Things I could do instead of sleep:

write a blog post
sing all of Oasis's songs one after another
clean the kitchen
build a composting bin (with  the aid of a work lamp)
read a book (or three if they are short)
plan a lesson
bake cookies
set up all my seed pots
laundry
compose a short story
grade the mountain of student work
paint my bathroom
chase cats
watch a non-toddler friendly movie
alphabetize my library
plan my garden
create a fictional world
write bad poetry
email friends in other countries
make friends in other countries
crochet a shawl
cull the cookbook collection
index a cookbook
sing all the songs I know that aren't in English
read previous blog posts and fix grammar errors
wait for the cats to drift off to sleep and tickle their paw pads

but, I really should just sleep

Citizen Farmers by Daron Joffe

This is a reread. Citizen Farmers is by a local celebrity, Farmer D, who is an advocate for home and small scale organic farming. I've always liked the idea of growing food and this is a good and encouraging text.

Each chapter focuses on a different phase of the gardening cycle, from planning all the way to harvest. Every chapter is replete with photos, illustrations and charts. While there are a lot of ideas, there's isn't much depth to each topic and at this phase I'm beginning to notice what I don't know, which is quite a bit really. For example, Farmer D talks quite a bit about testing the soil and getting the balance write, but doesn't spend any time talking about what that means.


Farmer D takes a spiritual approach to land stewardship and plays up the meditative aspects to gardening. While I find some of the ideas like planting to the phases of the moon a little esoteric, it's not the kind of thing I would necessarily rule out.

I tend to read this when I'm trying to gear up for a new growing season and I refer to several of the charts, but I think it might be time for me to move on and find more and deeper texts. I wish Farmer D had more books that dealt with these topics in depth as I find his writing approachable and friendly.

Oh well, I'll keep looking.

Navel-Gazing

People go on about football, baseball, and soccer being America's favorite pastime. I've always been a hold-out for Hockey myself...I can't say that I really know anything about the sport, but I enjoy watching it when it's on and saying I like hockey keeps people from thinking that I'm completely bizarre. The thing is, I know a lot of people like me who only have a tenuous appreciation for professional sports. I know many more who deliberately look up the scores just so they can act like they are a casual fan. (This confession is always delivered with a lot of neck rubbing and ah-shucks-you-caught-me facial expressions.)

It's all some sort of bizarre social scam, I think, that everyone has to find a sport to line up behind...it's like declaring a tribal identity. Now you true sports fans out there, that's lovely, glad you enjoy watching grown people chase around balls, pucks, and birdies for millions of dollars a year, but that just can't be everyone's cup of tea, now can it?

I think we American's have a more universal national past-time: the art of navel-gazing.

Think about it. As a culture we spend an inordinate amount of time worried about how we compare to others, deciding there's a problem, and then trying blindly to fix it. It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't go half-cocked with incomplete information. Most Americans spend time in therapy or some sort of support group at some point during their lives. Quite a few of them end up on medications. (There's definitely a point where therapy and meds are necessary things, but I think we tend to over-apply it.) Self-reflection is a wonderful thing, but it seems like we can't engage in it without an audience.

Just look at all the blogs floating around out there (this one included of course). There are whole genres of navel gazing blogs out there: weight-loss blogs, spiritual quote blogs, mommy and me blogs, food photo blogs, and fitness blogs just to name a few. The art of the diary isn't gone, it's just gone public.

We love talking about ourselves and examining ourselves. I love usage stat pages, for instance. I look at my blog stats frequently. I just found Goodreads's reading stats pages. There are all kinds of nifty things in there. I've already read 5585 pages this year, for example. It also turns out that in the last three years or so since I started recording my reading consistently, I've read more Garth Nix books than any other author. They also have a nifty little scatter plot that charts publishing dates, which is cool. It doesn't matter and it doesn't mean anything, but I find this way more absorbing than the impending March Madness shenanigans coming up.

Girls Like Us by Gail Giles

I avoided reading this book for almost a whole year. It fell somehow into a class of fiction that I know is good for me, but that I also know is going to tear me up inside. In this case, the whole premise made me a little uncomfortable.

Girls Like Us is a story told through the audio journals of two girls: Biddy and Quincy. Both girls are special ed and wards of the state. Biddy didn't get enough oxygen when she was born and so is physically normal but has pervasive intellectual and learning disability. Quincy was born neurotypical but received a traumatic brain injury when she was six and her mom's boyfriend hit her with a brick. She was left with facial disfigurement and learning disabilities specifically in the area of processing it seems. Quincy's actual IQ seems to be in the normal range to me, but the learning issues are substantial.

Both Quincy and Biddy are wards of the state and, when they graduate from high school, are placed together in a special work program. They live together and share expenses but have different jobs and a social worker checks in on them regularly.

Quincy starts the book as an abrasive and judgemental figure. She is quick to take offense and isn't afraid to speak her mind. If the story weren't told through journal entries, she would be completely intolerable, but because we get to see her thought process, it softens her some. Biddy comes across as almost achingly naive. She's been treated shabbily her whole life and seen very little love, but she accepts that as normal. It's pretty obvious from the start of the book that something bad wrong happened in her past.

On the surface, they aren't a good pair for roommates. In fact, Quincy starts the book with a horrible opinion of Biddy. It is a triumph of Giles's writing that she gives both girls amazing and believable character arcs that set them on a equal level to each other.

I also very much like Miss Lizzie, Biddy's boss and their landlord.

This book is clearly intended for a YA audience, but it was a difficult read. On top of the obvious issues of these kinds of special needs narrators, both girls had awful childhoods. Additionally, Giles confronts the sad truth that the intellectually disabled are are a much higher risk for all forms of abuse head on. While I find her treatment of the issue appropriate and even sensitive, it was difficult and heartrending.

I think highly of this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone.

