the view from saturday

And now, for a young adult novel that will never be made into a movie because the characters could not possibly be embodied by human child-actors, all the special effects are words that can never be replicated by moving pictures, and so much of what pushes the story forward is interal, within one of the four "Souls" or Mrs. Eva Marie Olinksy, their teacher.

Are you listening, powers that be? Please don't let anyone try to make a movie out of this story. My mental casting agent is having a field day with Hamilton Knapp and his father (Tom Felton and Jason Isaacs; mental casting agent and I are very sorry for the lack of creativity there) - but not one of the four Souls can be cast. Because they are, as so many reader-reviewers point out, so not actual sixth graders. Sublimely wise; ethereally composed. Unbelievably perceptive, too mature. Too quick-thinking, and way too considerate. Too intelligent, and far too worldly. Where - gasp - would you find such kids, the ones who would know the origins of obscure acronyms, kids for whom science and activism are a lifestyle, kids who have had life experiences outside a house, away from a television set? OK, so these aren't your sixth graders (neither, I will point out, is the opposite end of the spectrum of manners, Maniac Magee), but that's exactly the value of this book - any of the Souls might be a YA reader's first literary hero.

I do not deny that Harry Potter is infinitely more probable than Julian Singh, but one can always hope.

Konigsburg doesn't set out to create role models, she just happens to have created four of the finest, all in one book. I thought I should say that because she's not an author who tiresomely moralizes, separating (or even classifying) "good" and "bad." Hamilton Knapp doesn't get beat up, sent to the principal's office, or grounded, but readers do see what he has lost out on by being what he is. The Souls win the competition but the rewards are intrinsic - friendship and honor speak for themselves, volumes louder than a plaque or standing ovation.

I came upon Konigsburg not in elementary school but in one of my favorite M.Ed. classes ever (well, favorite ever if you don't count Todd Chow-Hoy's "let's all get out of here by 7 p.m." Ed Research class): Children's Literature taught by Sherry Rose, a Farrington High School English teacher and self-described kook. According to Maurice Sendak, you can't write for children - "... [T]hey are too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them") - and I have a particular love for great authors and illustrators who write books of interest to children without talking downward or diluting truths. E.L. Konigsburg quickly became one of my favorites. Some of her books I couldn't get through (Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, for one) and I haven't yet read her latest, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (sounds Murakamian!), but was floored (and made more than slightly uncomfortable) by Silent to the Bone* and have its prequel, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, on deck.

The View from Saturday is by far my favorite Konigsburg. So many ELK fans seem to dislike this story, calling it boring, unrealistic and unworthy of the (1997) Newbery Medal. I completely disagree - and would like to know how four sixth-graders forming an Academic Bowl team and sincere friendships is less realistic than, say, an eleven-year-old girl fed up with her family running away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC with her precocious little brother for a week (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, 1968 Newbery winner by ELK. Also a beloved book in my stash, though I didn't read it till I was in grad school.) Each character's singular quirks and their life experiences - funny, painful, joyous - contribute to each one's ability to answer the Academic Bowl questions he or she is given. In the chapter entitled "Nadia Tells of Turtle Love," Nadia Diamonstein describes sea turtles' migration to the Sargasso Sea and, after battling hurt feelings she'd rather deny, finally sees a parallel between their journey and human journeys in which change, compromise and sacrifice for the sake of family and love are everyday necessities.

Nadia, for whatever reason, does not use contractions (as in, she'll say "she will" instead of "she'll"). She's smart and prickly-sensitive, and, were she a real live sixth grader in a real live sixth grade class, she'd probably be scorned and shunned for her intelligence and ostensible self-righteousness. Fortunately, Mrs. Olinsky (perhaps the only adult as smart as Nadia in this book) can see what many real live sixth grade teachers of real live sixth grade classes probably wouldn't. This is another facet of the gem that is TVFS - ELK creates four surprising, perceptive individuals (the "Souls") - and dreams up the teacher so many of us want to be. Intuitive, resilient, human, and at the end of the day, right.

The View from Saturday sparkles - because of Nadia (she has a halo, you know) and for many other reasons. At the risk of sounding like a bad elementary school book report closer, please read this book. For a synopsis and sharp analysis, please read this article. And if you must read an official review, please read this one (but ignore Beth Gutcheon calling one of the principal characters "little Noah Gershom." Thank you.

