World War Z...

....is a perfectly good zombie movie, which I would have liked had I not met its much smarter cousin, the book it was supposedly based upon.

I've figured out the problem.  I'm not so terribly against movies that aren't faithful replicas of their books.  I realize that you're driving at a different audience and you have time constraints and you need a little tighter plotting with a movie.  When a movie isn't 100% faithful to its book, I'm not usually all that bothered.  Unless, I just read the book.  Then it's like a slap in the face.  If I read World War Z a couple of years ago and then saw the movie this weekend, I probably would have happily accepted the movie for what it is - an exciting, entertaining zombie flick catering to the masses who are dying to see a great action movie this summer.  The zombies are acceptably scary.  Brad Pitt makes a good, quick-thinking hero.  There are lots of those tension-filled moments when you have to look at the screen through your fingers because you know a scary zombie is about to drop in "unexpectedly."  It's a good movie, but having finished the book just this month, I set myself up for all kinds of disappointment.

This is why I no longer wish to be that person who reads a book in preparation for the movie's debut.  It serves me poorly.  I would be better off in most cases not reading the book at all before its movie comes out than to read it shortly before the movie becomes out.  Once the fog of forgetfulness sets in, and I'm happy to recognize a general resemblance between book and movie, I'm a forgiving viewer.  Before the fog of forgetfulness?  Then I'll just want my money back because they took a sort of "thinking person's" zombie book and turned it into a more or less run-of-the-mill zombie movie in comparison.  The two are so dissimilar with the book lurking in my recent memory that it practically seems that this movie was just stealing the name of a book for a recognition boost with little effort to re-create virtually any of the book's situations on film.  Admittedly, I guessed that World War Z would be a tough book to take to the big screen, but it's almost like they didn't even try.

Happily, the one great effect of this going to see movie World War Z is that it actually made me appreciate book World War Z much more.  I finished it earlier this month and found it to be a good read, but I didn't realize just how much I was captivated by it until strikingly little of it was to be found in the movie.

Told in the style of an oral history, Max Brooks' World War Z tells the story of the zombie wars from the early days when the zombie infection is just starting to take hold, through the Great Panic when it seemed that humanity stood little chance of surviving the hungry undead, to the eventual battlefronts as humanity makes a stand against an enemy almost too dead to kill.  As Brooks "interviews" many of its survivors, the zombie war and its global implications take shape to dramatic effect.  Brooks' novel is not an action/adventure thrill ride, rather it is a bizarrely thoughtful and thorough exploration of the unexpected toll the zombie apocalypse takes on an unsuspecting world and the many ways it shapes the planet's future long after the zombie plague has been taken in hand.  Brooks leaves no stone unturned exploring the psyches of a soldier in a failed publicity stunt of a battle against zombies in Yonkers, a twisted capitalist who invented and marketed a worthless vaccine, the man who re-united Russia into a newly formed religious state, the supposedly "heartless" man whose cold and calculated plan is the only one that can save South Africa from total zombie takeover.  Out of Brooks' many encounters with survivors from around the globe emerges a painstakingly creative, comprehensive and believable tale about a world that looked a lot like ours that was ill-prepared to combat  a threat that's never been seen before, a world where humans are hunted almost to the verge of extinction, and a world where those humans ultimately have to find a way and the fighting spirit to adapt and conquer the terror of the undead.

Truly, World War Z is a thinking man's zombie novel, a novel that can easily satisfy your inner zombie nerd and your inner international relations dork at the very same time.  If you want a story that makes you think about life, the world, the future (uh, with or without zombies), and everything, read World War Z.  If you're more in the market for an action-packed thrill ride with a sympathetic hero who will stop at nothing to save the world and his family from zombie apocalypse, watch World War Z.  Ah, but to enjoy both, this might just be one of those rare occasions where you would be better served watching the movie first and enjoying it on its own terms before you tackle the much (much!!) more thorough and compelling book.

Did you read the book?  See the movie?  Both?  What did you think?

Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates

It's that time of year again.  Actually, it hasn't been this time of year for quite some time, but I've missed it.  I'm speaking, of course, about the springtime, when I, for some reason, love to read a good prison memoir.  Shakespeare Saved My Life is just one link in a chain of very excellent prison-driven stories that tend to find their way into my hands in April/May, like Picking Cotton and Orange is the New Black.  There's just something about the prison system that proves to be fascinating to me, so when an e-mail landed in my box offering me this memoir of a college professor's time taking Shakespeare into maximum security solitary confinement, I knew I was read to "return to prison."

