Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Let me just start this off by saying that I  did not read this whole book. I read the first and the last chapters and was able to save myself some time by skipping the middle. I don't usually write about all the books that I start and don't finish here, but this one needed to be spoken about. This, like all my other posts, is not a book review. It's just me, talking to you, about a book that I read.

Obviously I didn't like the first chapter or I would have read more. I knew that the story was  controversial. I'm cool with that, but I was looking for a good story, not a listing of the ways this woman can get off in her middle school classroom. If there had been a good story with a good hook I would have been on board. If this had been a love story I would have been on board. If this had been a convincing profile of a psychopathic woman I would have been on board. This book is none of those stories.

It's the story of a 26 year old woman who starts her first year of teaching with the express purpose of getting it on with a 14 year old boy.

I'm not a prude. I like sexy books. I even liked 50 Shades of Gray since it had a great story regardless of the writing. But this book was not sexy it was just plain too much. I don't know if it's because I work in a public school or if it's the fact that I don't understand how anyone could be attracted to 14 year old boys except 14 year old girls. Even when I was 14 I wasn't attracted to 14 year olds. When you are an 8th or 9th grade girl you are always crushing on the 16 and 17 year old boys.

I just found it weird, and unbelievable, in a bad way. I like unbelievable, but make it believable or the story will be no good. This was no good.

I love writing and I love writers. It's a hard job. I feel for Alissa Nutting. It sucks to get bad press especially after everyone has tried so hard to pump up and talk about her book. I hope I'm wrong about this book. Maybe all the middle parts are redeeming... but I doubt it.

Orange is the New Black

I remember getting this book from the library when it first came out. It sounded interesting even though it was a hipster's account of jail. I didn't end up reading it then for what ever reason, but when I heard it was made into a Netflix series I found myself interested again.

We recently finished watching all 4 seasons of Arrested Development (including Netflix's not- so original series) and couldnt' find another new show that was as funny and entertaining until I stumbled upon this. I think I read about it in Entertainment Weekly and it jogged my memory so we started watching it.

We've only been through the first 4 episodes, but so far I love it. It's a little heavy on the lesbianism for me, but it is a women's prison after all, so I deal with it as best I can. The story is awesome. Piper is weird and so are all the other women in the prison. What I love about it are the stories that are told about why the different women are in prison. Their stories are shown through flashbacks as a way to explain their behavior in prison. Laura Prepon is amazing as Piper's ex-girlfriend and Natasha Lyonne is always a spicy quirky ingredient.

The show is an odd duck. I wouldn't call it a comedy or a drama. It's more like pure entertainment in a fish out of water kind of story. My husband isn't as big a fan as I am, but he couldnt' tell me why. I think there just isn't enough action or violence in it. He keeps looking for similarities between this and WEEDS since it is produced by Jenji Kohan as well. The only similarity that I can see it that they both tell the story of a strong women in a strange situation.

I highly recommend it. On Netflix streaming only.

PW 2013 Fall Children's Books

It's here! It's here!

I just started it last night. This issue will take a little time. It's one of my favorite issues becuase I actually create buying lists from this issue. I circle, cross out and star selections and put it in my desk for the day when I get my budget numbers from the school district in November.

So far I'm still in the articles. I loved the one about what indie booksellers do to stock their stores with kids and YA books. It made me think, " How do I become a children's book buyer?" Can I honestly be paid for that? I mean I get paid for it by the school district to buy books for the library, but I also have to read to 600 children a week too, and all for the awesome salary of $12/hour. I bet if I worked for a  book store I would get paid more than that and wouldn't have to apply bandaids and clean up bloody noses.

Oh, this magazine always make me think and drool.

5th Grade Reading List

I've got my son's reading list for 5th grade this fall.

I am not impressed.

Chocolate Touch
Chocolate Fever
Milton Hershey
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Witches
The Castle in the Attic
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
George Washington's Socks
Maniac Magee
Tangerine
BFG
The Cay
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM

I mean the choices are okay. They are all classics. A little bit of Roald Dahl never hurt anyone.
I think I was just expecting to see something more challenging. All the books seem more like 3rd or 4th grade reading level.