Going to Sleep Now

After 20 hours of wakefulness (starting at midnight the night before) I can with no uncertainty tell you that I can't manage sleep deprivation the way I used to. Although, I think I get less miserable about it all.

I used to enjoy the sort of loose and disconnected way my thoughts bobbled around in my skull. I end up feeling like a babbling fool, but hey it can be fun during the writing process as long as I don't have to interact as a human being.

Sorry for the skimpy post but it's time to:

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

I've been curious about this book for while. It has compelling cover art and it hit the New York Times Bestseller List which always gets my attention for YA. My sister-in-law read it and had a sort of ambivalent reaction to it which is intriguing in and of itself. As a general rule, Carra tends to have clear reactions to the things that she reads. So, I borrowed it. I can see why Carra had the reaction she did, I can also see how it got to be a bestseller.

The School for Good and Evil is about two girls, Sophie and Agatha, who live in a village called Gavaldon that is completely enclosed in a ominous and somewhat magical forest. The village is completely isolated by this forest and it is impossible to escape. Every four years on the eleventh day of the eleventh month two children who are at least 12 are abducted. One child is good, sweet, and beautiful. One child is evil, sinister, and ugly. Everyone is sure that Sophie will be the good child taken this year and that Agatha will be the one taken for evil. Indeed, Sophie wants to be the one taken.

Sophie and Agatha are, in fact, the ones taken but against expectation Sophie ends up in the school for evil and Agatha ends up with the good. Is it a mistake, or is there something going on beneath the surface?

The world Chainani created for this book is amazing. I absolutely love the premise. The students are basically in training to be in fairy tales. That could be saccharine but it becomes clear very early on that there are dire consequences for failing in your studies which gives the whole world a bit of an edge from the get go. All the characters, in both schools, are well developed. All the primary and secondary characters are fully three dimensional which is challenging given how many there are. The plot reversals all make sense for the characters, and there are a startling number of them.

There are flaws, however. Firstly, Sophie and Agatha are supposed to be 12 and I very quickly stop believing that. The act and react to situations more like a 15 or 16 year old. Frankly, the good schools focus on princesses snaring princes is more than a little odd if they are all supposed to be between 12 and 16, the age range alone makes the concept a little problematic. However, more critically, I think: there is just too much going on here and not enough space for it. There is a massive cast of fully developed characters and almost too many plot twists. While everything that happens is properly seeded in the narrative, so much happens that it is easy to forget say...a two line description on the second page that becomes critically important in the last twenty pages. The last 100 pages or so end up feeling very compressed.

I think Chainani would have done better to split the plot arch over two, if not three, books and take more time developing events. However, I did very much enjoy the read and would recommend it despite the flaws.

Striving towards waste free

I know the goal to waste no food  was going to be a difficult one. Things get lost or forgotten in the fridge all the time. Veggies don't last as long as they should. Emergencies happen and disrupt food plans. It's also just a different mode of living. Luckily my husband is on board with the idea and he's been quite good at reminding me about things in the fridge or helping me come up with ways to use up leftovers.

It was no where close to a perfect start, but I feel like we are getting the hang of this. I'm going to start keeping a more accurate tally. However, closing into the end of January and the list of spoilage is as follows:
10 or 15 strawberries

• a small handful of blueberries
• 2 pears
• several clementines....which I think may have come into the house already dead
• 2 apples
• half a recipe of dilled chicken noodle casserole that got stranded at school during the snow days
• about a quarter of a dish of chinese chicken lo mein that I forgot about until it was too late.
• two slices of homemade bread that went fuzzy

All in all, it's well under two pounds of food. So it could be worse.

My Cat Hates Me

For the last three weeks or so, Ashley (my big black cat) has woken up around midnight each night. He then starts a campaign of yowling and pawing at Thomas door until I hiss at him or squirt water at him. He then jumps up on the bed and begins an aggressive purring/kneading/head butting routine. He's a 20 pound cat...those head butts have some mass behind them.

Then he settles down, I start to drift back to sleep. Just as I'm starting to move from a doze into real sleep, I hear the maddening sound of a 20 pound cat jumping down from the bed. The cycle than starts again.

I can't just shut him out of the bed room. He has in the past banged, clawed, and pawed at a door for six hours straight. That's part of why the bottom of my basement door is shredded.

arg!

So, I give up, I get up turn on a light and sit on the couch. So, what does the cat do? He curls up next to me and sleeps.

http://www.catversushuman.com/

Sold by Patricia McCormick

It is easy to forget how good we have it in this country, and it's easy to believe that horrible things don't happen here. I guess that's the ultimate purpose of books like this: to remind us. I picked up Sold for two reasons. First, last year when I went to the NCTE conference this book was on just about every list I saw for Young Adult Lit. Second, Jess read it and said it was good. I can't say that I was looking forward to reading this, I knew what it was about.

Lakshmi is 12, the only daughter of a very poor Nepalese family in a tiny village. Her mother tries her best, but her step-father has a serious gambling problem. After a drought followed by an unusually strong monsoon wipes out the family rice fields, her step-father sells her to a mysterious glamorous stranger who promises to find her a position as a maid.

Being a maid means Lakshmi can help her mother and younger brother by sending her pay home. She goes willingly. She is so naive, in fact, that she doesn't realize anything is wrong until long after she's over the boarder into India. Not in fact, until she's installed in a brothel and the clients are in front of her does she realize what is going on. She's been sold into prostitution.

Mumtaz, the madame, is one of the most chillingly awful people I've ever read in literature.

The story is brutal, which is expected given the subject matter and I question its suitability for the younger end of YA group. Not that I think we should wrap our teens in cotton-fluff and protect them from the realities of the world, but there are sections of this that are graphic, and of course, the whole thing is emotionally disturbing. The verse format of the text softens this some, but also heightens the horror of it.

