It's OK, my BOOKS are my friends

Back to the books

Okay, so those last two posts have had NOTHING to do with books in any way, so it's time to rein myself in and return to the Ostensible Purpose of this blog -- writing about YA and kids books. Discipline, young grasshopper!

John Green, of Paper Towns etc. fame, has the High School Boy voice all wrapped up, but for my money it's been a looong time since I've read anything as funny as Carter Finally Gets It. I would call this the Middle School Boy voice, perhaps, even though Carter is a freshman, but he is so totally hapless with the ladies and so completely earnest in his attempts to improve his game that he reminds me of  every eighth grade boy I've heard over the past five years trying to Slyly Put The Moves On and failing miserably (or succeeding in spite of The Moves). Just LAUGH OUT LOUD funny. In one scene, he spends $30 to get a bootleg VHS copy of a porno that is stuck on fast-forward, and then accidentally leaves it running in the basement VCR, prompting his dad to patiently remind him that it might bother his mom to find it and ask, "Why did you forget to hide it?" to which Carter replies in deep truthfulness, "I don't know, Dad. I think I might be retarded."
 

Carter Finally Gets It

Brent Crawford

Absolutely Ha Larious. Verging on too dirty for my library, but so funny I need to keep it. Storky, by D. L. Garfinkle, is the cleaner version of this (plus a great Scrabble sub-plot, for which I am a total sucker), but can't compete on the funny scale. Even if you're not a YA devotee, read it for the giggles. 

I lost something ...

Wigs for Kids got my ponytail! I am several pounds lighter!

Long Hair

Short Hair

Shalom, y'all!

My trip to Israel was amazing and exhausting. If I may, here's a brief photographic recap:

1. I flew for many many hours. If you were on the 7/12 6 am flight to JFK and you played the online trivia, I took you to school AND church. From JFK to Tel Aviv, I played Tetris. That's right, a 12-hour Tetris marathon. Just like college.

Airplane trivia CHAMPION

2. Jerusalem is amazing. It has Roman ruins (excellent):

Part of the Roman Cardo

a crazy Third World-style market (although I didn't take pictures, there were also tons of tiny booths selling plungers, paint and panties, not just tourist crap):

Giant spice booth

Festive Middle Eastern colors!

Ecumenical souvenirs!

and the Dead Sea Scrolls! Which are two thousand years old and yet Completely Readable Today! You know, if you knew Hebrew.

Jerusalem also has comparative religion! There are Jewish holy places (duh):

SW Corner of the Temple Complex

(the Western Wall, aka Wailing Wall, aka Kotel, is further along the wall),

and Christian holy places

Church of Gethsemane, garden in back

and Muslim holy places! They made me put a shawl on here:

Dome of the Rock

The Old City of Jerusalem has a neat wall around it with seven gates in and out! Apparently you have to be Muslim to use this gate and they quiz you by asking you to recite the first chapter of the Koran. Luckily, the Christian quiz is the Lord's Prayer (easy!) and the Jewish quiz is the Sh'ma (even shorter!). This is about 6:45 am, so nothing is happening, but later in the day this is the bustling-est gate!

Damascus Gate

If you make the hajj, you get your door decorated!

You may now call me Haji Abdul

3. Israel also has an excellent desert. It's called the Negev and it is home to Masada, the Dead Sea, several neat oases, camels and Bedouin, and the grave of David Ben Gurion.

Sunrise over Jordan and the Dead Sea

We got up at 3:30 am in order to hike to the top of Masada in time to see the sunrise. Which was pretty glorious. Masada has a rather tragic history in Jewish lore, but a great view! And tons more Roman ruins at the top!

Masada in the daytime

Snake path to the top of Masada

Hiking up before sunrise was one thing, but then we hiked back down again. In retrospect, a stupid idea. So relaxing in the Dead Sea was definitely in order:

I can't actually read that Hebrew paper

The Bedouin are very hospitable

Excellent tea and bread

although they don't let you near their women (but I am a crass tourist with a zoom on my camera, so there).

Bedouin women. Very far away.

I wasn't fast enough to catch any of the camels on camera (because our bus was moving fast, not the camels) but these ibex? ibexes? ibices? were everywhere and very docile. I guess no one hunts the ibex in Israel.

Ibex 1 and Ibex 2

Tel Aviv was kind of a dump, but it did have THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA washing up against its border.

THE GLORIOUS MEDITERRANEAN!

This was before dinner and the worst avant-garde dance performance I have ever seen. It makes me laugh out loud lo these many weeks later just recalling its crapitude. Happily, we came back around midnight and swam for close to an hour. Definite highlight!

And then, a lovely view on the way home:

That's the last I'll see of you, EL AL.