Dr. Laura Bates, professor of English at Indiana State University, once thought prisoners in long-term solitary confinement were beyond rehabilitation.  She thought education in prisons should focus on first-time offenders, those more likely to return to society and change their ways as a result of what they'd learned.  That all changed when she finally succeeded in opening the doors to the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility's Solitary Housing Unit (SHU), where she came face to face with some of the most dangerous of inmates and determined to teach them Shakespeare.

Bates went into SHU not knowing what to expect, and emerged with an unlikely group of Shakespeare scholars with a decidedly unique perspective, not the least of which is Larry Newton, a convicted murderer serving out a life sentence whose several escape attempts keep him from even joining the group that Bates was able to convene in SHU. Bates quickly realizes Newton's gift for unpacking Shakespeare's meaning and taps his thoughts to produce workbooks for other prisoners and even her university students. This work is life-altering for both Newton and the many students whose Shakespeare discussions cause them to look at their lives and their incarceration with new eyes.

I have mixed feelings about Shakespeare Saved My Life.  Considering the fact that it is a book about the remarkable insights even a very uneducated prisoner can bring to Shakespeare, its style seemed almost patronizing to me, as it might to its other non-incarcerated, more educated readers.  The chapters are very short, and the writing style is very uncomplicated.  There's a bit too much telling mixed in with the showing.  Telling me outright why education is valuable to and should be given to prisoners is not necessary if you do a good job of showing me, which Bates certainly does.  Likewise, Bates need not go on explicitly extolling what an insightful Shakespeare scholar Larry Newton is when she's already done a fine job of revealing through his speech and his writing how very able he is to decode Shakespeare and introduce the Bard to his fellow inmates.  Bates seems to push a little too hard, and at times, the belaboring of her points felt condescending, which is bizarrely incongruous with a woman who so successfully brought Shakespeare into what should have been a very hostile environment. 

Despite my confusion over the writing style, I found the content of Bates' memoir to be fascinating.  I struggled with Shakespeare through high school, and even after college struggled to draw meaning from Hamlet without the help of a commentary.  Even now I hesitate to wade any further into Shakespeare's work because I fear that so much of its meaning would elude me, and I doubt my feelings are unique among a good percentage of the population.  This makes it that much more impressive that not only did Bates find a collection of willing students in supermax, but she also found a group who actively engaged with Shakespeare's work and discovered that much of its meaning could relate to their lives.  Bates' experiences are a powerful testament as to why education should be available in prison, despite many arguments against it, some of which were yet echoing in my mind even as they were about to be ably disproved.  As Shakespeare's work speaks to prisoners who are supposed to be beyond rehabilitation, Bates shows that their lives are changed, and so, to her surprise, is her own.

(Thanks to the publisher, Sourcebooks, for providing me with a copy for review.)

The Grave of God's Daughter by Brett Ellen Block

There's a certain joy in reading a book that all your blogger friends love and loving it, too.  I do it with some frequency, and it's always awesome having your faith in all your most trusted blogger brethren affirmed.  There is another joy, however, and that is discovering a great backlist book that it seems that none of your blogger friends, or really any blogger that you can find has reviewed.  It's a bizarre and rare sensation to enjoy a book that seems to have elicited no blogger attention.  I mean, jeez, book bloggers as a collective entity read a ton of books both new and old, so in my insular little world, it seems that there must be at least one blogger out there that has read each worthy book, however incredibly ludicrous that thought might be what with there only being so many bloggers, and book blogging becoming popular only lately.

Fear not, I am coming to a point.  Any moment now.  Wait for it.  Waaiiit for it....

So, I had this book on my shelf that I'm pretty sure I didn't even buy.  I think my well-intentioned parents (yay for well-intentioned parents!) attended a book sale that I couldn't make it to, and plucked this trade paperback from obscurity.  It then landed on my shelf thus re-attaining its obscurity for any number of years, which I hesitate to even surmise.  After which, one February day in 2013, LibraryThing and Random.org delivered into my hands a, "I can't choose, oh just surprise me," read, and thus I stumbled (again) upon The Grave of God's Daughter by Brett Ellen Block, which I read and loved and am happy to introduce to the blogosphere.  Ahem, there will be no need to link up your post where you rave about the awesomeness of this book, thus proving me wrong and raining on my parade.  Okay, you can, but I won't know whether to be excited or mad at you, so you might be taking your chances.  Hopefully (?) nobody is now struggling with this quandary, and you're all just like, "Shut it Megan, and start talking about the actual book!"

The Grave of God's Daughter begins with a woman returning to her hometown for her mother's funeral and remembering her girlhood in Hyde Bend, a factory town nestled in the Allegheny mountains.  Most of the town's residents are Polish immigrants who use their language to blockade the town from outsiders.  The families in the town, most of the all the narrator's, live hardscrabble lives, eking out a living working either in the town's steel mill or its chemical plant, and faithfully attending Mass at Saint Ladislaus church.  It's the type of small town where everybody seems to know everyone else's business, but secrets still run deep.

