27 April 2009

Just finished The Vagrants by Yiyun Li, which is a sort of slice-of-life novel set in late 1970’s China.  I’ve been struggling to find a way to describe the experience of reading this novel.  Simply, I enjoyed reading it very much, I think because every time I dipped in, I was fully engaged in the world.  What trips me up though, is that I didn’t have an active feeling of transportation to that world.  I was not swept away.  I just was there.  There is something very matter of fact about this novel, even though it has a lot of feeling.  It is well written and really amazing in the number of characters one walks with between page one and page 3 hundred and 37, with only the vaguest distracting awareness of the choreography involved in moving from one character to another. I liked it.

The Hobbit and I are spending a lot of time with Owl at Home, by Anold Lobel.  Owl is a lovely guy who sits by the fire and eats buttered toast and pea soup for supper.  We read it, we quote it, we act it out, we read it again.

Ongoing: The Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Luov.  My sister, who’s an elementary school teacher and a parent of two teenagers, gave this to me a few months ago saying, “Read it while you can still do something right.”  Luov writes about nature deficit disorder – a condition he argues results from the lack of time in nature that most kids growing up in the U.S. today experience.  It’s not the most scientific work, but then he admits there have been very few studies of the effect on children of a lack of exposure to nature.  Whether he’s right or wrong about the condition or the general state of childhood in the U.S. doesn’t really matter to me.  What matters is that in reading the book I’m reminded of how important time in nature was for me as a child.  Even the urban nature in which I spent most of my time.  As a little girl I picked leaves off of shubs and traced their veins as I walked to school.  As as an angsty teen I used to drive out to the beach, lean against the cliffs and take a nap listening to the crashing waves.  The Last Child in the Woods reminds me to take the Hobbit to the beach, to the zoo, to the park, to the ranch, to the woods and let him wander, climb trees, roll in the grass and the sand, listen to water, watch ducks.  It’s worth a read, especially for anyone – parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers – who spends time with kids.

24 February 2009

In the middle of Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s In Dependence and really enjoying it.  In the current chapter I’m transported to Nigeria 1993.  Smooth writing, believable characters with compelling conflicts.  More of a series of snapshots than a sweeping history of Nigeria’s independence struggle.  I feel like it’s giving me insight into the struggle many people face when their community or country begins to fall apart – the decision to stay or get out.   Just in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen this struggle play out in the real life story about the Taliban’s closing of schools for girls in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, and in the great movie Persepolis, about Iran before and after the revolution.  In Dependence is good.  I recommend it.  Not available in US yet but can be ordered on amazon.co.uk

25 January 2009

Just finished The Count of Monte Cristo!  Talk about a sweeping story.  Wow.  It was a total soap opera that had me hooked almost the whole way throughout.  Almost lost me about 1/3 of the way through, when it picked up in Rome, but I persevered and have no regrets.  Wonderful use of language, lots of great descriptions and sentences and paragraphs.  Lots of revenge and clever twists.  Dug it.