"Garfield Minus Garfield"

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."

"Life's too short to read five novels a week"

From "Life's too short to read five novels a week," a few interesting points--

"Then we come to a question that cannot be ducked: are there really 10,000 novels worth reading? Surely it is not essential to read every word an author wrote, and in the case of some well-known writers, one may not want to read anything at all. At some point, personal taste must come into it."

I disagree. I imagine there are 10,000 novels worth reading. Every time I'm foolish enough to start thinking I'm somewhat well read, I'll run across authors and novels that I've never even heard of. (I can only imagine how many hundreds exist that I still haven't heard of, much less read!) So I think the reading supply is definitely plentiful (no matter what your personal taste), and much of it is, if not essential reading, at least good enough to merit a single read-through.

"What a relief it was, last year, to learn of Milan Kundera's opinion that he based his reading on the premise that he got through books at the rate of 20 pages an hour. How the Society of Slow Readers enjoyed that confession"

I think that is reassuring! I happen to be a pretty fast reader, but I read much slower when I'm reading for leisure because there's an element of really savoring the text, as opposed to merely comprehending it.

But five novels a week, every week? Yeah--I'm not anywhere near that.

And The Biggest Loser...err...Winner Is...

And the grand prize winner in the 2008 Delete Key Awards contest is …

“A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!”

“We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness. But they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight. On our planet, and perhaps simultaneously in many parts of our galaxy and beyond, consciousness is awakening from the dream of form. This does not mean all forms (the world) are going to dissolve, although quite a few almost certainly will. It means consciousness can now begin to create form without losing itself in it. It can remain conscious of itself, even while it creates and experiences form.”

– Both from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Plume)

Turkish Delight--Not So Delightful After All?

I smiled as I was reading the article "The Lion, the Witch, and the Really Foul Candy" and the writer's reaction to her first taste of Turkish Delight:

"And so, with anticipation, I took a bite of the Turkish Delight. And a second later, spat it into my hand. It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust, or like a lump of Renuzit air freshener: The texture was both waxy and filling-looseningly chewy. This … this? ... was the sweetmeat that led Edmund to betray his siblings and doomed Aslan to death on a stone slab?"

This must be the reaction of 99% of Americans who rhapsodized over the thought of Turkish Delight as children reading C.S. Lewis, only to finally try Turkish Delight as an adult and find it less than impressive! But I think it's pretty much an inevitable response, because every child who read The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe projected onto that mystical candy the penultimate taste she could imagine. (For example, being the chocaholic I am, I always assumed as a child that Turkish Delight must be made of chocolate.) In the end, it's less about how Turkish Delight actually tastes and more about how we expect it to taste.

It was only years and years later, when I was having tea with a friend who had lived in Turkey and married a Turkish man, that I actually tasted authentic Turkish Delight. And it was...well, it wasn't made of chocolate! Nevertheless, I liked it. Oddly chewy, dusted with powdery sugar, and made of an array of peculiar flavors (rosewater, dates, mint, lemon, almond, hazelnut, etc.) it was--for all its strangeness--the perfect accompaniment to afternoon tea.

I still like it and buy it whenever I go to the Middle Eastern grocery store/bakery. But pretty much every other person I've introduced it to has had the "Renuzit air freshener" reaction! Oh, well...to each his own!

"Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book"

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there's more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Even outdoors, Meyer can't seem to think of anything better to do than flip through some American classic.

Yes, the whole thing.

"It was great," said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Finalists Announced For The Delete Key Awards

Here's the complete list of 10 finalists for the 2008 Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books.

Winners will be announced March 15th, but in the meantime, my money is on the following:

Delete Key Awards Finalist #5 – From Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon:

“And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me.… This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia.”

Ummm...face-to-what?

My vote for runner up:

Delete Key Awards Finalist #7 – From Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian:

“ARGGHHHHHHHHSSSSSPPPPPPGGGHHHHHHHAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHAGGGGHH!”

My goodness. I don't think I can top the awards people's characterization of this passage:

Yes, Alexie won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for this novel. And, yes, it’s possible that this line has an inner logic discernible only to teenagers. But the rest of us may wonder: Why does this line have five S’s and six P’s instead of six S’s and five P’s? Why does it have eight A’s and ten G’s instead of ten A’s and eight G’s? What, exactly, is the logic behind this manic sequence of letters? Does it help to know that it’s supposed to sound like “a 747 is landing on a runway of vomit”? Or that in the book the letters take up two lines (without punctuation) instead of one? The letters seem intended as onomatopoeia, but their arrangement is so random, you wonder if Alexie’s space bar just got stuck.