Times are especially hard for the young narrator's family, so hard that her mother has fallen to pawning their meager belongings while her father drinks his paycheck at the town's one tavern.  Determined to buy back one of her mother's most prized possession, the girl secretly gets a job delivering packages for the local butcher.  Through the job and the momentous events of that year, the girl is startled to discover a deep well of secrets lurking beneath the surface of the town, not the least of which involves her own family.

I was actually, for some reason, staggered by how much I enjoyed this book.  Whenever I was forced to put it down, I found myself saying to myself in surprised awe, "I really like this book." The Grave of God's Daughter is a different kind of page-turner.  Usually when I find myself referring to a book as a page-turner it's because it's a very plot-heavy, action packed, thrill-a-minute sort of read, but I'd hesitate to describe The Grave of God's Daughter as such.  Rather, it is so well-crafted and well-paced with such a supremely engaging narrator that it's hard to put down. In fact, I was so caught up in the narrator's tale, in her breathing life into her hometown and the mystery of it as it intertwined with her own life, that it took me nearly two thirds of the book to realize that said narrator is never actually given a name. 

Block expertly brings to life the hardscrabble life of her unnamed narrator. She shares a bed with her brother in a house with three rooms, is frightened of the old lady down the street, discovers a dogfighting operation while posing as a boy to make the butcher's deliveries, has the profoundly guilty conscience of a Catholic schoolgirl, and sincerely believes that when she started lying, she set into motion this momentous time of her life when all the lies of a family and a town are beginning to be revealed to her.  The Grave of God's Daughter is a profound coming of age tale set in a unique place with absolutely vivid characters that I would recommend to anybody who doesn't mind a bit of darker story and discovering a diamond in the rough.

Unplugged

What a bizarre (almost) two months.  I have been effectively almost unplugged from social media since the end of March, not because I made any special commitment to be, just because it kind of happened that way.  Other than trolling Facebook for e-book deals and arbitrarily "liking" the cute things all my friends' babies keep doing (provided they were cute enough to fend off my irritation that everything in my Facebook feed is either somebody announcing they're pregant or posting a picture or story of their cute freaking baby, whose cuteness is often a subject of debate).  Oh, and Instagram.  I occasionally have the desire to prove by photographs that I do lots of fun and awesome things, so Instagram gets in there once in a great while, because, as it turns out, I, uh, don't do that many fun/awesome/photo-worthy things, but I mean, there was that one time I went to DC....

Anyhow, yeah, I haven't posted anything since Easter.  It's more than likely that I've not commented on your posts, much less read them.  Okay, I might have read some because Feedly is on my phone, and I need a dose of the bookish once in a while, but comments?  Not so much.  I have been traveling and having epic yard sales and cleaning the house and watching The West Wing and eating dinner with friends and driving to far places to eat dinner with other friends and not always making myself feel like I'm choosing to do the wrong thing.  I expect more of the same in the near future.

You see, as soon as the sun came out and springtime came, any desire I had to boot up my laptop after yet another grueling day spent slaving away on the computer at work was totally lost.  I've been addicted to my computer for so long  that the thought that I could pretty much abandon it and not miss it has been astonishing me.  As you might be able to tell by my sudden and probably unexpected reappearance I have, at least in part, started to miss it.  But these last months have been good.  It turns out that when I turn my computer off for a while I have so much more time to do all of the other things I enjoy that I forgot that I enjoyed - like keeping up with friends I get to see in person, hanging out with my family, watching great TV, and, you know, reading books without the looming task of having to always have something to say about them and being chained to my computer for most of every Saturday because weekdays are full of full-time jobs and assorted life responsibilities, not so much writing blog posts. 

I have so very much enjoyed my two months, but at long last, I've found that I've missed being occasionally immersed in the bookish, ergo, this is not a farewell letter, as a few weeks ago it might have been following numerous days of navel-gazing over the wisdom of keeping up with such a demanding hobby that turned out to be so easy to lay aside for weeks and weeks.  As it happens, I've started to miss reviewing books and seeing what my internetty friends are up to and so on and so forth. 

So I am calling forth the latest of many lazy blogging renaissances in which I commit to being a suckier blogger than ever, but while I'm sucking, I will damn well be enjoying it on my own lazy, inconsistent terms.  I'm sure I'll stop by and comment on your blogs in utterly sporadic fashion and will post content here in just as random a manner, and if you still read my ramblings I will be most certainly happy.  I've been a little weary of blogging since it became about creating "an audience" and maintaining a "brand."  I don't want to feel like I need to promote myself on sixteen different social media sites to be worth reading.  When I started doing this, just reading and talking about books was enough, and it was easy and it was fun until things changed and it became hard work to keep up with the blogging hordes who started after me and rapidly surpassed me and blogging began to feel like another exercise in always feeling not quite good enough.  So I'm flipping the off switch on building "my brand" and "my audience."  I'm closing the door on stretching myself too thin throwing myself into all different kinds of social media and creating 650 unique ways for you to follow my blog.  I'm not interested in challenging myself, and I probably won't be reading along, either.  When I comment on your blog, I'm going to do it because I want to comment on your blog, not because I have some unhealthy need to get you to comment on mine or because I feel guilty for disappearing for *insert lengthy period of time here*. 