Somehow, the combined wisdom of two moms and one dad managed to keep my child alive and happy, and I managed to shed that responsibility for moments at a time! I'm so lucky to have had this experience. When I am grouchy at Hausner this coming year, I'll need to recall that they made this possible.

Off to Israel!

At 6 am tomorrow! Close to two weeks away from my beloved family, and only half way through this monster:

The Source: A Novel

James A. Michener

which we were requested to read, along with The Jerusalem Report (weekly) and Ha'aretz (daily). Yeah, right. I'll see if I can pick one up at the airport. The Source is the first Michener book I've ever read, and it's really quite good, although it was written in the mid-60s and definitely has that era's tinge in its approach to the female characters. I don't mean the countercultural approach, I mean the OTHER approach. That the Republicans are nostalgic about. You know.

Anyway, as long as I can get on the plane (I understand it's easier to get past St. Peter than El Al security -- but perhaps that's the wrong analogy) I'll be off tomorrow! I wonder if saying, "I'm not Jewish but my sister is!" will speed me through or get me sent to the strip-search room.

And I'll report on The Source when I finish it.  24 hours of travel time should be plenty.  

Oh man, The Wire only had five seasons!

And we just finished it. We are bereft! Luckily, I cleverly noticed that author Richard Price wrote a whole bunch of episodes, and his latest book "Lush Life" was conveniently available in the Cupertino library's excellent bestseller browsing section, so I snapped it up!

Lush Life: A Novel

Richard Price

It absolutely filled the void for the time I was reading it. All kind of criminal-cop dialogue and urban decay and the general awesomeness that The Wire delivered so consistently. He's written seven or eight other books, of which I have only heard of "Freedomland" and "Clockers", so I hope those live up to my sky-high expectations. No pressure or anything.

And, although Richard Price didn't write it, I really liked the last episode of the series. <SEMI SPOILER>I thought it was so tragically satisfying the way someone is always waiting to fill any vacancy (retirement, death)  ... like Sydnor becomes McNulty, Michael becomes Omar, Dukie becomes Bubbles ... everything changes but nothing changes at all. Too big and cracked-out to change.</SPOILER>

I could have watched that forever. I bet the City of Baltimore's PR department is pretty happy it's done, though.

Jodi Picoult is NOT a kids-in-peril author!

My usually-reliable NYT magazine had a LAME article about Jodi Picoult, who (they say) is "the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril." Uh, no.

Now, I would like to think I KNOW from kids-in-peril authors. And JP is NOT among them. The whole point of kids-in-peril lit is that it's about the KIDS, and their own problems, their own consequences, their own resourcefulness. JP's books are all about the PARENTS (even the NYT admits it) and the myriad ways they can suck at their parenting. I would like to propose that we give JP the category "There's So Many Ways To Screw Up A Child" and let her be the figurehead for that. But keep off my favorite genre.

12 Raining Twilight Coast

Robyn Hitchcock

Please leave the moon alone.

I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.

the dead and the gone

Susan Beth Pfeffer

What I took away from this is that my emergency box is WAY understocked (in both books the entire second half

Exodus

is essentially rationing canned goods gotten through smart planning or corpse robbing) and that -- again -- I am total zombie fodder. I thought it was both wise and maybe cowardly to make the environmental disaster something external and both unlikely and unavoidable (an asteroid) instead of the much more likely global warming scenario (a la another YA disaster novel where the flood is totally man-made). But then these would have been different, more political novels, instead of survival tales. And please! Nothing is going to crash into the moon any time soon, so we're fine, right?

Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?

Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.

April! April! April!

That's right, it's gone! It included a whirlwind trip back East to NJ, NY and Boston; crazy 8th grade projects and crazy 8th graders at school; Eric's new part-time Follow the Dream job, which keeps him working all day Saturday and Sunday; the news that I am teaching 6th grade history next year (!), monster birthday preparations for the world's lowest-keyed birthday; and mad hula. Crazy!

So, Ainsley's birthday party was last weekend, scheduled for our neighborhood park. The Bay Area reported variable weather, but here in SJ it rained. It teased a bit, but then it really rained. This is about how the day went down:

7:30 AM: Amity at park, claiming three tables. Last year there were four separate parties happening at the same time. Cloudy but dry.
8:00 AM: Mother-in-law takes over waiting at tables. A&A go to diddams for balloons
8:30 AM: Skies open on MIL.
9:00 AM: Balloons acquired. MIL soaked.
9:30 AM: Park wet. MIL wet. Balloons wet. Mood damp.
10:00 AM: Decision made to move inside. Sad plastic-sealed note with sad little map left at park with sodden ballons. But wait! Entire party is based around rainbow parachute games! Where to do parachute in tiny tiny house?
10:15 AM: Garage!
10:20 AM: Oh no! Car with dead battery cocooned in garage! No room for parachute.
10:25 AM: Push car out of garage with help of neighbor (weekend stand-in husband, for tasks of this nature)
10:26 AM: Oh no! Car windows rolled down, rain pouring in!
10:28 AM: Jump-start stupid pre-rolled vehicle to roll up windows.
10:30 AM: Panic! 14 kids * 1.5 adults per kid + rain / tiny house = bad idea!

