Loose Leafing: Currently

It seems I haven't afflicted you so much with my personal rambling lately, so I lifted this "currently" thing that all the cool kids are doing on Sundays anymore (like Kim and Suey and everybody) and have tweaked it to my liking.

Time:  9:00 PM Sunday night (yeah, I'm totally late, but it's never too late to be current, am I right?)

Place:  My kitchen table (the desk is currently being hogged)

Consuming: For lunch, I was exploring my new appreciation for sushi.  Okay, I come from rural central Pennsylvania, I am a way late comer to sushi.  Happily, a fancy new hibachi steakhouse opened in our humble little town recently, and Sundays are half-priced sushi days, so you can take a chance on new things without wasting a ton of money.  Philadelphia Roll is my stand-by, but I decided to branch out and try a Volcano Roll today, but we think maybe they brought me a Godzilla Roll instead.  So I ate that, and I quite liked it.  I see way more sushi in my future.   Then, we had steaks on the grill for dinner.  (Why yes, I am living the high life these days, thankyouverymuch).

Reading:  I just started Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble.  Okay, looking back, I might have picked this from William Morrow Paperback's blogger outreach e-mail simply because the cover is just so pretty.  Which is a good way to choose books, of course.  The jury is still out on the book itself.  But, I mean, come on.  Look at that cover!  Pretty!!

Listening:  I am 100% addicted to Spotify.  I have this swell catch-all playlist that has just about any random song that comes to my head lumped all together, and it is....how you say...quite eclectic when listened to on shuffle, which I quite love.  This week's theme in adding to the ridiculous playlist?  High school nostalgia!

Watching:  Speaking of being 100% addicted, why oh why did it take me until last month to finally start watching Breaking Bad?  Seriously (Wait, is my boss here?  I mean, seriously but not seriously, okay?), I am on the point of calling off work a couple of days this week to catch up with it before the last season starts. Also, nothing I do seems as important as watching another episode.  Reading?  Eh.  Sleeping?  Meh.  Working?  Oh definitely not.   That's right.  This just in:  TV show about cooking meth is dangerously addictive.  Cue ironic laughter.

Buying: A new mattress, at last!  (and embarrassing quantities of cheap e-books, but that goes without saying).  Next hurdle, cleaning up my dump room for when it gets delivered on Tuesday so that I won't shame myself and everyone who lives with me.  If I survive "Attack of the Killer Underbed Dust Bunnies," maybe I can live the good life for another week...  Maybe.

Not Buying:  The services of my chiropractor every week.  *crosses fingers*

I'd love to stay and chat some more, but really, all this is keeping me from the next episode of Breaking Bad.   =P

The "I Finally Read It!" Reviewlettes

Greetings all, we interrupt the shameless over-buying of cheap books for...some reading!  No, wait.  *analyzes several teetering piles of books looming over just the desk*  Surely that can't be right.  We interrupt the continuous browsing of the Kindle deals page for...some vacationing!  Wait, no, the vacationing appears to over.  I believe this place might be my home...  Okay, one more time, we interrupt the continuous cataloging of new bookly acquisitions for...some blogging!  Ah ha!  Yes, some blogging.  I do that once or twice a month, and considering that the looming pile of books begging for bloggish attention is threatening to topple onto and destroy my computer thus severing my connection from the book blogosphere forever for a couple minutes, it's probably time to re-assume my secret book blogger identity and write about them before they rebel.

It seems that much of this year that I haven't dedicated to reading brand-spanking new books, I've been reading all the books that it seems like nary a soul has failed to read except for me.  What with how I am among the last few people on the earth to enjoy these three selections, I figured a few reviewlettes are in order, if only so I can remember the books I'm reading.  Frankly, it's surprised me how quickly being a barely there blogger has plunged me into complete inability keep the books that I'm reading in my head for more than a few minutes.  I'm all like, "Wait, what did I just read last month?"  Whoa, that's bad news.  So anyway, without further digression, reviewlettes of some books you probably have already read!

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green - I know, right?  Not only had I not gotten around to reading this until this summer,  this is also the first book I've read by John Green.  Oh, the multitude of reading sins being atoned for with just this one book!  Anyhow, if you've been living in a nuclear fallout bunker or something for the last year, I should probably mention that this is the book about the teenagers with the cancer, and I loved it as much as all the people who love it loved it.  Green's terminal teens, Hazel and Gus, are almost unrealistically precocious in a way that I just ate up.  The Fault In Our Stars is full of lovable characters, romance, intelligent unpreachy contemplations of mortality, an exploration of how there is plenty of truth to be gleaned from fiction, and also, sadness.  Of course, sadness.  I had to practically speed read the last third of the book on a Monday night so that I wouldn't be caught weeping at my cafeteria table at work on Tuesday afternoon.  Rather, I wept embarrassingly much from the safety of my own home.  I laughed, I cried, I loved it.  I've already recommended it to a few real life friends who are also behind the times, and I recommend it also to you, last person on the earth to read The Fault In Our Stars!