If I was going to choose:

Wonderstruck
Titanic: Voices from the Disaster
Tuck Everlasting
The Graveyard Book
Holes
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Hatchet
Walk Two Moons
Flipped
The Wright 3

It seems to me that the teachers are using the same books they used when they started out teaching. There is nothing new in that list. The newest book is Tangerine which was published in 1997. I know there have been a lot of great books written since then but why aren't teachers using them? Are they afraid to read new books? Are school districts afraid to approve something newer? I don't get it. If the idea is to get kids interested in books then lets give them books that make them think and that challenge them. Lets also give them books that were written in their lifetimes. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is great, but it's not a class lit set read.

It's frustrating for me both as a parent and as a librarian. Not every child has the benefit of a librarian mother to curate book choices for them. They rely on their teachers, but most teachers don't have time to read, or just plain don't make time to read. How can they teach a child to love reading if they don't themselves? My child's 5th grade reading list just shows a lack of effort on the part of the teachers and school district. I am sorely disappointed.

This is What Happy Looks Like

A 17 year old movie star accidently emails a girl in rural Maine and then likes her so much he moves his movie shoot to her town and surprises her. She has no idea he's a movie star and has to avoid him due to the paparazzi and her secret past scandal involving a rising politician.
To sum it up this book was super cute. It was well written and entertaining and I wasn't rolling my eyes at the way that teens speak to each other. I would highly recommend it as an easy cute summer read. I have to warn you though that the ending is a little bit disappointing. I love neatly tied up happy endings and this is not quite as neat as I would like. It's decent, but not perfect. I know she ended it like that on purpose because life does not always turn out neatly, but this is fiction and I like my happy endings.

I finished this yesterday morning and I am now knee deep in Celine by Brock Cole. Holy Crap is he an amazing writer. He writes like Diablo Cody in Juno. It's smart and sassy and witty and totally believable for smart aleck teen dialog. I can't tell where it's going yet, but I'm excited for the journey.

In throw back news I am also reading The Monk A Romance by Matthew Lewis. It was published in 1796. It is amazing. There is so much sex and scandal in this book it's a wonder it's not written by Jackie Collins. I love it. It has ghosts and gothic elements and monks being led astray and it  is also about true love. Is there anything better to write a story about? I think not. I can't wait to finish it.

Philippa Gregory and Women in History

I recently read The White Queen by Philippa Gregory. It was not my first foray into historical women's fiction. I can't seem to get enough of it recently. I chose The White Queen because it tells the tale of Elizabeth Woodville, the mother of the two boys who were supposedly murdered and killed in the Tower of London. It is one of the greatest historical mysteries. But I'm not wriitng here today to discuss this book.

I was at the library perusuing my favorite section, (942) English History, and I came across The Women of the Cousins War, by Philippa Gregory. She has a series of historical fiction that documents this 'Cousins War' and this is the non-fiction companion to those books. She gives great biographies of the three women who were instrumental in the War of the Roses.

Now even if you are not the least bit interested in this portion of English history, this book is worth picking up just to read her essays on Women in History and Women Excluded from History. It gave me goosebumps. She describes how women in history, if they are shown at all, are either portrayed as Eve the temptress or as Mary, mother of God. The examples are eye opening. She then goes on to give reasons as to why women were excluded from the historical record and how finally in the 20th and 21st centuries history is finally including women.

What I found so fascinating is that nowadays in order for a women to be included in history she usually has to do something that has never been done by a woman before; rule a country, travel in space, start a Fortune 500 Company. These are all very distinct jobs and trades.
In history if we know of women it is because they were the mothers, sisters, or wives of someone historical. They in essence could make history by doing what women traditioanlly do; get married and have children. No one is legendary anymore because of those things (unless of course you are a Kardashian).

