This Time it Wasn't My Fault . . . Really

I know I've had a spotty record just lately with posts, but this time it was out of my control. My Lenovo Yoga 3 hit a fatal screen error which put me in the position of either paying more than the machine was probably worth to fix it or buy a new computer. I bought a new computer. It came in yesterday and I spent most of the day charging it, running updates, and developing a list of gripes/concerns.

I got an Asus and so far I'm pretty happy with it. It combines a lot of the things I liked about my Lenovo without having to deal with the general corporate skeeviness of Lenovo who I'm fairly convinced combine 1984 big brother issues with sheer programming stupidity. I'm not even a hacker and I can see how their adware opens up critical vulnerabilities in operating systems. All things considered, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out my screen failed because Lenovo decided it was time for me to buy a new computer and sent a kill command. (I promise, I'm not generally a paranoid person)

It's always possible that I will end up as distrustful of Asus, but I can't find many frustrated people online ranting about Asus and there are tons ranting about Lenovo.

So, the Lenovo died on Monday. After establishing I was already out of warranty, I even cracked it open to pull the battery and force a full reboot. (I actually enjoyed poking around in there, it's fascinating stuff. Silver lining, I guess) Tuesday, I went shopping and decided on my Asus. Unfortunately, I had to get it shipped and because I wasn't sure I'd be home on Thursday, I didn't get it until Friday. I suppose if I'd been really motivated, I could have found the machine somewhere in Atlanta, but I decided to wait and spend some time thinking through some things.

1. Repair Costs - it seems disingenuous that it costs as much or more, in some cases, to replace or fix a component than buy a whole new machine. It feels like forced consumerism. I know that there are some valid reasons for this, but on the whole I think that component costs are deliberately inflated. I suspect (but don't know) that this is to support the infrastructure of industry which tends to base its bottom line on sales of new machines. I think that there is some equation out there that measures the point at which the average consumer will tolerate built in obsolescence and then prices repair/component costs to take advantage. After all, the companies are protecting their bottom lines and if they can get us to buy new computers even a year earlier that we otherwise would, that helps them so why not find a way to force it.
2. Machine Recycling/Toxicity of Components - So if we are buying computers at a faster rate than we otherwise would, what happens to the cast off machines. That's a lot of waste when you sit down and think about it. In a perfect world, we are all trading them in or taking them to recycling centers (and the recycling centers are actually recycling them - which is not a given). However, I know a lot of people just throw them in the trash especially if they know their broken device has no trade-in value. Aside from the general landfill issue this creates, most people don't realize just how many toxic components are in our devices. Cadmium (used in device batteries) alone is causing huge problems in many poor countries where unscrupulous companies are dumping used-up tech. 
3. Microsoft Bullying - I hate microsoft. I really really do. I think it's a shoddy product and I think that they are big ole corporate bullies. I just think mac/apple is just as bad and that I don't have time to manage a linux system. The reason, therefore, that I stick with microsoft machines is that I better know how to get around and subvert microsoft idiocy. And yes, sometimes I bully it back. Microsoft is trying it's darnedest to keep people from using chrome on microsoft machines. Get over it Microsoft. Figure out how to make a browser that people actually want and you won't have to play playground bully anymore. Oh and by the way...I'm posting this through Chrome so neener neener neener. 
4. Privacy Concerns - Network security and privacy is this big scary thing. There are so many places and ways to lose control of your data and ultimately it all comes down to trust. Do you trust the people you buy your software from? At this stage it's no longer practical to write all your own apps and OS's. Things have gotten too sophisticated and complex. Even if you do program, your programs often make use of preexisting code. Exploits and snoops are everywhere and we have no real guarantee that a button to opt out really opts us out. It's just a digital button, it doesn't have to be connected to anything. We just are wired to think and trust that they do. I don't inherently trust these people. I used to code and know how easy it is to mess with people.  I put most of reliance in vigilance and being too insignificant to bother with. Also, I tend to keep an eye on what the paranoid tech-savvy teenager set have to say about various companies. There are some advantages to being a teacher and teenagers know a lot more than people tend to give them credit for. They just don't always know things that we value. (That's a different issue though)

Nothing has changed, and none of these things are things I didn't already know. However, it's been a while since I really spent time thinking about it. The downtime was a good thing.

Booked by Kwame Alexander

I've been delving into this Verse Novel format more. It's a strange way to read a story and not at all like the epics I teach. When I first heard of it, I thought it would be clumsy and difficult for a young audience in the same ways that reading the epics are. I was wrong.

I was wrong because my assumptions were flawed. Epics are difficult for younger readers because of the use of poetic conceits and need for abstraction in approaching even basic plot points on top of overarching difficulty with approaching a fundamentally alien culture that happens with any translated literature. Verse novels are a new format for YA so the text is written with a contemporary YA audience in mind. I'm not sure how well they will wear as time marches on, but for now they are very accessible. The authors have mostly dispensed with poetic conceits by entirely writing in a straightforward blank verse. While descriptive and expressive language is still of primary importance, the use of metaphor and simile tends to be used more sparingly and with more in-text explanation. The result is actually more concrete than prose in some cases because the poetry format allows a more direct description of character emotion without feeling heavy handed. Couple that with the greater amount of whitespace on the page and it explains why this format is so successful with struggling readers.

