Minis - Eleanor & Park by R. Rowell, Black Box by J. Schumacher, The Pearl by J. Steinbeck

Out of the last 8 books I've read, only two were advance readers. Both are worth talking about and will get their own posts. Everything else? Well, they varied and those that I loved are old enough titles that most everyone I know has read them so I'm going for a bunch of super-minis, 3 today and then maybe a few more, later.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell - I had no idea what this book was about, apart from the fact that it's clearly a YA with a touch of romance, but my friend Tammy said I had to read it right now, so I put it on hold at my library and it showed up almost immediately.

 Eleanor was kicked out of her home by her surly, abusive stepfather. A year later, she has returned to the stifling and, at times, terrifying atmosphere she must share with her large family, all of the children crammed into a single room together.

Park is an Asian nerd who gets along well with just about everyone but feels set apart by his looks and interests. On Eleanor's first day of school, he reluctantly scoots over on the bus when nobody else will let her sit down. As they slowly get to know each other and share music and comics, Eleanor and Park find that their families are a world apart but their affection for each other is boundless.

Highly recommended - I sobbed alligator tears. A wonderful, touching, beautiful story.

Black Box By Juli Schumacher is another YA, this time one that was recommended highly but I can't recall by whom. It's the story of a family in crisis, told through the eyes of Elena, a 14-year-old whose sister is suffering from mental illness. When 16-year-old Dora becomes severely depressed and has to be admitted to a psychiatric ward, her family is at first confident that she will recover and then confused and terrified when they see how tormented she has become.

While Dora is hospitalized and then goes through the difficult adjustment to medication, Elena is befriended by an older student who is known to have been held back for a year or two. At first she's uncomfortable around him but he says he's been through the same thing with his brother. Gradually, Elena begins to trust this strange new friend and learn to cope with the emotions she has a tendency to swallow.

Highly recommended - While Black Box is not a page-turner, it's a quietly powerful story that shows how difficult it can be for people to accept and adjust to mental illness within their household. A very emotional story. I particularly loved how the book ended.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck is one of those books that a lot of people study during their high school years. Naturally, I missed it. I snatched it off the shelf on a day that I just happened to be in the mood for a short classic.

Kino and his wife Juana wake up on an ordinary day, but when their infant son's life is endangered, they must go for medical help. When the doctor refuses to see them, Kino goes pearl diving in the hopes of finding a pearl large enough to pay for the baby's care. What he finds is a pearl of unusual size and brilliance.

With the pearl in hand and the baby improving, Kino dreams of the things he'll buy, and the ways he will be able to improve his family's life. But, when he's offered only a fraction of the pearl's value, he decides he would be better off traveling to another town to find someone willing to pay the right price than take what he's offered. Of course, everyone in his village knows about the pearl so Kino and Juana encounter non-stop peril.

Not recommended - Very much a "beat you over the head" morality tale, so transparent that I cringed all the way through the book, knowing what was bound to happen (and it did). I love Steinbeck but The Pearl is just flat awful. I gave it an average rating because I like Steinbeck's style but it's not a story I'll ever return to.

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Three for National Poetry Month - On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove, House of Light by Mary Oliver and Where Robot Mice, etc. by Ray Bradbury

My subject line is out of order specifically because I didn't want Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns by Ray Bradbury to get priority placement. It's that bad. At Goodreads, I described it as "hackneyed, uninspiring, egotistical,  often clearly envious of others." It's not unusual for a poet to use another poet for inspiration but there's often an unsettling undertone of envy or current of braggadocio when he refers to literature.

Having said that, there were a few random poems that I got something out of, if only conceptually. The poem about a man reflecting on the childhood games he played with his friends while looking at the landscape in which their young imaginations soared is one anyone reflecting on a lost childhood can appreciate in spirit. But it turned a little angry in the end when he noted that there were no children outdoors because they were all watching TV (and he even got in a little dig on Walter Cronkite -- funny, from our perspective, as most people now look back fondly on the days when there was a newscaster they could trust). What would he think of children now, with their iPhones, video games, home computers and TVs?

Another poem I liked was about a drunken uncle that the family was happy to bury but who then came back to haunt them till the author, a young boy, shouted at the ghost to go away. Humorous, yet definitely one of those poems that came off as egotistical. If he's in the poem, you can bet his part is inflated. 

There were some similar themes to Bradbury's prose work. Lots of mentions of dandelions, dandelion wine, science, the future. Honestly, he should have stuck with prose and just hidden this collection away. It's amazing that anyone was willing to publish it, even given Bradbury's name power. Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns was published in 1970 and went through several printings, though. Mental shrug, verbal reject. Not recommended.

On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove is more typical of a volume of poetry, at least to this reader, in that I found poems I loved, poems that perplexed me, poems that made me think. It's a nice mix. 

One of my favorite poems is "Homework." I can't duplicate the way the poem is laid out on the page perfectly but here's an excerpt:

"The Negro and his song

are inseparable.

If his music is primitive

and if it has much that

is sensuous, this is simply

a part of giving

pleasure, a quality

appealing strongly

to the Negro's 

entire being. Indeed,

his love of rhythms

and melody, his

childish faith

in dreams . . . "

Shit,

he'll take Science, most

Exacting Art.

In school when the teacher

makes him lead

the class in song,

he'll cough straight through.