This line suggests how the language of e-mail – or perhaps Hollywood screenplays – is infecting novels for all ages. Will we someday get a novel written entirely in emoticons?

TEAL To The Rescue!

As of March 2008, The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) is on the road, roving the country "to stamp out as many typos as [they] can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language."

Awesome! Why didn't I think of this?

Follow the great spelling and punctuation odyssey at TEAL's blog.

Me, Too!

Was skimming through Bookworld the other day and ran across a meme that I empathize with so much it's scary. The concept was "Ten signs that a book has been written by me," and I nearly fell out of my chair when I got to #9 because it sounds EXACTLY like me!

"It is a daring blend of nit-picking historical accuracy (picture its author spending a week researching what the Georgians ate for breakfast, only to discover that it was probably something as banal as toast, and then eventually summing up the week's work with "after breakfast they went out") and outrageous inaccuracy and anachronism (when the author doesn't have a week to spare and decides to write a description of a shipwreck in half an hour without knowing where the ship is, what sort of ship it is, what the bits of the ship are called, what would have happened to the passengers or any other sort of actual helpful detail, but does manage to sweep a cursed box out to sea along with its fanatically obsessed owner. Who doesn't yet have a name.)"

The only way this description could be more like me was if the author spent a week researching Georgian breakfast habits, only to discover that she had glaring deficiencies in her understanding of Georgian tableware and food etiquette. Which would, in turn, send the author into a nervous tizzy of further research, culminating in a buying spree at Amazon.com of boxes of books that, when they finally arrived, would undermine her confidence more than enlighten her. The author would never get around to writing about the shipwreck because, weeks later, she would still be determining what shape teaspoon to give her breakfast-eaters. Ultimately, months later, the author would throw up her hands in frustration and declare that her characters all share a disdain for breakfast and (counter to all cultural practices of the time) refuse to eat it.

Who Says Books Aren't Helpful?

This is one of the funniest blog posts I've seen in a long time. ("Every freaking time I leave my house there’s a huge ship in my way"--who can't relate to that?)

Best Reason To Move To France

While my in-laws are ready to whisk themselves off to the French countryside for the "grilled cheese sandwiches" alone, I think I've found my big inducement to pick up stakes and move to France: the "City of Books."

"With 30 times as many books as people, the La Charite-sur-Loire has certainly earned the title "city of books," which has been proclaimed from the town sign for the past six years. Fittingly, regular book sales are held in the center on the third Sunday of every month. There's also a festival of words in August, an internationally known salon of old books in July and a book art fair in May."

(Thanks to The Literary Saloon for pointing out this story.)

Strangest Book Titles of 2007

The Bookseller magazine has announced the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

This year's illustrious contenders--

• I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
  
• How to Write a How to Write Book
  
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
  
• If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
  
• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

My vote goes to--

Amazon.com Reviews of Ulysses

Inspired by this amusing article at The Morning News, I checked out some of the real-life, one-star reader reviews of Ulysses posted at Amazon.com.

As you might imagine, reviews ranged from the hilarious to the surprisingly thoughtful to the downright weird. And of course, a generous measure of the just plain awful. Here are some of my favorites:


"I could never pray the Lord's Prayer and read this book."

"The poor trees who gave their lives that _Ulysses_ might gather dust on countless shelves would have been put to nobler use as toothpicks."

"This is one of those books that "smart" people like to "read." Well if being smart means liking this, count me out! I don't know if it's modern, post-modern or what: but I know this much, I'd rather just curl up with "Bridges of Madison County" for a good cry! . . . I'd like to have seen Leopold patch things up with Molly, am I right? I mean, let's get down to brass tacks: don't we all hate those intellectuals who consider this one of the century's 'finest works of literary craft'? I mean these are the people who put "Citizen Kane" in the top ten...and totally ignored "Life as a House"! (No offense, but Orson Welles is no Kevin Kline!) Unless Oprah puts it on her book list, I won't be picking this one up again, that's for sure."