Of course some examples of the format are better than others. After reading The Crossover,  I immediately picked up Alexander's other verse novel: Booked. It's an excellent book, but not as emotionally devastating as The Crossover.

Nick Hall is a middle school soccer star. His dad is a linguistics professor and his mother is an out of work horse trainer. All Nick wants to do is play soccer, but when his mom leaves the house to take a job, Nick's relationship with his dad gets strained. Add on top of that a couple of neighborhood bullies and Nick is having a rough year.

I liked how intelligent Nick was. His voice felt appropriate for a 13 year old boy, but his approach to issues was more than usually thoughtful and his expression more articulate (thanks to his father's word obsession). While he rebels a little at the academic expectations, he also revels in his use of words which is a lot of fun to read.

The bully angle is not the primary focus of the book, but the subplot is well handled and resolves well. Overall, it's a good read.

Chomp by Carl Hiaasen

Once I read one of the Hiaasen YAs, I had to go looking for the rest of them. Mainly, I wanted to make sure they were stand alone novels and not part of some series. Turns out that they are all stand alones, which for my purposes, is a good thing.

Chomp is about Wahoo Cray, the son of a professional animal wrangler. Apparently, this is a real thing. Animal wranglers are professionals who work with non domesticated animals by removing them from inappropriate locations and, in some cases, rehabilitating injured animals and training them. These animals are then sometimes used as stand ins for their wild counterparts in nature shows and documentaries. Who knew? I learn something new every day and from the strangest places.

Anyway, Wahoo's father gets hired to wrangle for a reality tv show reminiscent of "Crocodile Hunter."  The difference is that Steve Irwin was actually a fairly competent wrangler himself. Derek Badger, the TV personality in Chomp is a egotistical and generally useless person who I pretty much immediately wanted to punch in the face. Wahoo's dad seems to agree with me. 

Wahoo and his dad have to keep this yahoo alive in the Florida Everglades as everything proceeds to go wrong.

This is a fast paced book. As always with Hiaasen's YA, ecological concerns are front and center but not the main thrust of the plot. There were two things that I found particularly interesting. First, apparently Burmese Pythons have become a major invasive species in southern Florida. I used to keep a ball python when I was younger. However, I lived in Michigan so if my python got away from me, it was unlikely that it was going to have much of an environmental impact. South Florida however has a very hospitable climate to a python's way of thinking. The problem is that the Burmese Pythons get big enough to successfully kill a human and have no natural predators in the Florida everglades so they are pretty much running rampant. There is an actual campaign to exterminate them. Interesting stuff.

Second, Chomp really got me thinking about nature programming and reality tv. The line between educational/informational programming and entertainment has become blurred in recent years. This is having many deleterious effects.  Nature shows, like the one described in Chomp, encourage a certain contempt for the natural world. I think when they started, the idea was to educate and raise awareness, but somewhere along the way, they turned into idiots doing stupid dangerous things and surviving it. I'm not opposed to entertainment, but when it's presented as fact oriented educational programming, people believe it's real.  This is a problem and it's one that Chomp obliquely addresses.

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

I have Richie, our school's athletic director and varsity basketball coach, to thank for finding this one. He got our librarian to buy a couple of copies for his basketball team. I'm not sure how that worked out for him, but I'm glad he got the books into our collection. I've found this an invaluable text for my athletic boys and yet, I hadn't actually read it. Until now.

I think most people when they are just learning to be a reader self choose texts that have characters they can identify with in some way. It doesn't have to be as simple as gender, age, or ethnicity. It can be something nebulous like a personality quirk, but no matter how small, some sense of commonality with the characters draws in the readers. Later, as a reader develops, they become more adept at finding points of connection with the literature. Everything gets easier with practice.

That being said, reading literature with protagonists who are very different from oneself, can be draining even if you enjoy the story. This is why I can only read a few sport boy books in a row. I very much enjoy them because they remind me of my students, but I don't tend to have many points of commonality with athletic teenage boys. As a result, I have to spend more time thinking about what's happening in the story which keeps me from fully immersing in the text.

The Crossover was surprisingly easy to immerse in. Josh and Jordan Bell are twins who both have a passion for basketball. The story is told through Josh's poetry. Being twins they have a close relationship but things begin to change as they look towards beginning high school. They growing apart.

I always worry that the verse format will be distancing. Poems are lovely, but they often require a focus on the words to decipher the meaning. However, Alexander's poetry has the opposite effect, it draws the reader in.  Because they are poems, the writing is closer to Josh's emotions without feeling overblown.

I see why my boys are so enamored of the book: lots of white space on the page, fast paced, yet sophisticated themes.