It was an excellent read, and I'm glad I read it, but I will never reread it.

Interesting Times by Terry Prachett

Ok, the time has come. I'm taking a stand. The Discworld series is not YA! (So, now there are a bunch people sputtering in their beverages that anything involving puns, wizards, and self-animated walking luggage has to be YA and a whole other group of people rolling their eyes and saying "well, duh! Of course it isn't")

See this is the problem with classing things by age. What's the cut off and how does one go about defining it?

Here's my reasoning for Discworld. It's really quite simple. When I first read this series I was 16. I didn't hate them, but I also didn't get why they were supposed to be funny. Reading the series was a long boring experiment in cross-cultural befuddlement.  Over the course of a couple years I got about as far as Soul Music before apathetically throwing in the towel. I'm now in my late 30's, more than twice the age I was then, and I love them.

The difference is that now I get the jokes. Part of that is that I'm just older and all the protagonists are fully adults. It resonates more. Part if is that I've watched a great deal more BBC programming. So, I'm more familiar with British humor in general. The biggest reason though is that I've read a great deal more literature and history. Most of the jokes involve a frightening breadth of literature. To get the jokes, one has to be fairly well read and, as much as I read, I think I'm missing things still. What teenager has read more in their less than twenty years than I have in my slightly less than 40 years?

So, NOT YA!

Alright, enough of that.

Interesting Times is a Rincewind book. It starts out with the gods of luck and fate sitting down to play something that seems like chess. The "board" is the empire on the counterweight continent, which is where Twoflower came from in Colour of Magic. Fate has all the noble families of the empire. Luck has Rincewind, Cohen the Barbarian, a horde of geriatric barbarians, and the red army. Things then play out as they often do in Pratchett's books. By which I mean, a string of seemingly unrelated an ridiculous things happen that in the end all come together like the pieces of a puzzle box.

The Agatean Empire is clearly modeled after the imperial Chinese court and so this all made me slightly uncomfortable. Pratchett is a satirist and poking at another culture this way just gives me the willies. That's not to say that it wasn't all very funny, because it was. It just made me squirm a little. It was, however, fun to get all the characters back from the first book for a kind of character reprise.

Good read, but not a quick one. Humor relies on a passing familiarity with Imperial Chinese history and culture and some knowledge of Sun Tzu's The Art of War. The biggest challenge for adolescent readers is the lack of chapter breaks. There are no chapter delineations, just text breaks when Prachett picks up with a different point of view character.

Beef Carbonnade

As a general rule, I don't cook a lot of meat focused dishes. Mostly we rely on plant proteins and supplement with highly flavored meats like bacon or sausage as seasoning. There are a number of reasons for this, but at this point it is mainly just habit. However, I like to think that when I do decide to cook meat that I do an exemplary job of it. I'm proud of my brisket recipe and my chicken noodle soup. I'm currently working on refining a recipe for Beef Carbonnade. I tried it out last week and it was so good that we blasted through the whole thing in a couple of days.

2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 - 2.5 pounds beef chuck roast, in 1-inch chunks
2 pounds Yukon Gold Potatoes, in 1/2 inch chunks
1-1.5 pounds mushrooms, chopped
1.5 cups dark beer (guinness)
1 teaspoon dried thyme
3 cups water or stock
1 cup frozen peas
1-3 Tablespoons dijon mustard

Brown the beef in the olive oil in a large pot. sprinkle with salt and pepper. (8-10 minutes)

Add thyme, potatoes, mushrooms, beer, and water. Bring to a boil then adjust the temperature so that it bubble steadily but gently.

Cover and cook, stirring occasionally. Add more water if it gets dry. Simmer until beef and veggies get tender: about 30-45 minutes.

When tender add the peas and cook until warmed through. Mix in up to 3 Tablespoons dijon mustard. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Ahead of Their Time

About a year ago I subscribed to Penguin publishing's mail list. So now I get one or two emails a week from them. Originally, the list was clearly aimed at librarians and bookshop owners. I get a lot of updates on new titles and reprint series. It's actually very helpful when I'm trolling for non-YA titles. From there it's really only a minor twist to reorient your emails for direct to consumer ads. Add a few links to retail outlets and your done. Recently they've started to link to a couple of related blogs.

A week or two ago the linked to this listicle about books published a long time ago that didn't become popular but that have specific interest to a more modern audience. They've all been reprinted and I admit, I find myself looking for copies of most of them.

It is an interesting idea to me that a book can be written before there is an audience for it. It makes hunting through the dusty corners of badly organized used bookstores feel more exciting.

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

I initially heard of Scott Westerfeld because of his highly popular "Uglies" series. I read all of that series last year. It was a decent dystopian YA, fun but not super impressive. It was good enough that I've been idly keeping an eye out for more of his books. That's how I found Peeps, browsing through the BookNook.

Peeps blew me away. I have to admit, when I read the back cover and it mentioned vampires, I groaned a bit on the inside. I actually like vampire stories, but Twilight deeply scarred me on YA vampires and I just haven't recovered yet. However, Peeps is nothing like Twilight. In fact, there are almost no supernatural elements at all. This is straight up science fiction.

What if all the legends about vampires and werewolves and what not all had a common source. That source would be something like a disease or a parasite that not only changed the victim's physiology but also their cognitive functions. In Peeps, a parasite causes what people think of as vampirism. These victims gradually go insane and shun everything they used to love. They have insatiable hunger and crave meat including the meat of other humans.

However, 1 out of every 100 humans has the capacity to become a carrier. These carriers get several of the perks of the parasite (acute senses, super strength, increased life span, and a diminished capacity for fear) but never get the rest of the symptoms or go insane. These carriers track down the rest of the parasite positives - or peeps - and get them treated.