*Silent to the Bone. Highly as I regard this YA novel, I cannot bring it into my fifth-grade classroom. A handful of my children are not yet ready for it, and several dozen handfuls of adults I can think of will never be ready for it. It is for mature audiences, to be sure, not only because of references to sexual abuse and mind games played against children, but also because the theme of silence as communication is so complex. There's much to be learned from STTB about compassion, integrity, and respect - which is why I'd have it in my classroom library, no question, if not for the aforementioned issues.

progress

The saddest number in my life might be the books read to books owned ratio - about 1:5 at any given time. I've tried forbidding myself to buy any more books until I've finished reading the ones I have - and that, in my favorite used bookstore or airport newsstand or (worst of all) the Buy 2 Get the 3rd half off table at either of the big Bs, becomes "Oh, well maybe what it should be is that I should not buy any books unless I haven't started any of the ones I already have." Into the canvas bag goes the desired book (go the desired books?). They arrive at their new home, where I tickle the first 15 or so pages, go "I'm SO glad I got this!" and pop it onto the shelf next between my dust-coated psych textbooks and my unread collection of CS Lewis (which has its own special spot because I really do mean to read those, they're perpetually "next on my list").

So, a progress report on what's listed on my Facebook "shelf" as Currently Reading:

Eat Pray Love. I'm freaking finally in Indonesia. I don't know why something this readable is taking me so long to get through. Maybe it's because of how slowly I savored Elizabeth Graham's trek through Italy, hoping she'd just keep eating (and forget she was supposed to also pray and love.)

The Audacity of Hope. Politically disinclined though I am, I bought and started reading it because I had to know what was behind the impressively delivered words of this politician who has so much of the jaded populace buying into his version of the tired message that things can be better than they are. And though I've only canvassed 47 pages, I don't care how many skeptical pundits dismiss Obama's sweeping statements as substance-free - we as a nation lack passion, we lack hope, and even if hope is all he is capable of providing (which I seriously doubt, but I'll have to read more than his book to get a better feel), we'll be stronger than we are right now.

Digging to America. No progress whatsoever. I still revisit my old Anne Tyler books - just pick one up and read a random page while brushing my teeth or eating my cereal - but ever since Back When We Were Grownups left such a weird taste in my mouth, I've stopped religiously waiting for the next Tyler to come out, and pick them up when they're, well, on that Buy 2, etc. table. (I thought I'd love this one, incidentally. Being a Korean adoptee myself, I thought it would be the novel that would lure me back in to Anne Tyler's Baltimore ... so far, not yet.) Visual Bookshelf thoughtfully e-mails users when a book has been on the "Currently Reading" shelf for more than a week. I guess I should take this one down.

Son of a Witch. I opened the book, said "Who the hell's Oatsie Manglehand?" and reached for Wicked, which apparently I need to re-read. Note to self: Don't read stuff you want to remember while vacationing in Vegas.

the verdict, which is witches

Poll closed. Last night, on my way to dinner with my friend A (who might be the subject of my next "Words and We's" installment) I stopped at Borders and finally scooped up Son of a Witch. It didn't occur to me that I'd find it in fantasy/sci-fi so I scanned the general lit shelf from Debbie Macomber to Norman Mailer in a panic, finding nothing Maguire, muttering to myself, "Not even one stupid copy of Wicked?!" ... Of course when I discovered my error (my error? Debbie Macomber should be shelved in fantasy if you ask me), I had to dig through a freaking mountain of Broadway-cover-designed editions of Wicked.

Continuing with the L. Frank Baum motif I'm trying to keep going, I also picked up Witches Abroad by British author Terry Pratchett, with whom I am not acquainted, but hope that I'll love because it would be nice to get into someone of whose work there is just ... so much. It's been a long time since I've come across an author whose books I'd pounce on as soon as they came out in godforsaken hardcover. There is Nick Hornby - hilarious, accurate, sublime - but not prolific, exactly. I want MORE. I want this pile of books that seems never to end. Kind of like when I went to Goodwill with my godmother one day in my childhood and found a whole shelf of Choose Your Own Adventure books and bought them all and went through them like a worm. I want to discover a fun author with abundant works and recurring characters, and try as I might, I just can't get back into the Baby-Sitters Club. (I have, seriously, tried.)