What Philippa Gregory is trying to say is that these women, although hidden from history, made huge impacts in politics and history in general just by being wives and mothers. They looked out for their families by conniving and plotting. They took care of all the things behind the scenes. They educated thier children themselves and then looked out for the best education ouside of their homes. This is what made them great and gave them a lasting imprint on society.

What frustrates me is that women now, as then, are still looked down upon for taking care of their families. I am an educated woman. I am actually an engineer as well as a librarian. I worked for
years as an architect and even ran my own architectural firm. What I couldn't do was be a professional and take care of my home and my family in a way that was balanced and successful.

I am all about women's rights and I would say I am a feminist. I think women can do anything men can do, and usually better and with more compassion than men, but I'll be damned if I think it is possible to work professionally AND have a family. Something or someone suffers if you try to do both.

In the past a women was lauded just for taking great care of her family. Now you cannot get that unless you also work 40 hours a week in a profession. Since the doors have been opened to women, we are all expected to not only have a family, but also to work. You are looked down upon if you just stay home with your kids, and looked down upon even more if you stay home with your kids and don't have a college degree.

With all my expensive education (I made the first $450 payment on my Master's Degree yesterday. 119 more payments to go) I still work only part-time for $12/hour. It is my choice, yes, but it is not an adequate use or compensation of my talents. I have 3 children, 2 family businesses, 2 blogs, and a voracious reading appetite. Working full time is just not in the cards for me.

What reading those essays did for me is make me realize that even though I am a smart intelligent woman with degrees up the wazoo, I can make a difference just by being there for my children everyday and making sure that they make the right life choices. If I look out for my family's interests both in the business world and personally then I am doing things right. I don't have to walk on the moon, or write a best selling novel. History will change just because I am here and I am taking care of my family.

Thug Notes

Ohhhhh a double post today. I'm on a roll. Hopefully a ciabata roll.

Yo check this shit out.

THUG NOTES

I found this on BookRiot earlier today and I have been trying to pimp it out everwhere.

Thug Notes is ganster style Cliff Notes for classic literature. The site was just launched in May and it needs a little bit more support to go main stream.

The above link is to the website and from there you can go to YouTube and FaceBook for links and more information.

Watch the videos and laugh your ass off.

Then take a reluctant reader and have them watch a video and then put the actual book in their hands and see what happens.

I am down with whatever it takes to get people to read.

Inferno by Dan Brown

Yes if course I read it.
 I even pre-ordered it. It arrived the Tuesday before I left on my European vacation. I took it with me and carted it all over England and Paris and I didn't crack it open once. Some vacations are not made for reading.

I picked it up after I got back and read the whole thing in about 3 days. It's a Dan Brown novel. Even if it isn't the best story it does have great pacing and action making it a page turner.

I liked this one, but it's still no Da Vinci Code. This one investigates Dante's Inferno and how a madman has hidden clues over the city relating to the book and his horrible plague he is planning on realeasing into the public. It did seem a little bit forced. If he really is a madman why would he advertise what he is going to do and make everyone run around on a treasure hunt? It just seemed a little far fetched. Other than that it was very educational. I learned a lot about Italy and about Dante and art. We expect that from a Dan Brown novel and this one didn't disappoint on the educational front. The chases and close calls were very Jerry Bruckheimer and redundant.

What I loved most about this story was the end when the plague is actually released. (Sorry for the spoiler) The place that was chosen was perfect and it really made me think and want to visit the real location. What really blew my mind was the type of plague that was released. I never would have guessed and then that is what stuck with me after I had read the book. The aftermath of the plague would be way more fascinating than this book was. It needs a 900 page book along the lines of The Stand or The Passage.

So if the criteria of a good book is one that makes you think, than this is a winner. It was worth the reading of all the boring chase scenes to get to the juicy science fiction stuff at the end.