Enter Cal. Cal's a carrier and 19. He starts the novel in the process of hunting down all the people he accidentally infected before he knew he was a carrier. Once he achieves that, he has to track down the one who infected him, his progenitor. During the search he finds a building with a mysterious iron door sealing a pit into the depths of the city and infested with parasite infested rats.

I really enjoyed this. The story kept me enthralled but I really liked the way Westerfeld structured the book. The odd numbered chapters carry the story, but the even numbered chapters are these little two or three page micro-essays on various topics concerning parasites. They are delivered in Cal's voice and are, as far as I can tell, factually correct. The risk with structure is that it detracts from the story, but the topics are inserted in such a way that they reflect on events happening in the story. It's a fun contrast. Even though parasites are kind of yucky to read about, I wouldn't dream of skipping them. The narrative wouldn't be as strong without them.

Ironside by Holly Black

So, changelings. I've always been fascinated and creeped out by the idea of changelings. The idea is that the faeries come and steal a baby away and leave something behind in its place cloaked in glamour (illusion). The thing they leave behind might be a log or bundle of straw and then the illusion either wears off and reveals what is underneath or the baby seems to die before the magic dissipates. Sometimes though they leave a faerie baby behind and the magic never wears off but the babies are difficult and sickly. As they grow they develop into wild cantankerous children who act out and run away. From a pragmatic view this is an early explanation for difficult children that absolves the parents of responsibility.

The thing is that these stories always focus on the human parents or sometimes the human baby...but they are always human-centric. Ironside focuses on the faerie child instead as a protagonist which is an interesting  perspective. After all, what must it be like to realize that your parents aren't your parents and that you aren't even human?

Even though the first two books in the series have little in the way of shared characters, this third book in the series brings most of the main characters from both of the earlier books back. Roiben is about to be crowned; Kaye is still in love with him and insecure about it. Corney is dealing with his trauma from the first book and looking for ways to protect himself from the fey. Val and Ravus are making a go of the whole human & troll love match thing, but don't turn up much. Dave is still broken and burned out from his drug overdose, but Luis features more in this last book and finally gets some resolution.

The plot picks up a couple of months after the second book with the coronation of Roiben as the unseelie king. Kaye declares her love to him publicly and receives a seemingly impossible quest which she takes as a rejection. Casting about for a path, she decides to tell her human family the truth and gets wrapped up in the seelie queen's plot to take over the unseelie court.

In some ways, I think this the best of the three books. The first two were fun reads but there is a better balance to the story in Ironside. The intrigue means that this isn't just a teen romance which is nice. I'm sad that there aren't any more books in the series, the world is a lot of fun.

Snow Days and the South

How the South deals with bad cold weather always boggles me. It's not that the city shuts down when snow falls or when we have an ice storm. From a pragmatic point of view, there's no point in investing in the equipment the city would need to deal with it for what amounts to a week or so of real use per year. I can get behind that decision. It makes sense to hunker down and just wait for it all to melt.

What I don't get is the preparation cycle. The way it is supposed to work is that there is a weather prediction. The powers that be watch the weather develop and make the best decision for the current situation. In the meantime, residents prep their houses and pantries for the next couple of days. The weather either comes or it doesn't, but generally in a few days down here the temperature comes up and everything melts off. The big danger down here are power outages generally, but even so, the weather usually shifts quickly.

What happens though tends to be a weird multi storm cycle of under-response and over-response. So, weather is predicted and the city shuts down. However, in this scenario the weather isn't as bad as predicted and we all could have been in work/school. Winter continues and work continues until a new storm is predicted. This storm looks worse in all the radar than the last, but because the last one turned out to be nothing, the schools all stay open and we all get trapped in horrible road conditions as the schools shut down midday. Bad weather happens then melts and in the next storm prediction and this one gets and over-response because the last one was so awful.

In the meantime, every weather prediction is met with Atlanta residents stocking up with more food than they'd need in a week particularly hitting things like bread and milk.

I don't get it.

Valiant by Holly Black

It's always weird writing posts for multiple books in a series, which is why I started doing those series posts a while back. Those series posts always felt a little lack luster though and so now I'm back to this.

I'm not sure what I expected from a second novel in the Modern Faerie Tale series. I guess I assumed that the story would follow Kaye or at least Roiben. However, Valiant introduces entirely new characters. While still part of the same world, there is almost no cross-over in characters.

Valiant introduces Val who is something of a jock and something of a tom-boy. She plays lacrosse at school has a gay friend named Ruth and a boyfriend with a mohawk named Tom. There's nothing unusual or difficult about her life, she's just drifting through. That changes when she accidentally walks in on her boyfriend cheating on her with another woman, and the last woman Val would have expected.

Val goes to a hockey game to clear her head and just doesn't go home. It's not a concious decision, she just fails to get on the train home and soon is distracted by meeting Lolli and Dave who live in an abandoned subway station. Val fits right in. Soon, Val meets Dave's brother Luis and finds out how the exiled fey manage to survive in New York City. Oh, and obviously she discovers that the fey exist.

The only glaring problem is that someone is killing the fey and humans are high up on the suspect list.

This one reminded me less of the paranormal romances and more of Francesca Lia Block's Weetsie Bat books. I think because there is more of a dreamy quality to some of the writing. During her time on the streets, Val experiments with a drug that is a sort of magical acid. So there is a sort of weird magical realism going on.

Clearly there are some tough themes here, but relevant to a teenaged audience. Aside from the drugs, Val spends most of the book living rough on the streets. It's appropriate for teens but does require a more mature mindset.

Pop Sonnets by Erik Didriksen

So, the whole point of the book talks that I make my students do in class is that it starts the conversation. Many of my students can't conceive of having a meaningful conversation about a book which means that even if they enjoy what they read, they are isolated and the experience is disconnected from the rest of their lives. Therefore, the book talk. In an ideal world the kid does a book talk and some other kid says something like "hey, that sounds, cool can I borrow it." In all honesty, it takes a while before it starts to happen, but at this point in the school year, I have observed some books traveling around between students.