A few years back I had horrible drive-thru coffee drinks (pink chai! ai!) with an acquaintance named Wendell, who so wanted me to stop reading Amy Tan and Anne Tyler novels that he gave me his copies of Neil Gaiman's Stardust and Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic, both of which he happened to be carrying in his backpack. I fell asleep on Stardust and never even picked up the Pratchett, but if Witches Abroad rocks my weekend, I'll have to go find Wendell's book and maybe even drop him a line.

After an impulse grab (Milan Kundera's Identity, which in all honesty scared the crap out of me on a mere skim and so probably will never be picked up again), my gift card leftover is $11.93. Sweet.

(s)he's just not that into you, jr.

Of course he has time to write books. He's nine. (I'm not bitter.) You've got to scroll down a ways in this CNN transcript, but it's worth it (especially when he tries to convince Betty Nguyen that it's OK - better even! - to be a regular girl than a pretty girl). The kid's really a kid, and hopefully HarperCollins will let that kid-ness ring true when they market this book.

I'd love for ^my kids^ to read something published by a 9-year-old, except I don't know if I want to be the teacher pointing them toward what is basically a guidebook to scoring on the playground.

i miss being required to read

Commencement, 2001. The greatest thing about being an English major is that you are expected to read - and write - all the freaking time. Of course when you're going through this, it is pure hell and no one can tell you anything different. I did, however, fully appreciate being read to, and to this day cannot forget being enraptured by Dr. Mark Herberle's Beowulf. I've never read it through all the way by myself; 1) I am lazy and 2) I stubbornly cling to the most unlikely of hopes that someday, somewhere, I will sit in (or be invited to or sneak into) an early English lit class and have Beowulf's funeral read to me once more. That's all I want when I die ... for someone to be reading an old English epic to me in an accent so authentic it sounds nothing like English. I wish I could write a scholarly blog entry on B but alas, all I seem to have taken from the actual poem were 1) an as yet unfulfilled desire to listen to the whole text by a crackling English fire, over and again and 2) an immature and thankfully short-lived delight in referring to everyone I disliked as "Grendel's mother."

A short list of other loves cultivated in the UHM English program:

• Tennyson's "Lady of Shallott" (my reason for picking up Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty)
• Alice in Wonderland
• Overmicrowaved Sodexho-Marriott chicken sandwiches
• Stephen Canham quizzes. Example of a bonus question after a quiz on Lord Byron's dramatic poem Manfred: "Name the British pop band Manfred Mann's greatest hit." (A: "Do Wah Diddy-Diddy")
• Poe's "The Bells." Who does not love the word tintinnabulation?
• Christopher Marlowe conspiracy theories
• Amy Tan novels. They were what I'd use to wash down everything on the next list.

A much shorter list of allergies cultivated in the UHM English program:

• Flannery O'Connor and pretty much all Southern Lit except "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud."
• commas
• Mos Burger
• Arthur Miller

words and "we"s*, installment 1: The College Ex

Here is a memory that is either sweetly idyllic or obviously foreboding, depending on whether you look at the scene or analyze the words (and, I guess, on how you feel about Pablo Neruda). It was raining, so The College Ex and I were holed up in his Moiliili apartment one weekend afternoon. He was sleepy; I was sitting up in bed reading The Captain's Verses. I could hear the rain on the tin roof covering the neighbor's shed. I read him "Si Tu Me Olvidas" as he drifted off; he said it was beautiful and I should read - and speak - in Spanish more often. This poem, about deep - but conditional - love was how I felt about him. "If suddenly you forget me, do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you." I reasoned that people in such love as I was in with him are likely, by Murphy's Law, to be fallen out of love with (PLEASE pardon my construction) - and, given any indication that this was going to happen to me, would have pre-empted any such strike by leaving first. I did not read him the English translation.