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson  - Can I just say that I think the problem with my reading last year is that for some infernal and unexplainable reason I pretty much just abandoned YA fiction?  Truly, I swear, my love for YA grows with every year I grow to be less of a, well, young adult.  There is something about charging through a good piece of YA that is totally refreshing to my readerly soul, and it's not because I have a craving for something simple because YA these days is smart, just in a different way than "grown-up" fiction is smart.  Anywhoodle, The Adoration of Jenna Fox.  I didn't love this like I loved The Fault In Our Stars, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading it just the same.  Again, in case you yourself are just emerging from a coma that might have prevented you from reading this book before me, this one's about a girl who wakes up from a coma in a decidedly more technologically advanced future, and as she tries to recall who she was before a tragic accident, begins to discover that she's not quite all of the person she used to be.   Jenna Fox's world is interesting because it seems like just a mildly tweaked version of the world today wherein bio-ethically questionable technological advances have led us into both the miraculous and the catastrophic.  As Jenna unravels the secrets behind her post-accident life, Pearson gets to present a lot of very interesting bio-ethical quandaries involving life and death and where the true essence of a person lies.  The Adoration of Jenna Fox is an excellently paced and compelling story of how much you would do to save someone you love.


The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey - Last but not least, a book which has an intended audience of...adults!  I grabbed a copy of this at BEA the last time I was there, and I was sure I would love it.  Then all the bloggers started saying fantastic things about it, and I was doubly sure I would love it.  After all, I'm sad to report that despite pretty much every review I've read of this book being unrelentingly positive, I was disappointed.  The problem here, and the reason I've waited so long to say anything about The Snow Child is that I can't quite pinpoint why I was disappointed.  Okay, if you're returning from a lengthy undersea holiday, this book is about an older couple who decide to try their hand homesteading in the wilds of Alaska.  Mabel is unable to have a child and is crushed by the loneliness of long winters in the wilderness.  Jack is crumbling under the crushing demands of carving a farm out of a very challenging landscape.  On the night of the first snow, the two find unexpected joy in building a child out of snow.  The next day the snow child is missing, but a real child has appeared in her place. 

Honestly, I'd like a do-over on this one.  I read it over Christmas-time when things were hectic and I was busy trying to save kittens from dying and a lot of stuff was going on, and I couldn't give myself to this book like I might normally.  It's got all good ingredients - excellent characters, incredible descriptions of the dangerously beautiful Alaska wilderness, the sort of magical realism I'd normally just go bananas for, but it somehow it didn't all quite come together for me.  Faina, the snow child, always seemed more magical than real to me, and her not being quite "real enough" in my mind made it difficult for me to get emotionally involved with the latter half of the book.  I'd still happily recommend it, especially to readers who like a good dose of magical realism, but I can't say I loved it, at least, not upon my first (admittedly flawed) read.

And that's three books off my teetering pile, not to mention my overburdened shelves! 

(Oh, and by way of disclaimer, The Snow Child is the only one of these three provided by a publisher.)

Surely, you've read at least one if not all of these, what did you think?  Or perhaps you'd like to reassure me that I was not the last person in the world to, say, read a book by John Green?  ;-) 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Why look, it's the lackadaisical book blogger back to interrupt your (new) feed readers with yet another (few and far between) book review.  I know I've become a real one trick pony lately, when there are any tricks at all.  I know, I know, all book reviews and no play makes Megan a dull, dull girl, but it seems like if I'm only going to post three times a month or something similarly ludicrous, I should at least be sharing a great book with you when I do.  Good news, though, there is an acquisitions post in the works with my of late book haul.  If you're anything like me, those totally make me drool.  Until then, hopefully I can amuse you with my inability to so much as describe Neil Gaiman's latest much less actually explain why I liked it so much, what with how Gaiman somehow defies explanation and how I am vastly out of practice at describing and explaining things in general.

Adults follow paths.  Children explore.  Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of time, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

So, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  It begins with a man driving away from a funeral and surprising himself by ending up at his childhood home.  As he sits beside the farm pond that the decidedly different ladies at the end of the lane always referred to as an ocean, he recalls with unexpected clarity the momentous events of his seventh year.  They began with the suicide of a lodger in his parents' house and end with his discovery of the true nature of things at the Hempstock house at the end of the lane where things are a good deal more magical than they might appear. 

I hesitate to reveal much more than that because The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a short book that's full of surprises best met within its pages.  Suffice it to say that Gaiman is at his best creating the world of a bookish seven-year-old boy without any friends to speak of, who spends his spring holidays discovering the dangerous and magical things that lurk so closely beneath surface of the humdrum world where he lives.  Gaiman captures the perfect mix of the innate helplessness of childhood with the boy's desire to be the hero of his own story like the kids in the many books he reads.  For the second time this year, I found myself reading a book in which the narrator has no name, and that somehow makes the stories being told that much more engaging.

It's hard to describe what makes Neil Gaiman's books so compelling.  It might be his knack for expertly co-mingling the world we know with magical worlds of his own creation.  Reading Gaiman can be an exercise is whimsy and nostalgia.  His stories put me in the mind of being in grade school and reading James and the Giant Peach for the first time.  It's refreshing to be a "stuffy grown-up" and be allowed, nay, encouraged by Gaiman to believe again that magic both good and evil is never so far away as we might think.  That said, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is no mere children's book, rather it's a book that confronts the real presence of fear in everyone's life however young or old they might be, the inherent dangers of getting what you want, and the benefits of having a hand to hold onto. 

"Dunno.  Why do you think she's scared of anything?  She's a grown-up, isn't she?  Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things."

"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie.  "That's why they're monsters.  And as for grown-ups..." ... "I'm going to tell you something important.  Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either.  Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing.  Inside, they look just like they always have.  Like they did when they were your age.  The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups.  Not one, in the whole wide world."

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a great addition to Gaiman's work, and, I think, one of my favorites.  It's a beautiful modern day fairy tale that touches on universal feelings with the help of magic and myth.  If you're looking for a story to get totally caught up in this summer, then I highly recommend taking a dip in Gaiman's Ocean. 

(Many thanks to the people at William Morrow for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.)

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.)