Often, it all starts by the students publicly offering me the book or by me asking to borrow it. I get a small percentage of my yearly reading that way. Pop Sonnets is an example of that. Alex did his book talk on it Thursday and it sounded so amusing that I asked to borrow it. It's a collection of sonnets written that adapt popular song lyrics into Shakespearean style sonnets; Didriksen even tries to mimic Shakespearean diction.

The range is pretty impressive. In there is Beyonce, Chuck Berry, Outkast, even Rick Astley and Rebecca Black (that girl who's birthday vanity video went viral online). Apparently, this all started as a tumblr blog.

My thought was that Ryan would really enjoy them and I was right. We read them over the course of the weekend and he's started writing his own. I think he's done three of them so far. It's all a lot of fun and I think I need to buy a copy to keep in a classroom for when I teach my seniors Shakespeare's sonnets.

Tithe by Holly Black

I've read Tithe before. I know this, but during my reread I never remembered what happened which isn't normal for me. The Modern Faerie Tale series was intensely popular for a few years when I first started teaching so I picked up the first of the three books. I remember liking it, but that's about it.

In this story Kaye is a teenager who follows her mom from city to city as she tries to succeed in the rock world. Mom is not terribly successful and so Kaye mostly takes care for her as well as herself. She has dropped out of school and going nowhere fast.

Kaye is an odd kid. For one thing, she's seen fairies and sometimes when she's day dreaming things happen.

The premise of the world is that all the fey folk in the stories still exist and live in the more wild places. The reason we don't see more of them is that we surround ourselves with iron which makes them ill. Kaye is more wrapped up in it all than even she knows when her fairy friends deliver a revelation about Kaye's origins and she meets a tortured fairy knight, Roiben.

Basically this is a teen level paranormal romance: all the weird romantic situations without any of the ...ah... "heated moments." Think fantasy adventure mixed with high school drama.

The characters are fun and the world richly imagined if somewhat gritty. This isn't high literature or anything, but it is a lot of fun.

School Reentry

One week down, 17 to go.

I started to get into a good writing groove and then school started. Also the cats went insane. Thankfully, I had developed a nice cushion before the week began of sandbagged blog posts, but I'm really going to have to figure out a time to write every day.

Hopefully, now that Ashley has stopped deliberately waking me up at midnight every night, it'll get easier. We'll see.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

Having read and blogged Gun Machine, Ryan reminded me that we also owned Warren Ellis's other novel Crooked Little Vein. Actually it occurs to me that for all that I read voraciously, Ryan and I haven't read many of the same books. It's an oddness. We tracked down Crooked Little Vein for Ryan soon after it came out. He read it and liked it, but I never got around to reading it myself until now.

I expected Crooked Little Vein to feel similar to Gun Machine and it did, to an extent. It's another hard boiled detective novel. Michael McGill is a private detective with incredibly bad luck. He keeps walking into the random, embarrassing and bizarre. When a creepy government type turns up and offers McGill half a million dollars to find an antique book, McGill soon finds himself wandering into every impossible den of depravity and sexual deviancy.

So, if I was mildly shocked by the amount of foul language in Gun Machine, Crooked Little Vein was on a whole different level. It was one awful uncomfortable situation after another. Generally, I would find such a thing gratuitous and it would annoy me, but Ellis found a way to write a story that made all the awful oddly necessary. That's a skill, a very weird and very specialized skill, but a skill none the less.

I think there are two things that make this novel work. First, the search for the missing book is really pretty engaging. The book is an alternate version of the Constitution written in secret by the founding fathers with ability to make anyone who reads it more moral and innocent. What it comes down to is thought control which raises some ethical issues later in the story. Second, Michael McGill is just a really likeable character. He's this strangely normal guy who keeps finding himself in all these bizarre situations. His reactions are genuine and somehow show him it be a really good guy in the midst of it all.

So, I will never ever admit to my students that this book exists. It's that far off the deep end in so many ways. That being said, I enjoyed reading it so much that I finished it in a single afternoon.

Paper Towns by John Green

John Green is one of those authors. He has a following. His fans are. . . persistent. Just before The Fault In Our Stars was released as a movie, various of my students and friends started pestering me to read the book. They even gave me copies of it. I have five copies of the thing. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that insisting that I read or watch something too persistently tends to backfire. It's a weird perverse impulse, and I get stubborn about it.  However, I really try to read the books that my students recommend so I fought through it and read the book. It was good; it even made me cry.

So, now I'm gradually working through all of Green's books.

At its core Paper Towns is a mystery. It starts with the introduction of Quentin Jacobsen and the enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman. When they are 9, they stumble across the dead body of a suicide in a park. The two kids respond to this in very different ways.

Fast forward eight or nine years. Quentin and Margo are both seniors getting ready to graduate. They are not friends. In fact, they haven't really interacted since that fateful discovery in the park, but Quentin is still hopelessly in love with the idea of Margo. So, is anyone really surprised that when she shows up one night with a crazy plan  for a prank rampage that Quentin lets himself get sucked in. I'm not. Sounds like the beginning to a high school romance except that after that crazy night of pranks, Margo disappears.

No one knows where she is, but she left Quentin clues. He becomes obsessed with following those clues

A couple things about this. First, Green has actually made me want to read  Walt Whitman. I do not have fond memories of that man from American Lit, but a substantial section of Paper Towns revolves around "Song of Myself" from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The sections described were interesting. It's possible that 20 years ago when I had to read it for class, I just wasn't ready for it. Second, for something calling itself YA, Paper Towns is terrifically philosophic.