"This waste of paper is a genuine TEE-YOU-ARE-DEE"

"uggghhhh, after nine months i finally finished this rambling, incoherent string of words. i took this book on because i'm reading the 100 best books of the 20th century (as defined by the modern library). . . . whoever listed this as number 1 was smoking too much crack - since i can't afford a nine-month crack habit, i guess i'll never be able to truly appreciate it."

"There is a famous sex scene in this book where the mental thoughts of the individual coming to climax fills many pages. I asked around and no one I know thinks about anything while climaxing except for a sexual fantasy. Totally unrealistic."


(I'm still marveling that someone would "ask around" about people's thoughts while having sex, all in service of writing a book review on Amazon!)

Death (and resurrection?) by Ulysses

I'm considering resurrecting this blog, mainly as self-encouragement to keep better up-to-date with various literary happenings. Of course, I'm not promising much, as I realistically see my blogging enthusiasm lasting for a couple months, only to slip back to disinterest and inactivity (see posts below for a sterling example of this!). But hey--you never know until you try (again).

And, by the way, resurrecting this blog does not extend to resurrecting my pursuit of its namesake. I'm not currently up to another try at Ulysses (especially since I just bought Clarissa!), but one of these proverbial days, I'll get back around to it. In the meantime, I'm reading a lot of Elizabeth Gaskell and intending to do a lot of reading of Moby Dick.

Thirty Years Later, A New Lord Of The Rings Book

From "Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings: The last, unfinished book by the 'Lord of the Rings' author has been completed by his son"--

The first new Tolkien novel for 30 years is to be published next month. In a move eagerly anticipated by millions of fans across the world, The Children of Húrin will be released worldwide on 17 April, 89 years after the author started the work....

The book, whose contents are being jealously guarded by publisher HarperCollins - is described as "an epic story of adventure, tragedy, fellowship and heroism."...

The author's son Christopher, using his late father's voluminous notes, has painstakingly completed the book, left unfinished by the author when he died in 1971. The work has taken the best part of three decades, and will signify the first "new" Tolkien book since The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977."
Neat! I hadn't heard anything but rumors about this project, so I had no idea it was actually in the works, much less nearing publication. (My former LOTR students would be so very disappointed in me!) This should prove a truly interesting read.

Girls Gone Wilde

Uncensored, Out-Of-Control, and Able to Resist Anything but Temptation, these beach blanket bookworms are a literary cut above your average co-ed!

Girls Gone Wilde
(Thanks to Bookslut for this very amusing link.)

"Schools refuse gifts of 'boring' classics"

Dozens of schools have rejected gifts of free classic books because today's pupils find them too 'difficult' to read...

Around 50 schools have refused to stock literary works by the likes of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens after admitting that youngsters also find them boring....The titles include Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and JR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

But Helena Read, librarian at Cotelands school in Linconshire, said: "The bottom line is getting the pupils to read, whether it's a newspaper, comic novel or magazine. In an ideal world, I would love it if the pupils came into my library and requested some of the classics, but the fact of the matter is that pupils today are living in a different world."

She added that pupils are more interested in Japanese comics rather than literary greats. "Kids love action and adventure," Miss Read said. "They want books that excite them and are current. They love fantasy. The books for nowadays are Manga, the Japanese comic books that you read from back to front."

The librarian went on to say that the classics were "unattractive". She said: "I think they are unappealing to youngsters and you've got to fit them into your school bag."
Coming from a librarian--and one named "Ms. Read," no less!--these comments seem appalling. Since when do we judge literary merit by whether or not a book appears attractive or happens to fit nicely in a bookbag?

Reading this reminds me of the magazine Bible trend of a few years back (Revolve; Becoming; etc.), when publishers started repackaging the Bible, stripping off the staid, black leather cover and replacing it with a jacket designed to pass as a fashion magazine, a la Seventeen or Cosmo.



I like eye candy as much as the next person, but the idea that we must "makeover" texts--whether they be Great Expectations or The Greatest Story Ever Told--in order to make them enticing enough to read seems absurd.

So how much is too much when it comes to tinkering with texts to appeal to readers?

"Very Short Stories"

From "Very Short Stories" in Wired--

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.
There are a bunch to choose from, but my personal favorites are--

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

I saw, darling, but do lie.
- Orson Scott Card

"Do female writers today lack imagination?"