Kids everywhere

After all this, the party was actually lots of fun. Parachute worked great in the garage (preschoolers were TOTAL SUCKERS for the parachute -- I was like Jesus Christ for hooking that up), we all ate food on (quick thinking!) "picnic blankets" spread over the carpet on the living room floor, and the completely lowered expectations worked in our favor (no one could judge me for a crappy party when it was supposed to be AT THE PARK. You know, with the pony and the bounce house and all. Or maybe not any of that last stuff).

"Picnic" in the living room

Parachute fun in "the cave"

Our garden is growing, despite the snails. For a while I was mastering them by sneaking out at midnight and six AM and hucking them into the neighbors' yard, but they had six long hours to eat every vine veggie we had planted, so I had to go non-orgo and encircle the garden with a ring of toxic snail death. Now in the morning, there are piles of dead snails littering the garden battlements and we huck them into the yard without a fight.

Die, snail scum! Die! Die!

 

And on the hula front, my halau is preparing for ho'ike, this big hula extravaganza that is happening on June 6th. I am in two short simple hulas that defy my every attempt to master them. I anticipate bringing shame and dishonor to the sacred art of the hula and to my hula brothers and sisters in just four short weeks.

Not tons of time for reading. Plus I think I'm getting old. I just love me the Genre Novels and the Nonfiction now, just like granddads the world over. Behold:

 

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Basket Case

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

The Glister: A Novel

Nonfiction, trash fiction, nonfiction and some weird mystery/literary hybrid which was CREEPY AS HELL and which I highly recommend. Plus my Obama-hating dad is all on my case to read the Federalist Papers and document the liberties I'm forgoing in the name of collectivization. Well, hell. First I need to get some money before I can be mad at the government for not letting me keep it.

new semester

Oy, February. With the rain and the cold and full weeks of school and the hey hey hey; it's just too much.

I started teaching a graphic novel elective last week (also: the return of Scrabble! which in three short years has grown from six die-hard players into the Most Desirable Elective with The Longest Wait List, rivalled only by Israeli Cooking, which -- come on -- has weekly food! That's right, haters! Scrabble rises supreme).

Right, so, the graphic novel elective is a combination of Reading, Sharing and Writing (we all read some together, we share what we've read outside, and then we write our own). First classwide book is Bone, which everyone loves and I would have thought everyone would have read, but no. That's next week. For this week I modelled a sharing with this unsung gem:

Mail Order Ninja Volume 1 (Mail Order Ninja (Graphic Novels)) (v. 1)

whose name pretty much says it all. Ninjas are awesome.

Up next is The Arrival, an absolutely stunning book with no words at all. Have I talked about this before? Every time I think about it, I'm awed anew. Run right out and be absorbed by this. It requires several readings but is worth every second.

The Arrival

 

Drugs! And sex! Awesome!

So the whole world knows that HOLES was a huge mega-hit kids' book followed by a medium mega-hit kids' movie, all intended for kids around the age of 10, we would assume. In fact, my school teaches the book in 4th grade. But HOLES is a bit scary and mature in parts, and 4th grade seems a bit early to have it as approved curriculum, at least to me. Its sequel, Small Steps, came out several years ago and I didn't bother to read it. "Here kid, you like HOLES? Read the next one. Now let me get back to Go Fug Yourself."

Which is why I found it troubling when the 4th grade teacher came to me last week and said, all sotto voce, "I think Small Steps belongs in the Middle School section."

ME: (non-committal, faking like I've read it, totally cool): Mmmm?

HER: You know, because of the drugs. And the sex.

ME: !!!   ???

ME: Well, urm, it's, you know, the kids already, and well, FIRST AMENDMENT and CENSORSHIP and ... I have to go over here now.

Small Steps (Readers Circle)

So I took it home and read it a few nights ago. Hello? No sex. Barely sexual reference. One of the main characters is an exploited-type rock star teen who is described as having a "sexy body" and later says, "Gee all these songs eem to be about sex." And that's it. A little edgy, but no worse than Holes, which again, they teach in 4th grade.

And the drugs? Well, in Holes, all the characters meet at a juvenile-detention center, and one of the characters is there for having sold little baggies full of parsley for $50 a pop. In Small Steps, they reference that. BECAUSE IT WAS A PLOT POINT IN THE FIRST BOOK. YOU KNOW, THE ONE YOU TEACH.

So again, it stays in the general collection. Don't get me all worked up expecting drugs and sex and then get nothing. Damn!