In the search for Margo, Quentin spends a lot of time thinking about how he never really saw her as a person and that his obsession was with the idea of her. This ties directly into Whitman's "Song of Myself." It comes back again and again this idea of being perceptually trapped behind our own masks and limited in our ability to recognize the reality of others. Perfect idea for teens who are naturally struggling with identity but still. . .heavy stuff.

Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce

The problem with reading a book in series literature, for me at least, is that once I begin I feel impelled to pick up the next one and the next one until I run out of extant books in the series or the series concludes. I get really frustrated actually when I have to wait for the next installment because the writer hasn't written it yet. This is why I tend to wait for series to conclude and then read them all in one big marathon. I do T.V. the same way.  It's a character flaw.

Luckily, "The Lioness's Daughter" series is a duet. Also luckily, I managed to finish it before having to go back to school.

Trickster's Queen picks up about six months after the end of of Trickster's Choice. Aly has earned her place as spymaster and has spent the winter building and training a network of spies. The old king is dead and the Balitang family is going back to the capitol city. This sounds like a good thing. But it's not. With all the deaths, the youngest child Elsren is now the presumed heir to the throne and that's not a very safe position to be in.

The court intrigue deepens and the pressure from Kyprioth increases as fears drawing the notice of two of his god siblings. Despite her youth, Aly has earned the respect of her raka conspirators, but can she keep track of all moving pieces and keep her prospective queen alive?

This is an excellent continuation from the first book even though the feel is much different. Trickester's Queen is less action oriented. It is more focused on the plotting and intrigue. While there is plenty of action still, the narrative is more driven by following Aly's complex schemes which provides a very different reading experience.

Break Reading

As far as reading goes, it was a very productive break: over two weeks - 17 days really - I read 15 books. Six of them are Tamora Pierce books which I can gulp down at about a book a day which accounts for the high number. Over all it was a very successful batch. All of them were good.

The most impressive concept was probably Fledgling by Octavia Butler followed by Scythe by Neal Shusterman. The writing style in Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon is really sticking with me and I will definitely keep an eye out for more of her books.

I'm stalling out on the Pitticus Lore books. My dad assures me that they get better, but I'm just not sure I can trudge forward on them.

Over all.... a good couple of weeks.

1. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler (Dad)
2. Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
3. Paper Towns by John Green (Library)
4. The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
5. Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
6. Protector of the Small: Page by Tamora Pierce  (Jessica)
7. Protector of the Small: Squire by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
8. Protector of the Small: Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
9. Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
10. Tricksters Queen by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
11. Bullyville by Francine Prose
12. Scythe by Neal Shusterman
13. Where Three Roads Meet by Sally Vickers
14. Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
15. Every Thing, Every Thing by Nicola Yoon (Bella)

Gun Machine by Warren Ellis

I love clearance sales. I particularly love clearance sales at used bookstores. 2nd and Charles, both locations near me, have excellent selection and an almost arcane reasoning for placing things in the clearance sections. For example, I found a brand new Meg Rosoff novel and one of Warren Ellis's novels in perfect condition.

I immediately dove into the Ellis novel and couldn't put it down. Warren Ellis is more well known for writing graphic novels such as Transmetropolitan and Fell but he has also written two novels. I tend to appreciate Ellis for his unabashedly brutal treatment of politics and power dynamics. He has a wicked sense of humor that he bends to his subjects and characters. And he has a severe case of potty mouth which I appreciate in certain settings.

Gun Machine is a gritty cop intrigue that borrows heavily from the hardboiled and noir novels of early and mid twentieth century. Detective John Tallow is world weary and disconnected until his partner dies in front of him leading to the discovery of a cache of hundreds of guns that have each been used to kill exactly once. Tallow is deeply intelligent but not in a way that stretches credibility and slightly crazy in damaged by life kind of way. He reminds me both of Dashiell Hammett's Philip Marlow and Ellis's own Spider Jerusalem (albeit more lucid and less insane).

The plot is pure intrigue and conspiracy. Tallow has to figure out the identity of the most successful serial history to prowl the streets of Manhattan.  Question number one is how did this killer manage to escape notice? Who's protecting him and why? The answer to these questions get Tallow deeper into a mess of department infighting and corruption.

This was a fun read. If I have one criticism, it is that they interplay between Tallow and his two CSU sidekicks is highly reminiscent of the relationship between Ellis's three main protagonists in Transmetropolitan: Spider Jerusalem, Yelena, and Channon. It's not much of a criticism really since that was a very fun set of characters too but it all did kinda feel like a lost issue of Transmetropolitan.

Nice quick read with short chapters. There's plenty of action to keep things moving, but Tallow's a thoughtful enough character that there's plenty of solid exposition to ground the narrative.Because of the copious amounts of foul language and violence, I can't put it in my class library, but I would give it to the occasional student.

Bullyville by Francine Prose

Bullying is one of those hot topic issues right now. Every year we have to do a program with the students about the effects of bullying and the tendency of people to be silent bystanders. It's a good idea and probably a good approach but I'm not sure of the effectiveness of it all. The idea is that successful bullying relies on people not wanting to get involved. So if bystanders speak up for the victims then the bullies are defeated. Huzzah! Except as far as I can tell, it just makes the bullies sneakier or favor things like internet trolling.

When I was a teen/pre-teen I was bullied. Not horribly, but it happened. It's a part of growing up. I dealt with it mostly by ignoring them and getting even in small subtle ways. Mostly, I just holed up in the school library and made it difficult for them to find me. It worked, but it worked because I grew up in an age where they mostly had to physically find me in order to bully me. With the internet and social media, that is no longer the case. No matter how bad it was on a given day, it ended when I got home. That's not true any more.

So, I don't know what the answer is for these kids. My current tactic is to stock my classroom library with stories dealing with bullying as a theme on some level. Bullyville is one of the books I picked up for that. I'd never heard of it or its author, Francine Prose. I am, however, always game for something new.