From The Independent's article, "The Big Question: Is Muriel Gray right... do female writers today lack imagination?", some bold characterizations of female writers and their works:

Muriel Gray, novelist, television presenter and this year's chair of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which male writers are not eligible), accompanied the announcement of the longlist with an accusation that, by and large, the writers this year's panel assessed lacked imagination, and focused too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.

Women writers don't work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances - in short, says Gray, they're failing to make things up, surely a prerequisite for good, absorbing fiction. She's coined a phrase, rural schoolteacher syndrome, to describe the phenomenon: "the delusory condition that fools the sufferer into believing that an experience, say as ordinary as being a rural school teacher, is so interesting and unique that it's almost compulsory to chronicle it ... thinly disguised as fiction".

Say "So Long" To Vanilla Bookstores?

You'd never know it, judging by the proliferation of Borders and Barnes & Noble stores 'round here, but "real readers want bookshops with personality and choice" (or at least The Guardian thinks that "real readers" in Britain do).

The story of 21st-century retail is surely going to be about niches as much as it is good value.

Slowly, consumers are wising up: they...increasingly relish the local, the unusual, the personal.

By their very nature, those who buy books - and most people don't - are likely to be ahead of this trend. More than many, book buyers resent blandness - even heavily discounted blandness - as the publishers who, like sheep, invested in one too many celebrity memoirs are now discovering.

Pirated Books Outnumber Pirated Movies And Audio In China

From "500 million pirated books"--

Pirates and bootleggers in China produce 120 million counterfeit audio and video products and 500 million unauthorized books a year, says an official with the General Administration of Press and Publications.

The rampant piracy of audio and video products and books has seriously affected China's international reputation and future investment prospects,said Liu Binjie, vice director with the General Administration of Press and Publication, during a movie festival organized by college students in Beijing.

"The audio and video product market alone is suffering annual losses of billions of yuan, while book piracy has left publishers and distributors with legal copyrights in a very unfavorable position," Liu said.

Latest Acquisitions

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
The Preservationist by David Maine
The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Nephew by James Purdy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
Agee On Film, Vol. 2 by James Agee
James Agee by Victor A. Kramer
The Restless Journey of James Agee by Genevieve Moreau

Thanks to a screwed-up order, I'm still waiting on The Angel of Forgetfulness by Steve Stern. Hope it arrives before too long (though it's not like I don't have plenty to keep me busy in the interim!).

Movie Ratings Now In Effect!

Updating the list of movies I've watched lately, I've realized that folks reading this blog (all three of them!) might perceive my listing a movie here as an endorsement of said movie.

Au contraire.

In fact, I've seen an unusually high number of crappy films this year. (Perhaps a sign from the heavens to read more?) Some I chose to watch (my inexplicable penchant for the horror genre leads to quite a few duds). Others resulted from spousal whims or were recommended by various well-meaning people. =]

But in any case, I've decided to add a very rudimentary rating next to each movie to distinguish the truly good ones from the truly awful. (And man, have I seen some truly awful ones this year!)

So my very rough scale (from one to five stars) is as follows:

* = The very worst. Mind-raping or mind-numbing or both. This is not the designation for "so-bad-they're-good" movies. This is for the inexcusably, through-and-through bad.

** = Poor. This movie could never be mistaken for good, but there remains some redeeming factor--however slight--that rescues it from being entirely dreadful. (The "so-bad-they're-good" flicks may find a home in this category.) Still, you probably wouldn't ever recommend this movie to anyone and may even lie about having seen it.

*** = Decent to pretty good. As I'm thinking of my 3-star rating, those faces on the hospital emergency room pain charts come to mind.

See the expression on the face above #4? That's the facial equivalent of my 3-star rating: not bad, not great, just kinda hanging out in between. Heck, a 3-star rating might even lean toward the face above #2: mildly pleased but far from ecstatic.

**** = Quite good. This is a great movie that, while thoroughly enjoyable, falls shy of complete greatness. It's the kind of movie that you'd buy a copy of, watch more than once, recommend to other people--but it wouldn't quite crack your "favorite movies ever" list.

***** = Bliss.

I'll be test driving the new ratings system and applying it to my movie list shortly. In the meantime, I really should go read a book...

Bookslut's "obligatory interview" with Alison Bechdel

QUESTION: In Fun Home, and a little bit in Dykes, you take on a very literary tone with Joycean and Homeric references. Do you see the graphic novel heading towards a literature classification?