I won't go into details about what did finally kill our relationship, but there were plenty of times I thought the contradistinction of our reading habits would do it. For example, of the five Anne Tyler novels I love and have read many times apiece, my favorite is Saint Maybe. To give him credit, he did read the book (since I wouldn't stop talking about how much I'd loved it since I'd discovered Anne Tyler via a high school reading list.) "So?" I asked, when he'd finished. "Well," he said. "Um. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did." I could not understand. Lots of things happened in the book. It's a story built around a man's guilt after he causes his brother to commit suicide. Years go by. Entire flocks of children are raised. They have conversations that are hilariously sad. Things are realized. Atonement is desired and made. TCE didn't think years of children, conversations, or an ongoing, desperate desire for forgiveness counted as anything happening, and there we stood - him at the edge of Baltimore, wanting to come in but not seeing the point, and me, no longer willing to loan him any more Anne Tyler books.

He found pleasure in reading, but only when forced to read in the first place. TCE liked Ray Bradbury, he just didn't know it. What I mean is, when I asked him one day what his favorite book was, he said he didn't have one but that he did like this futuristic story he once read about a man whose tattoos come alive. I was intrigued and pressed him for details so I could find the story and read it. I remember having my first serious doubts about our future the moment he said, "I know! I think it was John Steinbeck."

The beginning of the end, that was. It turned out he was talking about "The Illustrated Man," which was funny because he had recently loaned me the one book he'd ever actually gone out and bought, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and had not made the connection. Our relationship ended when he let me go (and so it didn't matter if I was too big for my tiny literary britches after all), and it ended with a realization that only fortunate people have when they break up:

"Aquella que tu amas, no es mujer para ti, por que la quieres?"
"The one you love is not a woman for you, why do you love her?"

-Pablo Neruda, "Y Porque Amor Combate"

*This blog miniseries brought to you by ... a British online paper?

dogs of our lives

John Grogan, on the "Damn, isn't married life great?" dieffenbachia he bought for his wife, which met its demise in much the same way many of my own leafy green friends have: "She had adored both the gesture and the plant ... Then she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin's coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death. ... Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant, buy a puppy. Well, of course it made perfect sense."

It's like my college self watching an episode of "Sex in the City," going, Carrie is me! Neurotic fool in love with big bad Big! ... Except here I'm wanting to shout, Jen Grogan is me! Neurotic fool who thought she could raise a dog when she couldn't even stop overwatering a plant!

It was an odd afternoon: Mart and I went to Sam's Club where he bought a book and I ... didn't. Typical trip to Sam's with Scott: After wandering around the aisles poring over the cheapest cleaning products possible and consuming an entire dinner's worth of frozen food samples, we lament our general lack of funds - and then he looks the other way while I throw a paperback book into the cart just before we check out. I don't dig the Sam's Club staples: local cookbooks, every Jodi Picoult novel ever written, and entire pallets of Tuesdays With Morrie. But usually there are at least a couple of things I can't not buy. Example triumphs: a John Adams biography; Blue Latitudes by the hilarious Tony Horwitz; The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke by Suze Orman.

Anyway, today Mart picked up Marley & Me, which I shrugged off as a Book Club darling (yes, I am the same person who decided to inaugurate this blog with Sweet Valley Twins). I decided to save my pocket change for Jamba Juice. Just skimming it tonight after dinner, though, reminds me that snobbery toward books can lead to great losses. From reading three randomly flipped-to pages, I can see that this is a book I will see myself in, learn from, and have an awesome time reading.

There were times in the first year of Jug ownership that I despised our dog. Though I didn't demand his eviction like Jen demanded Marley's, there were times I fantasized about leaving the front door open and hoping Kona would find his way into the elevator and down to the ground floor, where one of the 145 or so people in this building who think he is so gosh darned cute would scoop him up and steal him. I am coming to terms with the dog; I think I even love him now, as all dog owners should love their dogs. But I can't wait to read about other souls in this world who at any point in their lives may have felt the same way about their dog as I did about mine.

Unfortunately of course Mart has first crack at Marley and Me, but as soon as I can get my hands on it, I will.

come in, it said, come in

The origin of my URL is the principal character of Sharon Creech's The Wanderer, which I recommend to my students every year. (So far no one seems to have developed as personal a connection with it as I have, but I'm still hoping. I love this book.) Sophie at 13 is so many things that I at nearly 30 am still trying to be. Along with E.L. Konigsburg's Nadia Diamondstein and Claudia Kincaid, Maurice Sendak's Ida, Andrew Clements' Nick Allen, and Creech's own Rosie of Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, Sophie is one of my favorite heroes of children's literature.