Skink: No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen

There is this crazy subgenre of gonzo crime caper novels mostly set in Florida. These books are brutal and absolutely enthralling. While they are no more violent or bloody than other books in the horror or crime genres, I find them much more disturbing for the bizarre inventiveness of the crimes. For example, in one book a woman is murdered by having fix-a-flat sprayed down her throat and into her lungs which sounds like an awful way to go. There are a handful of authors in this genre. Apparently Florida is a pretty wacky place.

One things I can conclusively say is that this genre of books is not YA. However, one of the authors of the genre, Carl Hiaasen, has written a few highly regarded YA/middle reader books. I was intrigued and picked up Skink: No Surrender for cheap on my recent buy. It was a quick read and indeed totally appropriate for YA/Middle readers.

Skink is apparently a recurring character in some of Hiaasen's nonYA but the main character of this book is actually a kid named Richard. Richard's friend/cousin Malley has run off with some guy she met online. Malley's a bit of a wild child so no one is really surprised that she ran off, but her friends and family are understandably worried. Richard, after doing some online research, becomes increasingly alarmed and eventually goes out to look for her aided by Skink.

Skink is a mentally unhinged ultra moral eco-warrior. A self-styled vigilante who protects Florida's wilderness from litterbugs, poachers, and industrial polluters. Apparently, he's quite out of control in the non-YA books. However, in this book, he serves as a kind of guardian-protector for Richard as he tries to rescue Malley.

This is a fast paced adventure story featuring a series of unlikely but highly amusing events. As bizarre as Skink is, the interaction between him and Richard is not creepy at all. It's a good book to hand teens as it illustrates the dangers of online predators without being at all heavy-handed.

Series Review: The Seventh Tower by Garth Nix

It seems like when I mention Garth Nix to the readers in my sphere, everyone has read a different one of his books. Wilfrid handed me Sabriel. Ben recommended Shade's Children which I'm still trying to find. Jessica handed me these books, "The Seventh Tower" series.

Tal has problems. His father is missing and his mother is sick. In order to get out of his trouble, Tal needs a 'primary sunstone.' In this world, the sunlight is blocked from the surface of the planet by a magical black veil. The sunstones are almost exactly what they sound like, stones that store light in the form of magical energy. Tal's people, the Chosen, have a highly regimented and organized society to manage teaching and using the light-based magic. At the bottom of the organizational ranking are those who cannot use magic at all, the Underfolk. If Tal can't get his sunstone, the whole family will slide down to Underfolk status. So, Tal decides to steal one.

However, it all goes wrong when Tal falls off the tower where the sunstones are grown and ends up on the frozen surface of the world where he meets Milla, a combative member of the Icecarls. Now Tal is stranded on the surface and he still needs a sunstone.

I'm trying to get away from the series review format. I don't think, in general, that I do justice to the books when I'm writing them, even if I really enjoy the series. However, with this series, it really all felt like one very long YA novel that got chopped up into six books. This is not the first time that I've felt this way about a YA series. I think that publishers have imposed a length limitation on individual novels regardless of the size of the story particularly for the younger end of the audience group.

As a side note, since discovering Garth Nix in February of this year, I've now read a total of 20 Garth Nix novels. I've enjoyed it, but I think it's time for Garth Nix break.

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

I might have a new author to add to my favorite lists.

Somehow when I finished The Running Dream last year, I never got around to reviewing it which is a shame because it is an excellent YA novel about a high school track star who loses her leg in a bus accident coming back from a Meet.  I'm not going to review it here past saying that I would recommend it to any of my athlete girls and most of the boys too. It's that good.

I kind of forgot about Van Draanen after that. It was a busy year and a cursory look at her bibliography led me to believe that The Running Dream was an outlier. She seems to mostly write for an elementary school audience. I mainly stick to YA, teen and Middle Readers. So, when I was doing my recent book buys I kept tripping across Flipped and couldn't figure out why the author name looked so familiar until I found a copy of it shelved next to The Running Dream. Then it clicked.

I read it over a single morning. What really pulled me in was the structure. Flipped is told from two points of view: a somewhat quirky girl named Juli and Bryce whose family is all about appearance. The chapters alternate narrators, but where as most novels with multiple narrators tend to use the shift in POV to advance the sequence of events, in Flipped the two narrators are telling the reader about the same events but from their very different perspectives. As a result, the story has a little bit of a Rashomon feel to it. It's an excellent demonstration of the use of point of view.

The story, on its surface, is a pretty standard teen romance. Juli, at the tender age of seven, is smitten at first sight with Bryce when he moves in across the street. The crush continues through middle school until she finally realizes that she doesn't really even know the object of her affections. Bryce on the other hand is completely conflict avoidant and this somewhat intense girl makes him want to run for the hills until one day he sees her in a different light and then he can't stop looking at her.

Like I said, pretty standard. What makes it worth reading is the conflict between the two interpretations of events. Both narrators end up sympathetic and the families around the two characters are full of interesting characters.

I would recommend this to both male and female teens and middle schoolers.