The main character, Bart Rangely, is a pretty inherently tragic figure. His estranged father dies in the North Tower during 911. As a result, Bart is offered a free ride at a local exclusive prep school. He goes, of course, despite the schools well known reputation for producing bullies. Our boy Bart ends up under the care of the worst bully at the school. Thus begins the absolute worst year of Bart's life.

Bart doesn't just turn into a pile of mush though. He does fight back, and as a result, ends up finding out more about his tormentor and probable motivations.

What I like about this book is that Prose didn't feel the need to tie it all up in the end with a nice bow and a fairy tale ending. It's messy and she lets it be messy. While the situation resolves for Bart, there's no sudden character flips or kumbaya moments. The bully is a bully and he is not redeemed.

This is a good treatment of the themes and a readable book. It's a good addition to my classroom library.

Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce

Every time I think I've finally finished all the Tamora Pierce books, Jess keeps handing me another. I'm appreciative, they are good books, but whenever I start one I get trapped in it until I finish it. It's a nice problem to have I guess, but I'm looking forward to reading books that I can put down when I need to.

Trickster's Choice is the start of a the "Daughter of the Lioness" storyline set in the Tortall world. This story-line follows Alanna and George's daughter Aly. Aly takes after her father, the ex-master thief turned spy. She's headstrong and a thrill seeker and completely uninterested in the traditional life-pursuits for a young noblewoman.

What she really wants to be is a spy. However, Mom and Dad don't want their little girl in that much danger. Who would? It's infuriating to Aly though, and after a heated discussion with her mom, Aly decides to sail down the coast a little and cool down. That's where she runs into the pirates who capture her and sell her into slavery.

Soon, Aly finds herself tangled up in the local politics of the Copper Isles and talking to local gods, specifically Kyprioth the trickster god.

So, in reading Pierce it seems that she like's coming sideways at real world issues in her books. She's taken on gender issues and slavery. This one seems to be coming at issues of race and conquest. It's interestingly pragmatic about the issues in a way that we often aren't. One of the things I've always valued about books is their ability to shed light on the issues of our world without the baggage so that we can think clearly about it. Most people seem to take literature, especially fantasy, at face value, but I think when it's well done, it can be more thought provoking than even the best history which must always be examined for agenda.

In any case, good read. Appropriate for high schoolers and precocious middle schoolers. Solid themes and thought provoking. Some, minimal romance but nothing lascivious. Strong characters both female and male.

The Importance of Sleep

I've been struggling with sleep issues for 29 years. The young don't really get how precious sleep is. Even I would forgo sleep with an almost cavalier way when I was in high school and college. I get so annoyed when my students toss off insomnia like it's something cool.

It's not cool.

 

https://xkcd.com/776/

In all honesty, there are worse problems to have.

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

So I finished my first non-YA book. Somehow, when I picked up Fledgling, I didn't expect a vampire novel. I'm not sure why it surprised me, after all Butler's done aliens and time travel so vampires fit right in.

Generally there are two camps with vampire books. 1: vampires are evil festering undead and the stuff of nightmares. 2: vampires are sparkly and sexy. In either case, what makes a vampire a vampire is something mystical or magical. Fledgling took a different approach. Butler's vampires are explained as a separate and symbiotic species to humans. There is a sexual component to them but they are far more alien than human, so they end up somewhere between the two camps.

The book opens when Shori wakes up in a cave in incredible pain and without any memory of who or what she is. At first she simply tries to heal and survive. Soon though she begins looking for people and crosses paths with Wright and binds him to her without really meaning to. It soon becomes apparent what she is, and despite looking about 11, she's actually 53 years old.

The rest of the book is a slow discovery of what Shori is and what has happened to her. In many ways, aside from the whole vampire thing, this is just a really well written mystery.

I have to admit that I found the sexual aspects somewhat off putting. It reminded me very much of my experience of the Xenogenesis trilogy. I don't tend to think of myself as being a prude, but there is something kind of creepy about a being who looks to be a bout 10 years old having intimate relations with adult humans even if she is, in fact, over twice the age of the humans in question. I got used to it quickly and Butler did a good job of creating an alternate sense of normal, but still. . . disturbing.

Excellent book, but obviously it's not one I can recommend to my students as a general rule. Everyone else should read it though.

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

I don't usually pick up romances. I have nothing against them except that I often find them rather boring. It is probably a deficiency in me. I have a student, Bella, who likes them though, and she told me to read Everything, Everything.

Everything, Everything is a book about Madeline Whittier, a girl whose lived in the same white room breathing filtered air her whole life. She never leaves because she was diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) when she was a baby. She takes classes online and reads. If you think about narrative as a move from order (the status quo) to disorder (conflict), Madeline's life is very ordered.

Enter Olly. Olly is the mysterious boy literally next door. If Madeline's life is controlled and contained, Olly's is chaotic. He practices parkour and scales walls, sits on roofs and lives in the room with a window facing Madeline's. But this is the relationship that cannot be. They can never touch, even being in the same room with each other involves a decontamination process.

So being teenagers, they of course take the prudent course... yeah right. But I will say that Yoon gets mad props for most interesting use of a bundt cake in a narrative.

So, clearly Yoon has seen John Travolta in The Boy in a Plastic Bubble. While the premise is similar, the execution takes a hard shift about two thirds of the way through that I wasn't expecting. Overall, this was a good quick read. It features short chapters intermixed with illustration and graphic elements. The narrative is in the first person, from Madeline's point of view.

A pleasent way to spend an evening all told.

The List as a Beginning

This is a list of the pile of the books that surrounds me while I type and gives me anxiety attacks. So I pulled it apart and organized it.