ANSWER: Yeah, I think it’s happening now. Like the whole Time Magazine thing with my book. They called it the book of the year, not just the graphic book of the year, but the book of the year. It’s kind of startling. It makes me very happy for the graphic novel format just in the same way that I’m always happy that I get perceived as just a “cartoonist,” and not a “lesbian cartoonist” like in the old days. That’s how I would get boxed up.

It’s a similar kind of thing at work, and I think because my book is so ostentatiously literary, that it’s about literature, it got a lot of literary attention. That wasn’t my secret plan, but I think that’s part of why it got more literary scrutiny. Other graphic novels have gotten that attention too, but it just sort of reached a crescendo with my book.

Al Gore Makes Your Landscaping Books Obsolete

From the UK's Telegraph:

Gardening books are being rendered out of date because climate change has altered growing seasons, an expert said yesterday.

Books written in the 1980s and early 90s, such as Geoff Hamilton's The First Time Garden from 1988, do not accurately reflect the fact that many plants that would normally be killed off by cold weather are now surviving longer through the winter. Guy Barten, of the Royal Horticultural Society, said climate change could transform gardening.

Happy Belated World Book Day

Bronchitis has squelched whatever World Book Day celebrations I might have planned for March 1st. (Ermmm, right...my big World Book Day celebration plans...yeah.) But if decreased lung capacity hadn't done the trick, this list of "The ten books you can't live without" would've stomped the party spirit right out of me:

For World Book Day's tenth anniversary, we have been asking you to share with us the ten books you can't live without, and we have now compiled a list of your most life-enhancing reads. Results of the survey were announced today.

Our survey to find the ten books the nation cannot live without has revealed that classics are still the most essential reads, with Pride and Prejudice topping the poll, and the Brontë sisters appearing, along with Charles Dickens and George Orwell. JRR Tolkein's fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, came in second, with The Bible also shown to be still relevant to people - coming in at sixth.

The full ten is as follows:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 20%
2. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein 17%
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 14%
4. Harry Potter books - J K Rowling 12%
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee 9.5%
6. The Bible 9%
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8.5%
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 6%, tied with:
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 6%
9. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 0.55%

So much for the fabled high culture of the British. (Aren't they supposed to be holding it down as the country of great readers? I fuzzily recall reading an article earlier this year pointing to the superior reading habits of the British people, both in number of books read and in the "literariness" of said books, but alas! I can't find the article.) Of course, a predominantly American poll would've probably anointed The Da Vinci Code as the pinnacle of written genius, so I shouldn't talk.

The full "top 100 books you can't live without" list is equally cheering (which is to say, not cheering at all). At least Middlemarch scrapes in at #20. Frankly, I'm surprised it makes the list at all, given that Harry Potter beats out the complete works of Shakespeare by ten places. And at least The Da Vinci Code doesn't show up 'til #42. Plus, half of the top ten are written by women--a mildly surprising silver lining.

But Bridget Jones's Diary (#68)? The Five People You Meet In Heaven (#88)? No Henry James? No Faulkner? Sigh...it's enough to send me straight back to bed.

"Our Love for Literature Dwindles in the Internet Age"

From Pace University's student newspaper, an article chock-a-block with frightening comments on the state of college students and literature:

Freshman Michael Pascale doesn't think literature is dead, but he would be one of the few. On his bookshelf lies Dante's Inferno and Mario Puzo's Omertaby, The Sicilian and The Godfather.

"I love to read," Pascale said. "It's good to stimulate the mind using comprehension skills." His friends chuckled snidely under their hands as he said this.

Pascale lamented over how most college students his age don't share his point of view on reading. "People find other means of entertainment instead of using their imaginations," he said. "If there were more books that interest kids our age - books on hip hop and drugs, you know, the stuff you see on TV - If they put that stuff into books, a lot more people would be reading."
And here comes the money quote...wait for it...

Pascale's friend, freshman Jeven Chiera, chooses to read Cosmopolitan over books, deeming the latter to be too difficult to concentrate on, especially with her busy schedule.

"I always wanted to read The DaVinci Code though," Chiera said.
(Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the link.)

Latest Acquisitions

I finally satisfied my book-buying urges with a recent binge at Half-Price Books in Corpus Christi, Texas, my favorite bookstore in the whole wide world. I think Corpus must be where literary types go to die and then leave behind their fabulous book collections, because Half-Price in Corpus has the best selection (and prices) of any used store I know.

