Sunday Salon - August 14

It's been a bittersweet week. My baby had her last first day of school (college doesn't count, not really). As I contemplate the next few months, I foresee a lot of tears (mostly mine), a lot of fun (mostly hers), and a lot of firsts mixed in with a lot of lasts. I'm wondering how that might effect the kinds of books I'll be picking up.

Coming up soon is a guest review of Lev Grossman's latest, The Magician King, the sequel to his hugely popular The Magicians. Last Christmas we gave Mini-him's girlfriend The Magicians which she tore through. So it was only logical to give her the opportunity to read The Magician King since she'll be able to offer a review that can compare this one to her impressions of  The Magicians.



Parry Gripp, who, I gather, is a regular YouTube contributor, is a huge fan of Grossman's. I'm all for anyone who wants to promote books!

I love the idea of finding new ways to display and store books and this idea for industrial pipe shelving certainly is unique. But am I alone in thinking that this doesn't look good for the books?

Coming up this week, the thoughts of the Omaha Bookworms on Willa Cather's O, Pioneers as well as the latest installments of Mythology Mondays and Fairy Tale Fridays. What are your reading plans for this week?

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Art

One of the things I've enjoyed since I started Fairy Tale Fridays is looking for the artwork to include in my posts. I've stuck to the traditional drawings, largely because I wasn't finding a lot of more modern interpretations. Thanks to my niece, I've discovered a page on Stumble! that features minimalist artwork for fairy tales. I'm liking these almost as much as my beloved Arthur Rackham works.

Rackham's work is so traditional, so appropriate to the feel of the fairy tales, that it seems that it must be hundreds of years old as well. But Rackham (9/9/1867 - 9/6/1939) didn't even begin studying art until 1885 and the works for which he is famous were not created until after the turn of the century. By that time, Rackham had developed his own technique, explaining why his pieces are so instantly recognizable.

Other well-known fairy tale artists are Maxfield Parrish, Gustave Dore, and Edmund Dulac. While Dore's works are literally and figuratively darker, Parrish and Dulac's works are all about color.

But Lisa, you as, were there no women illustrators? Why, yes there were; thank you for asking. Among the better known female illustrators of fairy tales are Margaret Ely Webb, Jessie M. King (a Scotswoman whose work was influenced by the Art Nouveau movement), Helen Stratton, Jennie Harbour, and Anne Anderson (whose work was a bit more stylized).

Jessie Wilcox Smith is, perhaps, the most famous of the female fairy tale illustrators.Smith, a contemporary of Rackham's, was as well known for her magazine covers as she was for her children's book illustrations and her illustrations for Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1916) are housed in the Library of Congress.

You may notice, if you should happen to click on all of these links, that all of these artists are deceased. There appear to be almost no modern fairy tale works to be found, making me even more happy to have found that page on Stumble! but, once again, I'm left wanting more. Let the research continue!

We Need To Talk About Kevin: The Movie Adaptation

Three years ago, Mari, of Bookworm With A View, read We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver's Orange-Prize winning eighth novel. When she finished, she put it in my hands, telling me it was a book that I had to read. She was right, although we had very different experiences with the book. I always say that reading We Need To Talk About Kevin is like peeling off a bandage. For some, the only way to get through the experience is to rip if off; for others, it needs to be peeled off slowly. Mari raced through the book. Here's what I had to say about the book at the time:

"I could never read more than about 30 pages of this book at a time because of the emotions it generates. I couldn't imagine feeling the way Eva did about Kevin from the beginning, I couldn't fathom the relationship between Franklin & Eva and trying to pin down a feeling about Kevin was difficult. The book is written with brutal honesty; Eva does not sugar coat her own behavior or emotions. This book, exploring nature versus nurture, is definitely worth the effort."

When I first read that a movie adaptation of this book was going to be released, I had mixed feelings. Done well, it would make a fascinating, horrifying movie. But would I be able to watch it?

Starring the always amazing Tilda Swinton and versatile Charles C. Reilly, the movie recently appeared at the Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews. Given the cast and the reviews, I'm certain that I'll see this movie at some point. Maybe it will be in the comfort of my own home, where I can slowly peel off the bandage, pausing the DVD whenever things get too tense. Which they will.


We Need to Talk About Kevin Bande-annonce by toutlecine

Have you read the book? Will you see the movie?

What Language Is by John McWhorter

What Language Is (And What It Isn't And What It Could Be) by John McWhorter
272 pages
Published August 2011 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours

In What Language Is, best-selling linguist John McWhorter explores languages throughout the world, explaining how they have evolved over time...or why they haven't, looking at languages spoken by only a few hundred people to the biggies, like Mandarin and English.

As an avid reader, language fascinates me, always has. As a high school student I took not one, but both levels of  "Greek and Latin Roots." Can you say word nerd? I loved them and still consider them to be two of the most useful classes I ever took. So I went into What Language Is expecting to be both educated and entertained. After all, the blurb on the front of the book says that Publisher's Weekly found the book "a rollicking tour of human language." Within twenty pages I knew that those folks at Publisher's Weekly are clearly even bigger word nerds than I am; clearly the kind of nerds that wear pocket protectors and have their pants belted so high that their socks are visible.