In general, I'm trying to get away from these massive lists at the beginning of each month. However, in this case, I think it illustrates the challenge I face with the reading. Notice that there are 71 books on my YA list but only a handful -less than 10- on the other two lists. There's a couple of reasons for this. First, I'm doing a lot of buying for my classroom library and I choose those titles based on a couple of guidelines, but primarily because they look good or because someone has asked for them. Obviously, I therefore want to read them.

The other thing going on here is that there are several books on the YA list that I'm not sure are really YA. I've placed them there because the publisher either calls them YA or because they are published under an imprint that caters to teens. I think though that because YA can be such a lucrative area of publishing, the publishers are pushing the definition somewhat and putting things in there that might otherwise appeal to a fully adult audience.

Now, I do have plenty of non-YA on other stacks, but it is heavily weighted towards fantasy and science fiction. I'll find things to read, never fear. I just find it perturbing the absolute glut of YA I am swimming through.

Adult & Mainstream Fiction

1. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
2. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
3.  Wizards: Magical Tales From the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois 
4. The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
5.  Fantasy Stories Edited by Diana Wynne Jones
6.  Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales edited by Melissa Marr & Tim Pratt

Nonfiction & Professional Reading

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 
2. "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys" by Michael Smith & Jeffry Wilhelm (Professional Library)
3. "You Gotta Be the Book" by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm (Professional Library)

YA shelf of DOOM!

1. Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson
2. Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson
3. Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson
4. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
5. Stand Tall by Joan Bauer 
6. Tithe by Holly Black
7. Valiant by Holly Black
8. Ironside by Holly Black 
9. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
10. Roses & Bones by Francesca Lia Block
11. Story Time by Edward Bloor
12. Bad Unicorn by Platte F. Clark (Sasha)
13. Fade by Robert Cormier
14. The Secret Country by Pamela Dean
15. The Hidden Land by Pamela Dean
16.  The Riddle of the Wren by Charles De Lint
17. Little (Grrl) Lost by Charles De Lint 
18. Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano
19. Wither by Lauren DeStefano
20. Fever by Lauren DeStefano
21. Runner Carl Deuker
22. Gym Candy by Carl Deuker (Library) 
23. The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
24. Girls Like Us by Gail Giles
25. Twerp by Mark Goldblatt
26. Paper Towns by John Green (Library)
27. 172 Hours on the Moon by Johan Harstad (Library)
28. The Returning by Christine Hinwood 
29. Green Angel by Alice Hoffman (published in collection as Green Heart)
30. Green Witch by Alice Hoffman (published in collection as Green Heart)
31. The Summer Prince by Alay Dawn Johnson
32. Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link
33. The Rise of Nine by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
34. The Fall of Five by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
35. The Revenge of Seven by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
36. The Fate of Ten by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
37. United as One by Pittacus Lore (Student Waiting)
38. Legend by Marie Lu
39. Sold by Patricia McCormick (Jessica)
40. The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann
41. A Step From Heaven by An Na 
42. Bound by Donna Jo Napoli
43. Sirena by Donna Jo Napoli
44. I'll Give you the Sun by Jandy Nelson (Library)
45. Shade's Children by Garth Nix
46. The Vault of Dreamers by Caragh M. O'Brien
47. Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
48. Tricksters Queen by Tamora Pierce (Jessica)
49. Boy 21 by Matthew Quick
50. Black City by Elizabeth Richards 
51. Story Thieves by James Riley
52. There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff
53. Downsiders by Neal Shusterman
54. Everlost by Neal Shusterman
55. EverWild by Neal Shusterman
56. Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman 
57. UnWholly by Neal Shusterman
58. Elephant Run by Roland Smith
59. Tentacles by Roland Smith
60. Zach's Lie by Roland Smith
61. Fly Girl by Sherri L. Smith
62. Lament by Maggie Stiefvater
63. Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater
64. The Swan Maiden by Heather Tomlinson
65. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by April Genevieve Tucholke
66. The Final Four by Paul Volponi
67. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
68. Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
69. So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld
70. Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson (poetry)
71. Every Thing, Every Thing by Nicola Yoon (Bella)

Resolutions 2018

Last year's resolutions was a classic example of my tendency to over engineer. I walked into it knowing that it was all probably too much, but really it was a beautiful arrangement of category and subcategory. I find that kind of organization very appealing, but it's difficult to follow through on something like that. So, this year is hopefully going to be a simplification:

1. Reading Goal: 150 total books, 50 of which need to not be YA. I'm still trying to read 100 YA books a year, but let's face it that's just going to happen. The bigger issue is getting in the other stuff. So, I'm going to read the YA, but my focus is going to be getting in the nonfiction, professional reading, and non-YA fiction.

2. Apply to Grad School. 'Nuff said. I got my certification renewed which was the project for 2017, so it's time to work on the grad school thing.

3. Eliminate Kitchen Waste By Spoilage. Sources vary somewhat, but the average American family wastes about $1,500 of food a year. (The estimates range from about $1300 - $2100) While I suspect that my family is probably a bit under the average for food waste, I know that we do waste food and it's mainly through bad planning and laziness. So for a year, my focus is going to be on cleaning up those habits. No ordering takeout when there's food at home that needs cooking and no ignoring leftovers because I don't feel like eating it. As a sub issue, it's probably past time that I set up my composter. We are a veggie heavy family and those trimmings could be put to better use.

4. Writing. This is the one area where I'm going to let myself get a little complicated because it is important to me.:

• The Blog - 1 post every day and every book I read gets a post. I got pretty sloppy with it last year and I'd like to avoid a repeat.
• School Blog - Launch and maintain the school focused version of the blog.
• Daily Writing Habit - Write every day and begin working on creative writing projects. I'm not sure how to organize this yet, but I am stating it as a goal.

It's still a lot to work on, but it's less rigid. Wish me luck.