Down the Great Unknown

I live about 70 miles south of the Grand Canyon. It is a part of our lives. My kids take field trips up there every year. We all give directions to lost tourists on how to get to the Canyon. There are river runners among us, and guides and tourists and preservationists, and geologists. The Grand Canyon may as well be a part of Flagstaff, it's that intertwined with our daily lives.

Sure I've been there. It's cool the first time you go, but the more visits and the more relatives you schlep up there the more the place just starts to look like just a big hole. You go up there, you look over the edge, you drive home.

The last time I was up there in February I bought a couple of books that looked interesting. I figured if I am going to live so close to this natural wonder I should know something about it. I got this book shown above, Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick and also the Penguin edition of John Wesley Powell's own biographical description of his trip. I tried the first hand account, but it was not for me. There was little set up and context to the journey and it was, as I learned later, a very one-sided somewhat fanciful account of the trip that Powell had not in fact written during the expedition, but written several years later from his memory. His journal at the time of the trip consisted mainly of one sentence summaries of the mileage for the day and the number of rapids crossed.

Edward Dolnick's summary of the expedition was more comprehensive. It took information and stories from the journals of 3 men on the trip, not just Powell's. It gave background history on white water rafting, debating the way the 10 men actually went down the entire river in boats that were not made for the task. There was lots of history and context but there was also danger and literal cliffhangers to liven up the dry history.
I loved the book and I wasn't expecting to at all. I needed to know more about the place where I live and I thought this would be a great source. What I got was a greater appreciation for the great big hole that I live near. It's scary. We all know that. I see the articles in the newspaper every week. People die up there all the time. It's almost boring to hear that another person died at the canyon. My dad's cousin even fell in in the 90's and died. It's a big hole, but it's also a force of nature to be reckoned with.
This book gave me some insight on why a man, Powell, or any man in fact would want  to try and explore the biggest hole in the earth.

I highly recommend this book. It's fascinating. It teaches the history of the old west, and the history of the Grand Canyon in a way that is very accessible and understandable. History really does come alive in this book.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this book is that it made me want to explore. Yesterday I took the whole family up to put our feet in the mighty Colorado River and see a part of  John Wesley Powell's journey ourselves. It made the book come full circle for me. I am truly enlightened.

See here for the details of my trip to Lee's Ferry and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The 4th in Flagstaff

Photo Courtesy of AZ Daily Sun

 

 

Tomorrow is  my very favorite holiday. There are no presents involved, no familial obligations and no religious overtones. It's all about community and BBQ.

 

I love my town. We've almost lived here for 10 years in November and it is an awesome town for the 4th of July. The parade is huge. The whole community comes out and a lot of Phoenix people come up for the ability to sit outside for more than 10 minutes. Everybody who is anybody has a float in the parade. The entire town walks by in 2 hours. I love, love, love it. It's all about getting the best spot on the parade route and then waving to all the folks you know while dressed in your very best red, white, and blue. I live for this day.

 

Tomorrow my daughter will get to walk in the parade for the very first time with her gymnastics class. She is over the moon about it. Photos soon to follow. We'll probably pick up some donuts in the am and then hang out until the parade starts at 9:00 and then cheer everyone on as they walk the parade route. Ohh I'm getting goosebumps already.

 

 

Afterwards we will be heading to a light lunch and then a showing of The Lone Ranger with the whole family. Then we head to my parents house for an afternoon BBQ.

 

Finally we'll top the day off with some illegal fireworks smuggled in from last summer in Nebraska (don't worry they are only sparklers, we don't want to spark the forest on fire), followed by beer and champagne on the back porch.

 

That is some good all American livin. I love being an American. You can have all your politics and internation issues, but to me I celebrate America by simply celebrating community, parades, BBQ and beer.

 

Book Collectorz

So I re-bought and updated my book Collectorz software. I've used this stuff before to try and catalog my vast collection of books, but I just couldn't get my stuff together to do all the books.

Here's why: I didn't have a scanner or for that fact a reliable laptop.