Rollicking this book is not. Boring is the word that first came to mind after just a few pages, in fact. How in the world will I ever finish this one to review it, I wondered. Fortunately it did pick up considerably and I found myself constantly amazed by what I was learning. McWhorter (a renowned linguist, mind you) even makes the case that we should stop being so uptight about allowing what we call "slang" to slip into our accepted language. After all, that's what's happened to language for thousands of years.

Language, he contends, develops orally. That's how a something like "a napron" over time became "an apron." That's one of the reasons that language changed more rapidly in the early years of man; without a written record of the "right" way, language is more likely to shift over time. For example, as people began anticipating the next sound in a word, over time their mouths simply began adjusting to prepare of the change, altering the first sound until that became the accepted way of saying something.

"Only when this sort of thing became possible [massive population shifts] was there any reason for a language to undergo the peculiar circumstance of being learned as much by adults as by children. Only then could there be languages like Modern English and Persian."

And how is it that some languages are more complicated than others? McWhorter contends that in places where there was an influx of foreigners, language became less and less complicated. Adults, he says, are unable to fully learn a new language and they will be learning it through hearing it, rather than reading it. They will learn the things that are absolutely necessarily to communicate and leave the subtleties and tricky bits behind. With a large enough influx of immigrants, soon the native children beginning learning their own language as much from hearing the "correct" way of speaking as from hearing the "new" way.

Here's a shocker for anyone who's ever taken an English class (and I'm hoping that is pretty much all of you!). English is not a complicated language. What? Doesn't McWhorter still, after all these years of studying language, still sometimes wonder whether or not he should be using "than" or "then?" It's true, compared to many of the other languages of the world, English really is much easier. Our nouns, for example, do not have gender. After you read even a few pages about some of the more complex languages of the world, you will wish you had been nicer to your high school English teacher.Clearly it was your own stupidity that made the class so difficult; that poor woman was teaching a relatively easy language, after all.

My dad is exceedingly fond of the English language but I'm not sure I'll be able to pass this book along to him because of one passage. Dad, I hate to tell you this, but McWhorter thinks that we should just get over the whole issue of "lie" versus "lay."

"Lie and lay "want" to just be words that mean the same thing. Call that unsystematic, but all languages have synonyms. Language is sloppy."

In What Language Is McWhorter teaches us that language is ingrown, dissheveled (the book's spelling, not mine), intricate, oral, and mixed. With more than enough examples to prove it (and I really do mean more than enough), McWhorter convinces his reader that all of the above are true. And that maybe we should be teaching foreign languages to our grades school students instead of our high school students when it is much too late for them to really learn the language.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. My brain is exhausted now. Can I please go "lay" down?

Sunday Salon - August 7

Well, this is not a Sunday Salon post I thought I would be able to write. The "thing" we've been dealing with all spring and summer was supposed to take a major turn tomorrow, one that would completely have occupied my thoughts today. Strange as it may sound, it's a disappoint to find that we are not able to take that next step. We now find ourselves living in a kind of limbo. I continue to find it hard to find the time to get to my Google Reader much, other than to try to keep it in check and stop by a few blogs every day. I'm trying to read as many of them as I can, though!

Mini-me found this picture for me this week of a theater that has been turned into a library. How gorgeous is that? I have a hard enough time tearing myself away from the boring library in my suburb. What a great idea!

Not sure how I missed this one--Michael Ondaatje's latest, The Cat's Table: A Novel is being released this month. I'm a huge fan of Ondaatje's The English Patient and have In The Skin Of The Lion patiently awaiting me already after hearing wonderful things about it. What's new on your wish list this week?

I've got a review of John McWhorter's What Language Is coming up this week. The Omaha Bookworms are meeting next week to discuss native Nebraskan Willa Cather's O, Pioneers so I'll be finishing that up this week. Then I'm hoping to squeeze in something from my review shelf that doesn't have a "due" date before my next scheduled review. I've fallen hopelessly behind again! What are you reading this week?

The Gap Year by Sarah Bird

The Gap Year by Sarah Bird
320 pages
Published July 2011 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours

The gap year usually refers to that year that some students take between their senior year of high school and their first year of college. But in Sarah Bird's latest, the gap year refers, instead, to the year in the lives of Cam and Aubrey Lightsey when suddenly, without Cam having a clue as to why, a gap developed between the two.

Cam and Aubrey had always been close, right up until Aubrey's senior year of high school when she suddenly started keeping a lot of secrets from Cam. The attitude that most teens exhibit had only rarely reared it's ugly head and flat out disobedience was almost unheard of. Cam, a quasi-rebel resigned to living life in the suburbs, is so wrapped up in her job as a lactation specialist that she hasn't even noticed the changes in Aubrey that started even before that year.