Better

columns of figures, the thing

dissected to the bone.

Better

the clear and incurious drip

of fluid from pipet

to reassuring beaker.

~from "Homework", pp. 20-21 of On the Bus with Rosa Parks

Such a nice way to show how humans have a tendency to diminish each other, to narrow our viewpoint of each other by categories like race or sex or income. Some other favorites are "Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967," which any booklover will appreciate and "Dawn Revisited," about the glory of rising in the morning, which ends:

To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong:

I'll never be through with my life.

I also love "Ghost Walk," about a haunted castle. And, of course, the title poem. 

Recommended - a lovely little collection about life in general, some of the poetry more specifically about being African American. There are several poems like "Homework" that would be especially fitting for Black History Month. I'll be looking for more poetry by Rita Dove, a Pulitzer-winning, highly feted former Poet Laureate of the United States.

I snatched up House of Light, in spite of the fact that I'd just ordered a volume of Mary Oliver's poetry, for the usual reason: to get a taste of her writing without a huge time investment. I figured I can then go back and spend more time really immersing myself in her poetry, later.

I've been pondering Mary Oliver for a while. Her poetry has been highly recommended whenever I've asked for recommendations, but I honestly knew nothing at all about her. Best to just dive in with poets, I've found. And, what I discovered is that she is a nature lover, like myself. It took some time to adjust to her poetry, which is often a little startling and graphic; but, in the end I found myself absolutely loving the sensation of drowning in the beauty. Just before I picked up House of Light, I read a line from "The Summer Day" quoted in Find the Good by Heather Lende:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

What a wonderful line to think about, frame, put to work in your everyday world. And, "Summer Day" is in House of Light, so I was thrilled to see it in context. Another favorite excerpt is in "The Ponds," as Oliver observes that life is imperfect, physically and otherwise:

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing 
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything--that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

~ from "The Ponds", pp. 58-59 of House of Light 

Isn't that beautiful? I'm so glad I bought a nice-sized volume of Mary Oliver's poetry. I'm going to enjoy it, I'm sure.

Recommended - Sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful, with special focus on nature. I think Les of Prairie Horizons was the first to recommend Mary Oliver to me, although I'm not entirely certain. Thanks, Les!

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

A few words only - The Glass Menagerie by Williams, Still Alice by Genova, Pure Drivel by Martin

I don't have all that much to say about these three, so . . . minis it is.

My F2F book group read about Tennessee Williams in The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing in February, and that prompted us to choose from amongst the works by the alcoholic authors described in Laing's book.

I'd never read The Glass Menagerie. My husband was shocked. "Everyone reads it in school," he said. I've heard that a lot, over the years. I took journalism during junior high and high school and it served as a replacement for a number of English classes toward English graduation credits - both literature and grammar classes. So, yes, I missed a lot of the books "everyone read" in school.

The Glass Menagerie is our April discussion book so the meeting hasn't happened, yet, but I enjoyed the writing and appreciated the fact that I already knew it had a tragic ending. I'm not so hot with tragic endings so I focused on the characters and the writing, both of which I found enthralling. I also absolutely loved the essay included in the edition at left, "The Catastrophe of Fame". I have Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on my classics shelves. I'll be reading more by Williams. I'd say I recommend it but you've probably already read The Glass Menagerie, right?

Still Alice by Lisa Genova is a book I received as an Advance Reader Copy, pre-release, but didn't read because my mother had just died and I was afraid it would be a downer. So, I swapped my ARC for one a friend wanted to get rid of and we were both happy.

Fast forward 7 years. You all know it's been made into a movie. I still had no interest in either reading the book or viewing the movie but when Still Alice was chosen as our March F2F discussion book I gave it some thought and then eventually got in line on the hold list at my local library. Unfortunately, there is only a single copy of Still Alice in the entire 11-library county system where we now live. So, when the timing got down to the wire and it was clear I wasn't going to get my hands on the library copy in time, I went out and bought a copy.

I was surprised. While Still Alice is horrifying and definitely a bit sad, it wasn't the depressing read I expected. In fact, I was quite impressed by Genova's writing, particularly the way she treated the heroine's illness and the family's experience with respect. I also found the way Alice's children responded uplifting, although her husband was a disappointment -- perhaps realistic, though. As it turned out, I didn't make it to this month's F2F meeting, but I'm glad I read the book, although I think it was wise not to read it when I was in serious need of sweetness and light. When I had my name added to the hold line the librarian said, "Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will donate a second copy, soon!" I had fun granting her wish.

Pure Drivel by Steve Martin has been on my shelves for ages. I'm guessing I bought it in the 90s. I came across my copy while shelving books in our home library and decided I might as well read it. It's slim and I doubted it would be one I'd want to keep.

Well, I was right about not wanting to keep it. I was not impressed with Pure Drivel, a book of humorous essays - or, at least, they're supposed to be. I like Steve Martin but I didn't find this particular book of essays all that entertaining. Only one made me actually chuckle throughout. Two others were entertaining and clever. But, in general, it wasn't a great book. I was surprised that most of the essays had been published in a respected magazine, but names do sell copy so I suppose I shouldn't have been.

Not a book I'd recommend, but I don't regret reading it because now I don't have to feel guilty about sending it out the door. Always look on the bright side, right?

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.