She's called "Three-Sided Sophie" by her father; she is in turns romantic and dreamy, logical, and hardheaded and impulsive. "... if I ever get all three together, I'll be all set, though I wonder where I will be then." Sophie speaks in exclamation points all the time - I miss and look forward to feeling that way about life - so in love with it that even when you're terrified of the unknown, no one can stop you from going out to sea to meet it.

The book is so well-written that I feel a little seasick when I read it; the rhythm of the prose and descriptions of the hell they go through at sea and with each other to get to England (and for Sophie to end up where she does) - I sometimes feel like I have to come up for air. My phobia of boats is so great that I almost passed up reading this story, because I was sure I'd hate it - but since I had never, to date, hated a Sharon Creech book, I delved - and have no regrets.

reinventing the wakefields

Found this out on a Google link-fest. Are they actually inviting people who outgrew Sweet Valley sometime in the late '80s to ... come back?

(I'm so there.)

Some memorable books my mom bought me when I was a kid include Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (it sits on a shelf in my apartment, still patiently waiting to be read, and I never could get past the first paragraph, which contains the phrase "rusty wooden house" - if the house is wooden, what exactly is rusting?, I'd wonder in bewilderment); Tormont-Webster's Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary; Rabble Starky by Lois Lowry; AND - my very first Sweet Valley Twins book (Best Friends). Could I pick a sillier series with which to begin this blog? See the Doris Lessing quote at the top of this page.

I would like to call my younger self a nerd, but I was fair-to-middling in all elementary subjects except Language Arts, so I'll have to settle for calling myself a dork. I idolized the Wakefield twins because, try as I might, I had none of the qualities that made them so appealing. I was messy like Jessica, but wasn't popular, a good dresser, or a risk-taker. I was reserved like Elizabeth but wasn't a particularly good student, and got kicked off the elementary student paper because I never did my homework.

I read SVT and SVH for years. Everything seemed believable, probably because I had no social life to speak of until high school (and by high school, when I knew better, I was way over SVH.) Revisiting the books now, I can see that the twins look 35 on every cover, although they are supposed to be seventh graders and then high school juniors, and for the upper-middle class community they grew up in, they were spending way too much time unsupervised by adults.

But like the Baby-Sitters Club (a blog entry all its own), Sweet Valley has this rose-colored feel to it ... no matter how bad things got for Jess and Liz, everything would be okay. The old-school versions touched on drug use (cocaine, of course, because these are the '80s we're talking about), middle-school bullying, running away, and a host of other "universal" issues, but of course by the end of each installment, the problem was solved. Everyone was once again on talking terms, and the Wakefields sat down to dinner together, just before the next crisis popped up. There were specials with uber-farfetched storylines like Elizabeth getting kidnapped while working as a hospital candy-striper, both twins being terrorized by a psychotic spitting image of themselves, and Lila Fowler managing to foil her gold-digger would-be stepmother's wedding to her unsuspecting millionaire father. Yeah, most of the time the stories read like a bad soap opera, but that was the fun of it ... and it all seemed so plausible then. Well, maybe not the psychotic third twin, but I was totally enthralled by Lila's plot to trap her dad's girlfriend!

A major issue they never touched (while I was reading the series anyway) was sex and teen pregnancy. Interestingly enough, the early issues of SVH were much more risque than the later ones, say from #40 on. I remember being scandalized when (in #2, I think it was) Bruce Patman untied Jessica's bikini top as they swam in the lake. It was no Harlequin romance novel, but reading about Jessica's breasts made me blush. As the series progressed out of the '80s and into the '90s, so did the twins' image. Francine Pascal('s ghostwriters) made them less gold lame and more clean-cut. It'll be interesting to see exactly what changes have been made to revamp the series for today's post-9/11 readers, who still need entertainment but who would (hopefully) reject a Sweet Valley as shamelessly idyllic as that of the '80s and '90s.