Then Aubrey suddenly gets a friend request on Facebook from a man she hasn't seen in 16 years...her father. And she begins a relationship with the high school's star quarterback. Aubrey knows that her mother will not approve of her relationship with either man, particularly not with the man who left Cam when Aubrey was only an infant to join a kind of religious cult. And Aubrey is certainly right. Cam is mortified with Aubrey's relationship with Tyler Moldenhause, but not as much because of what sport he plays as because she blames him for taking Aubrey away from her. As for Aubrey's father, it's not until Aubrey disappears, two days before she's supposed to leave for college that Cam even realizes that Aubrey's been in contact with her father. Suddenly the two need to work together to find their daughter and it's then that Cam fully discovers that he knows a lot more about the person Aubrey is now than Cam does.

When I was offered this book for review, I jumped at the chance; the story hits so close to home. My daughter is heading into her final year of high school and we are probably as close as any mother and daughter I know. Yet I also know that teens are capable of living a life of which their parents are entirely unaware. To paraphrase "Jerry McGuire," Bird had me at hello.

"Although I am a slob and raised Aubrey with plenty of messiness, my worst enemy - Recent Studies - now tells me that I should have gone the extra step and provided actual squalor. Recent Studies says that the absolute best thing for building antibodies is close contact with livestock. If I'd only put a goat in the playpen with my baby, she probably wouldn't have asthma today."

Yes indeed, Cam is living a life filled with regrets and concerns as she prepares to send Aubrey off to college and it really resonated with me. I'm a person who still lives with the guilt of having cut my son's fingernail too short the day I brought him home from the hospital...twenty three years ago. While I can't say that I could relate to Cam on every level, I frequently found myself nodding my head in agreement with a comment or observation she made. And I've been around enough teens in recent years to find Aubrey to be an equally reliable and true voice for her generation. Am I worried, after reading this book, that I might not know my daughter as well as I think I do? Heck, yes. Which is an excellent gauge of how well Bird has captured the relationship between a mother and daughter.

Bird uses dual narrators, both Cam and Aubrey, but in a style I've not seen before. While Cam's chapters are set in the present, over the course of a few days, Aubrey's are set in the past, catching the reader up on what has happened in the past year from her perspective. It's a wonderful tool to keep the reader engaged and to emphasize the differences in perspective and highlight the lack of communication between the two. The book is filled with humor but grounded it's serious story line. It makes for a very satisfying read and one I'll definitely be passing along to other moms.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour! For more reviews of The Gap Year, see the full list of tour stops and to learn more about Bird, visit her website.

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin
448 pages
Published July 2011 by Random House Publishing
Source: the publisher

Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump was born on Halloween in 1841 to a farm family in Massachusetts, a perfectly ordinary baby just as her three siblings had been. For a year, she grew normally. Then, almost without being noticed by her busy parents, she simply stopped growing. Lavinia, or Vinnie as she was known by family and friends, reached her peak height of 32 inches not long afterward. Her family was never quite sure what to make of her. She was sometimes an embarrassment to her siblings and always a concern to her mother who found danger lurking everywhere for her tiny daughter.

Vinnie, unlike her even smaller younger sister, Minnie, was much less concerned with what she should be afraid of as she was with what she wanted to be able to do. When the local school board offered her a teaching position when she was only sixteen, she jumped at the chance to be able to become somewhat independent of her family. When, less than a year later, Colonel John Wood walked into the family home offering Vinnie an even bigger opportunity. Claiming to be a distant cousin, Wood convinced the family that he could offer Vinnie the chance to travel the country, performing with his troupe, a troupe he claimed was akin to the world-famous acts shown by P.T. Barnum. Over her family's objections, Vinnie jumped at the chance.

Once on Wood's boat, Vinnie quickly discovered that life was not going to be quite what Wood had portrayed. Life on board was sometimes dangerous and never more dangerous than being around Wood soon became for Vinnie. But she had made many friends on the boat, particularly the giantess, Sylvia, who watched over her as if Vinnie were her sole responsibility.

When the Civil War broke out, the troupe found themselves without jobs and Vinnie was forced to return home. As much as she had missed her family and the comforts of home, Vinnie found herself missing the excitement of life away from home. Two years after she returned, she used the fame that she had found on the tour to attract the attention of P.T. Barnum himself.

Barnum was enchanted by Vinnie, less for the fact that she was a perfectly formed miniature woman, as he was by the fact of her intelligence and quick wit, and went about making her the sensation of the world, to much success. In 1863, despite not being in love with him, Vinnie married General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) in the wedding of the century. It was both Barnum and Vinnie's greatest triumph. She became even more famous and traveled the world, meeting royalty and presidents. But her fame came with a price. She would never find true love and she would no longer be able to protect Minnie from the glare of the public spotlight.

I've been anxiously waiting for The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb since I heard Melonie Benjamin talk about it at the Omaha Lit Fest last fall so I jumped at the chance to read and review it. I'm thrilled to be able to report that this book did not disappoint. Benjamin once again takes a well known but little written about woman from history and crafts a novel about what might have been, perfectly capturing the time period in which the story is set. In Vinnie she has also captured a voice which is filled with longing, spunk, and love and fully developed her into a person who is much more than just a public figure. I was thoroughly charmed by Benjamin's story; she has managed to give the reader a full range of emotions, to show the reader both the seedy underbelly of life in the mid-19th century and the over-the-top lifestyle of the well-to-do, and give us a love story on so many levels.