+The Silmarillion (Honestly, did anyone read this all the way through?)

Life of Pi: a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

*+Pride and Prejudice

*+Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

+The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

+War and Peace

Vanity Fair

+The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

+Emma

+The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

+Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

+1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

+A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Ha, I’m the only writer who hasn’t read this.)

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake: a novel (I gotta be in the right kind of mood for Margaret Atwood)

Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

+On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

*+The Hobbit

*In Cold Blood

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

So, I guess we can all feel bad about this together. I mean, these are the books most tagged as unread on LibraryThing. No one else has read them either.

Booking Through Thursday: Decorum

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Do you have “issues” with too much profanity or overly explicit (ahem) “romantic” scenes in books? Or do you take them in stride? Have issues like these ever caused you to close a book? Or do you go looking for more exactly like them? (grin) 

Well, I think we all know how I feel about swearing (scroll down for that answer). For me, it all has to do with the “higher good” of the story. Does it fit? Does it contribute? Is it crucial to the story?

What I don’t like is sex scenes added simply because the everything must be hot, Hot, HOT these days. But I’d feel the same way if these were car chase scenes, scenes taking place in a church, scenes where the heroine is communing with her bunny friends*. Whatever. Anything can be gratuitous.

*This isn’t a euphemism for anything (that I know of), but I’m thinking it should be.

Today’s Banned Author

Banned in Oklahoma: Maureen Johnson

Since it’s still Banned Books Week, I’m highlighting another author, another one not on the top 100 list, but a case that is both current and very interesting.

I’m not going to say a lot about it here because you can read Maureen’s entire series about her book being challenged in the tagged posts here on her web site/blog. If you want to start from the top, so to speak, you have to scroll to the bottom. However, her last post gives a good overview of what happened and the current situation. It’s a blow by blow book challenge/banning in real time.

From Maureen’s blog:

One of the more bizarre aspects of all of this is the secrecy in which this action was conducted. Without the actions of the librarian, no one would have known this happened. Book banning often happens in small meetings, out of sight. If you’re going to do something like this, I think you have the responsibly of making it public. It’s amazing what happens when you just add public knowledge to the equation.  

Banned Books Week: I swear!

Every time I turn around lately, someone is talking about swearing. Not gearing up to do it (although I’d find that highly entertaining), but rather, letting everyone know it shouldn’t be done. Or if it must be, only from the villain’s point of view, or the possibly the hero’s, but only under duress.

This post over at Smart Bitches–which sums up a letter that appeared in RWR–has already made the Internet rounds. Now, I have no issue with people who don’t like books with swearing. I don’t like books with serial killers. Uh, that doesn’t mean people should stop writing them. I choose to be an informed consumer. I’d rather not contemplate others making choices for me–for my own good, of course. /sarcasm mode off

Not surprisingly, many of the books on the most banned list are children/middle grade/young adult books. In fact, one of Andrew’s favorite books is on the list (more on that later–we’re trying to work up a mommy/son review).

I ran smack into the can’t swear in YA “rule” most recently in the children’s book writing class I took. Thankfully, the instructor put an end to that myth. The swearing “rule” comes up a lot on contest judging loops in the guise of how much is too much, or can you swear in YA, in a romance, and so on.

Generally when this happens, someone quotes their sainted great grandfather who maintained that swearing is the sign of small minds and if you, a writer, can’t come up with an alternative, you’re a hack. Or worse.

It’s hard to argue with someone’s sainted great grandfather, but I’ll give it a go.

Likewise, in YA contests, it’s someone’s fifteen-year-old who maintains (to his/her mother’s face–cuz you know, he/she would never lie) that teens think books with swearing are really just adults trying too hard and they never really read/take seriously books with swearing. (So, apparently, Chris Crutcher and Holly Black–so not selling these days.)

Then everyone jumps on the bandwagon of how wonderful it is kids these days don’t swear/don’t read books with swearing. No one bothers to check their bullshit detector. Or bother to read in the genre itself.

This doesn’t mean I think you should sprinkle in “swears” (as Andrew calls them) like jimmies on ice cream. The right word at the right time. And sometimes that word is a swear.

My favorite quote on swearing comes from Tim O’Brien:

If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Today’s banned author

YA author Deb Caletti’s book The Queen of Everything has been banned in a Texas school. (And honestly, is it wrong for me to aspire to that? Charity, now banned in Texas!) She has a wonderful essay on censorship called Sex, Swearng, and Banned Books that I encourage you to read in full.

For now, I’ll leave you with the following quote from Deb’s essay, because I couldn’t, in a million years, say it better than she does:

Books are information, ideas, and they are open doors. They provide empathy at hours you would never call a friend or family member, and they broaden our own ability to be compassionate human beings through shared “experience.” Censorship limits information, tell you what to think, closes doors. It is judgmental, always, limits our ability to be compassionate by teaching righteousness.

Nothing I could write would be as shocking and offensive as censorship itself. Censorship is a hand against your mouth, your hands tied behind your back, a blindfold over your eyes. It’s oppression and control, and were it not done by people in suit jackets, it would be called an act of violence.

Booking through Thursday: Friendship and Banning

Booking through Thursday this week:

Suggested by Marsha:

Buy a Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.

What book would you choose to give to a friend and why?

And, if you’re feeling generous enough–head on over to Amazon and actually send one on its way! 

Actually, Buy a Friend a Book week coincides nicely with Banned Books Week. If you like, head on over to the American Library Association web site (link above and in the sidebar) and pick a book from one of their lists of most challenged books: from last year or the most challenged books from 1990 – 2000, or the most challenged books from the 21st century.

I’m feeling the sudden urge to corrupt minds with Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Judy Blume.

How about you?

When names and romance novels collide

Borrowing shamelessly from Chris at Book-A-Rama.

Go to the advanced book search on Amazon, type your first name into the Title field, and post the most interesting/amusing cover that shows up.

There were a few tempting titles, like: When Charity Destroys Dignity (I’m sorry) and The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (Don’t blame me; I haven’t been international for years.)  

But, dude, check it! I’m a romance novel.

Actually, I’m several, mostly (and somewhat predictably) inspirational romance. Bah. How boring. True, there is that Ellora’s Cave book, but … uh … we’re not going there. Not when there’s:

bookcover.jpg

Him: Dang, my sleeve’s all bunched up and I can’t get my arm through. Why is my shirt tucked into my pants?

Her (note barely contained eye roll–that’s not passion, that’s disdain): Gawd, he can’t even dress himself. Sigh. Now where’s my circa 1860’s blow dryer and round hairbrush. My layers need some work.

Booking Through Thursday: Monogamy

Booking Through Thursday:

One book at a time? Or more than one? If more, are they different types/genres? Or similar?

(We’re talking recreational reading, here—books for work or school don’t really count since they’re not optional.)

Generally, I have three things going: audio book, nonfiction, and fiction.

 

I usually have a book on CD going in the car, otherwise, the commute–or rather, drive-time radio–would chip away at my sanity, and I don’t really have any of that to spare.

 

I’m slowly reading Script Partners, not that Darcy and plan to write any scripts together soon. It’s the only book that I could find about writing collaboration and partnership. I promised to send it to her once I was done–and I’m so not done with it. This one is moving up on the priority list.

 

I need to update my sidebar widget because it’s out of date. I finished A Northern Light a while back. I’m still reading A Girl At Sea.

 

I’m made some good progress on my TBR pile earlier this year, but now it’s teetering again on my nightstand, threatening to crush me while I sleep.