Anyway, thanks to my friend, J/M, and my sister-in-law for financing the shopping trip with birthday gift cards. Y'all must know that the way to this girl's heart is through her bookshelves.

But enough of the preliminaries--on to the haul! Here's what I ended up with:

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett
The Ha-Ha by Dave King
Littlejohn by Howard Owen
Matches by Alan Kaufman
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Headlong by Michael Frayn
Big If by Mark Costello
Cherry by Mary Karr
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Little Children by Tom Perrotta
Postcards by Annie Proulx
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Mating by Norman Rush
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
Finding a Form: Essays by William H. Gass

Hooray! So many good books...it warms my heart.

"With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar"

"The word 'scrotum' does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. "
Cue the controversy:

"The Newbery award winning book this year — The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron who is also a librarian — contains the word scrotum, not once, but a few times. Apparently this is a problem for some librarians and parents who have been challenging and/or removing the book from school library shelves..."
Author Susan Patron has issued a response:

"In writing The Higher Power of Lucky, I was interested in creating authentic characters who would ring true for readers. I wanted readers to trust that I respect them and would not talk down to them. Like the child-version of myself, Lucky eavesdrops on adult conversations; she is searching for a form of spirituality, a higher power.

I was shocked and horrified to read that some school librarians, teachers, and media specialists are choosing not to include the 2007 Newbery Medal winner in their collections because they fear parental objections to the word scrotum, or because they are uncomfortable with the word themselves. If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself—I'd be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book. And if I were a 10-year-old and learned that adults were worried that the current Newbery book was not appropriate for me, I'd figure out a way to get my mitts on it anyway, its allure intensified by the exciting forbidden-ness—by the unexpressed but obvious fear on the part of these adults..."

"Untouchable" authors--should we teach them?

From "Teachers defy list of untouchable authors" and "Teachers fight back over classics"...

Much controversy in Britain (and the blogosphere) as some middle school teachers object to teaching works by classic authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, claiming that those authors "are too difficult for many pupils aged 11 to 14 and could put them off great writers for life."

Apparently, Britain's Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, roiled the English teachers of the commonwealth by requesting that the new curriculum include a list of suggested authors:

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, Kate Chopin, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, John Masefield, Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare (sonnets), Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth
But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, apparently deeming the list too difficult, planned to bin it. In defense of the suggested authors, Johnson contended that

"There are certain untouchable elements of the secondary curriculum that all teenagers should learn for a classic, well-rounded British education....For example, it's vital that teachers instil a love of literature in young people and engage them with the best-loved writers from our history."
The National Association for the Teaching of English disagreed with Johnson's statement, maintaining that "teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive." And in a particularly sophisticated counter-argument, the NATE deemed Johnson "a bird brain."

Says NATE policy director, Ian McNeilly,

"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."
While I can see both sides of this issue, I tend to agree with Johnson, primarily because of my personal experience in this area, I taught a 7th and 8th grade literature class using a curriculum I'd designed around "classic" authors, such as Swift, Twain, Stephen Crane, etc. To my great surprise, the work that students enjoyed the most was the most difficult one in the batch, Gulliver's Travels. In fact, they enjoyed it so much that we ended up reading three parts of it, instead of just "A Voyage to Lilliput," the one section that I'd planned on reading. (The students actually requested that we read more!)

However, it's not hard to imagine students feeling utterly stymied by The Canterbury Tales or Middlemarch. It seems like careful text selection would prove the real key to making classic authors accessible--and hopefully enjoyable!--to students.

"Lichtenstein: creator or copycat?"

Thought-provoking article in The Boston Globe about Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book art.

I, much like the article's author,

"never thought Lichtenstein's work was a direct copy of scenes from comic books. I assumed that he stylized certain scenes suggested by the comic vernacular of the 1950s and 1960s."
But this guy (high school art teacher David Barsalou) knew otherwise:

He has found and catalogued almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, Barsalou has about 140....
"He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn't," says Barsalou, who teaches at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. "The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original."
Case in point:

Which of course brings up all kinds of thorny copyright issues--copyright issues that the original comic book authors truly have a vested interest in.

Barsalou correctly points that musicians who "sample" other artists' music have to pay them royalties. Does the Lichtenstein estate owe compensation to the creators of the original work?
Yikes...interesting food for thought there. Any comments from the lawyers and lawyers-in-training in the house?