The Size of the Truth by A. Smith, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by Salinger, Collage and Construction by H. Weiss

Well. This is a hodgepodge. I looked back over the list of books I've read and found that there are 4 I haven't reviewed. One is The Mueller Report, which I think I'll start quoting, next week (you should see the number of flags in that book). The rest are random and none are ARCs; all were purchased at some point, so there's no need to say much.

The Size of the Truth by Andrew Smith is a middle grade story about Sam, a boy who fell down a well when he was 4 years old and was so traumatized that he didn't speak for years. While he was in the well, he encountered a talking armadillo.

Now 11, Sam has been moved 2 grades ahead and is feeling traumatized all over again. Everyone is bigger, especially James, the boy Sam blames for his fall into the well. Sam's father wants him to go to the science and math magnet school and MIT but Sam wants to be a chef. Gym sucks and the teacher seems to hate him. Everyone is making him feel like he has no control over his life.

As the present-day story is told, the tale of Sam's time in the well with Bartleby, the talking armadillo, unfolds. Of course, the armadillo was all in his mind (or was it?) The Size of the Truth is a fun read and all the way through the book I was so convinced that the armadillo was real that I kept stopping myself to question how on earth it was that someone had managed to convince me a clearly-not-real character was, in fact, real and not a figment of the child's imagination.

I do recall having a bit of trouble with the fact that the 4-year-old knew so much, including how to swim. But, obviously Sam is a pretty sharp kid or he wouldn't have been bumped up 2 grades. I still had trouble swallowing his level of knowledge, although I shouldn't because I knew a little girl who was that far ahead of her age range at 5.

Recommended - Smart and entertaining with some terrific lessons. I particularly liked what Sam learned about James and how memories can be distorted.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction by J. D. Salinger is a book of two novellas (I think), which I read during a weekend readathon. I posted a couple photos of the book to Instagram but chose not to do any updating at the blog because I figured it would be too time-consuming and the whole idea was to read as much as possible, after all. There's something very real about Salinger's writing and the moment I read that opening paragraph, I was hooked. I loved "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters". I love the Glass family and it was nice to revisit them.

"Seymour, an Introduction" was a bit more philosophical, much like Franny and Zooey but without the nice stretches of description in which the family is just being human, so I didn't care for the second story as much. The great thing about Salinger was his straightforward descriptive ability and characterization. The awful thing was that he was too smart for his own good. I find his philosophical meanderings exhausting. But, it was great to go back in time and learn a bit about Seymour, his love of poetry, and how he and his friend kept getting in trouble for going off to talk poetry when they were in the military. In general, I kind of adore Salinger.

I definitely recommend Salinger, in general, and particularly loved "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters", of the two stories.

Collage and Construction by Harvey Weiss is an ugly old book that I bought in the library sale so long ago that I didn't even recall owning it. I came across the battered copy while I was going through books, trying to find some to donate. It's a children's book that describes the difference between collages and constructions, gives examples by the author and other artists (often with photos of museum pieces), and describes how to come up with a theme, the items needed to create them, and the actual process of creating or building.

I looked up Harvey Weiss, after I finished reading the book. He was an interesting man. He wrote quite a few how-to books and I wouldn't mind finding more of them to read but they were mostly published a long time ago, like this one (1970 is the copyright date). I also looked up some of the artists whose works were included and I'd like to read more and see more of one of those artists' works. I'm still not buying from Amazon but it's a book of one of the featured artists' work that I might break my boycott for . . . eventually.

At any rate, the book was fascinating and informative enough that I'd probably keep it if I didn't need to get rid of books and it didn't happen to be so grubby. Recommended, if you can find a copy.

©2019 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.

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey is one of those secondhand classics that I spent years collecting (seriously, you should see my classics shelves; they're great) which then spent years collecting dust. Now that I'm back to challenging myself to read a classic read per month, I'm happy to be diving back into those particular shelves.

Franny and Zooey contains two sections: one from Franny's point-of-view and one from Zooey's, Zooey being a nickname for Zachary. In the first section, Franny's boyfriend comes for a visit but during dinner Franny slowly goes to pieces and by the end of supper she has collapsed. In the second part of the book, Franny is home after suffering the nervous breakdown during dinner with her boyfriend. Pale and tearful, she spends her time alternately crying and sleeping on the couch while her mother tries to feed her chicken soup and her brother attempts to talk her into understanding the source of her distress in order to knock her back to her senses.

There were two particular things I got out of the reading of Franny and Zooey. The first was that it's definitely a product of its time, with long-winded, philosophical dialogue and a bit too much superfluous swearing. The swearing felt unnatural to me in a way I don't recall thinking the swearing in Catcher in the Rye came off, possibly because it was Holden thinking or saying all the swear words in Catcher but the people around Franny who used a rougher mode of speech when she was the one going to pieces. Most of the characters chain smoked in public and private, as well -- something that seems odd in today's mostly smoke-free environment. The fact that religion and/or philosophy was at the core of Franny's breakdown also felt like it was a very time-sensitive thing. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Salinger did seem to enjoy writing about breakdowns, didn't he?

The second thing I got out of the book was that, yes, I do believe Salinger was pretty impressive. If you can tolerate the idea behind the book, which is a bit odd (the cause of the breakdown) and put up with the long-windedness of the dialogue, it's actually kind of hard to put down. I have a 1980s copy and by that point it was in its 45th printing. 45th!!! That's any writer's sweetest dream.

I had to become accustomed to Salinger's style, I confess. At first, the dialogue just exhausted me. But, then I found myself sucked in, partly because the Glass family's history was slowly revealed and it became clear in that onion-peeling plottish way that everyone was deeply affected by the loss of the eldest Glass son, Seymour, who was the kindest of the children and apparently the most sensitive as he died by suicide. I had no problem whatsoever keeping the Glass children distinct in my mind because the characterization was so sharply drawn, even though only Franny, Zooey, and their mother actually appear in the book.

Highly recommended - I do like Salinger. I'm one of those people who fall on the love side of the love/hate polarization of Catcher in the Rye readers, so while there were things I found awkward about Franny and Zooey -- the basis for Franny's breakdown being so weird (although, in the end, it's implied that the book was more of a mechanism for expressing her grief -- at least, that's how I saw it) and all the uncomfortable swearing, for example -- I found the Glass family fascinating and I wanted to know what would happen. What caused Franny to fall apart? What was Zooey trying to accomplish as he talked her through her breakdown and brought up the book that started it all? The ending is fabulous. In just a few pages, after you've finally gotten the idea that Franny's obsession with the book may be connected to her trauma over the loss of Seymour, at least tangentially, Zooey does something that helps to moor her and you just want to give him a hug for doing something so wise and comforting.

Somewhere, I've also got a copy of Salinger's Nine Stories, which I recall being stories of the Glass family. I'll have to see if I'm right about that. If so, I'll seek out my copy because I'd definitely like to read more about the Glass family.

In case you're wondering, I took a raft of photos of Franny and Zooey with various backgrounds and chose the one with Izzy partly because it's a moody book and both the cat's face and the lighting in this particular frame look kind of moody, partly because I just like pictures of cats with books.

©2019 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.