I'm ready to cut some of the "fat" and the guilt off of my blogging and be more undependable than ever. If I lose readers that I haven't already lost, that's okay, I can learn to like talking to myself, and reviewing books can be its own reward.  That said, I sure hope some people will still stick with me, because it's much more fun (not to mention less crazy) to talk with friends than to talk to myself. 

And that is all, at least until the forthcoming reviews that will indeed be coming forth. 

*takes a bow*

Loose Leafing: Happy Easter and Good Stuff

Happy Easter, everyone! 

I actually did my Easter celebrating with both family and friends yesterday.  Instead of having several Easter activities spanning two days, we compiled them all into one.  It was a fantastic idea.  Not only was it a nice low-key dinner, we also had fun dyeing eggs together, and celebrating my now eleven-year-old cousin's birthday.  Even better, yesterday's weather was beautiful, while today's is kind of drizzly, so all in all, yesterday was the perfect un-Easter and today is the perfect day to relax and catch up on some reading and blogging. 

After one day of nice weather and hope for some more in the near future, it's dawned on me how down in the dumps I have been about, well, everything.  With the return of decent weather, I've found a new drive to try and focus on the good things about life instead of being always mired in the less good things.  So, today I'm not going to tell you about how I'm playing a months long game of whack-a-mole with various physical ailments that seems not to be flagging or how my job will soon be piling on more work that might make it physically impossible to stay there in the long term, but I will tell you about...

Dogsitting.  I'm live-in dog/house sitting for a friend of an acquaintance again.  This has been one of those mixed blessings where it seems like it should be easy money, and in a way it is, but then a slew of unexpected events kind of put a wrench in the whole "easy" part - escape artist Yorkies, malfunctioning garage doors, an assortment of murdered small animals, etc.  Now, on the eve of the last day of what will probably be my last time dogsitting (they're moving away), I've come to enjoy the time to kind of put my life on pause, relax, step back, and re-orient myself in what's going on with me because I don't have to be bedeviled by the details.  That, and a little extra cash is nothing to sneeze at, too.  Even with all its bumps in the road, I really think I'm going to miss this. 

Getting My Picture Taken With the Easter Bunny.  A co-worker of mine and I happend upon the Easter Bunny in the halls of the hospital where we work on Friday, and we couldn't pass up the chance to nab him for a photo-op.  I truly can't remember the last time I had my picture taken with the famous Bunny, but it put a smile on my face.

Travel Plans.  Travel plans are always good and I finally have a trip to D.C. set in stone.  I'm looking forward to wandering museums, marveling at monuments, and dining on delicious food a few weeks from now.  Even better, it seems like this could be just the beginning of a good season of getting out of town!

The West Wing.  Speaking of D.C., how excited am I that I and the parents have re-subscribed to Netflix just in time to stream the episodes of one of my very favorite TV shows ever that I had totally forgotten was one of my very favorites.  Here's to a show that shows you that your jaded attitude toward politics is totally valid while at the same time giving you some hope that there might be out there in politics a few decent people who want to do some good for the American people in whatever way they can.  Watching it again, I'm pretty sure I might be able to blame Aaron Sorkin in large part for my political science degree that I'm putting to no good use.  I think younger me wanted to be as articulate and passionate as his characters.  Younger me also failed to notice that said articulate and passionate characters all had (fictional) law degrees from Ivy League universities and probably weren't getting anywhere paying their law school loans while they were busy serving at the pleasure of the President.  Oops.  My career aspirations aside, I freaking love this show, and it's put me off nearly all the shows that are actually airing new episodes right now. 

Keeping In Touch.  The whole living in somebody else's house thing that I've been doing this past week really helped eliminate most of the distractions that keep me from doing a better job keeping in touch with a lot of friends.  I spent a lot of Friday night phoning and texting some people that I'd been neglecting, and it was good to catch up with them, so good I hope to do it more often.  Turns out I miss these people.  They should all travel with me, and then we could have a good stuff double-whammy!

I think that wraps up the good stuff for now.  That's quite a bit more good stuff than I expected, as it so happens.   Here's hoping I can find so much good in the coming weeks. 

So, what's good in your life?