I've had my MacBook for a couple of years now and don't think I could ever live without it. I also have a big HP desktop for all my business stuff, but for personal perusal of the interwebs the Mac is the bees knees. I can write anywhere and now I can catalog anywhere.

I bought some cheap $30 scanner from Amazon. The Collectors software doesn't officially recognize he scanner, but it works perfectly. I can single scan, or batch scan, but when batch searching there will be some titles that Collectorz does not recognize and then you have to stop and figure out book has a wack barcode. It's more  tedious to single scan, but more accurate.

So far I've only done about 250 titles in my office and those are just the loose ones not on shelves in my "ToBeRead" pile. I'm anxious to get it all done, but it is a lot of work. After I've scanned them in I have to go back and catagorize the books by genre. The software will select the subjects, but you have to choose the genre. It's actually more fun that way. I can split all my books into just 3 genres or 30 and it will still keep the subject headings regardless of what genre I choose.

 It will definitley take a while to get everything just as a want it, but hopefully this will keep me from buying books multiple times. It seems whenever I'm looking for a classic book I run out and buy a copy and then find I already have 2 copies in various parts of the house. It's a summer long project and I only have a couple of more weeks to go.

I'll spend a little bit more time exploring Book Collectorz and the ins-and-outs of the software and really get a great listing of my entire library. Ohhh it just gives me goosebumps to think about it... lists and lists of perfectly catagorized books that I already own! Oh the joys of being a librarian.

Here is the link to Book Collectorz .

July 1 2013 Aquisitions

Toady I took a little me time to visit the local used bookstore, Bookmans. I needed a break from the kids and the household chores (today I washed all the couch coushins) and the bookstore seemed like the perfect escape.
Whenever my Amazon cart gets a little too full I check out the library, of course, but then also Bookmans. I don't like the pressure of library books sometimes. I would rather keep the book forever and read at my leisure.

The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe  (1987)
I'm hoping this is the ultimate 80's period book. I want to be immersed in the excess that I missed out on since I was only a kid.

Harvard Yard - William Martin  (2003)
This was an impulse buy. I love Boston and this book promises to combine history, architecture, and libraries in the search for a lost Shakesperean play.

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing  (1962)
I recently read that this was one of the 100 best novels of all time and I had never heard of it, so of course it went into my Amazon cart. It seems like something I might like, combining something vaguely about women and mental illness. I could be wrong, but I'll have to read it to find out.

I was disappointed to find that there were no copies of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.

I headed over to the history section and picked up some awesome biographies. My recent trip to England has me reading up on English history, so:

The Wives of Henry VIII   by Antonia Fraser
The Life of Elizabeth I   by Alison Weir
Queen Victoria   by Christopher Hibbert

Will I have tiem to read these this summer? Probably not. I've got about 14 books ahead of these that are in my MUST read pile.

Theodore Boone: The Activist

This is the 4th in the series of Theodore Boone and I've read every one. Theo is a cool kid who gets involved in almost everything in his town. Every big event in town seems to involve Theo or his parents law firm is some way. In this story Theo gets involved in a real estate development situation that will take one of his best friend's family farm to build a bypass around their town. His parents want him to stay out of politics, but Theo wants to fight for what he feels is right. Overall Theo's a good kid, but he snoops and has squirrely was of finding out information that he needs that will help save a friend or advance his cause. There are a lot of moral issues involved, which makes these books great for kids. It helps them distinguish right from wrong and how to act in extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes they can seem a bit dry before all the bits of the story come together, but it's worth it in the end to stick with it.
They seem a bit much for most of my 5th graders. I have the first two in the series  at the library and they rarely get checked out even though I recommend them heavily. When I mention the word 'lawyer' kids seem to stop being interested. It could be they are just too young for the series yet. If I could just get one kid to finish one book in the series I think word of mouth will take over and make these popular some day. I just need to find the right kid.
All the books in the series have issues that are serious, but still understandable and age appropriate for kids. I think they will make kids think about issues that they might not be aware of. I will keep reading them as long as John Grisham keeps writing them.