Mary's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:23:16 -0800 60 Mary's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Speak 91445
I am an outcast.]]> 198 Laurie Halse Anderson 0142407321 Mary 5 ya 4.02 1999 Speak
author: Laurie Halse Anderson
name: Mary
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2016/11/29
shelves: ya
review:
Wow. I started reading this to entertain myself on a long subway ride home at 2 am, thinking I'd skim a bit and start reading it the next day. The next time I looked at the clock it was five in the morning and I was devouring the last lines of the novel. It is dangerously, fantastically gripping, not necessarily because the plot is so amazing, but because Anderson gets Melinda's voice so very, very right. Melinda is such a thoughtfully rendered portrait of a smart, funny, terribly depressed teenager that I was hooked from her very first lines. To me, the actual story was almost extraneous—the plot itself is a bit unwieldy—but Melinda's anxiety, isolation, and desperate attempts to cope with the horrors of adolescence were so real it was spooky.
]]> <![CDATA[The Annotated Huckleberry Finn]]> 2962 Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway once declared.
First published in 1885, the book has delighted millions of readers, while simultaneously riling contemporary sensibilities, and is still banned in many schools and libraries.
Now, Michael Patrick Hearn, author of the best-selling The Annotated Wizard of Oz, thoroughly reexamines the 116-year heritage of that archetypal American boy, Huck Finn, and follows his adventures along every bend of the mighty Mississippi River.
Hearn's copious annotations draw on primary sources including the original manuscript, Twain's revisions and letters, and period accounts. Reproducing the original E. W. Kemble illustrations from the first edition, as well as countless archival photographs and drawings, some of them previously unpublished, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn is a book no family's library can do without; it may well prove to be the classic edition of the great American novel. (jacket flap)]]> 656 Mark Twain 0393020398 Mary 5 teacher-books 4.40 1884 The Annotated Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Mary
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1884
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/16
date added: 2016/10/28
shelves: teacher-books
review:
Invaluable. Full of useful maps, illustrations from every edition, and ridiculously extensive notes on Twain, antebellum Missouri, the Mississippi River, past and contemporary racial controversies surrounding the novel, etc. My cooperating teacher passed her copy down to me with high ceremony. I feel like I should have knelt and stretched my hands upward to receive it. Buy it if you're teaching Huck Finn. Now.
]]> Goodbye Stranger 23615709
This year everything is different for Sherm Russo as he gets to know Bridge Barsamian. What does it mean to fall for a girl—as a friend?

On Valentine's Day, an unnamed high school girl struggles with a betrayal. How long can she hide in plain sight?]]> 289 Rebecca Stead 0385743173 Mary 0 3.91 2015 Goodbye Stranger
author: Rebecca Stead
name: Mary
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2016/01/11
date added: 2016/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Lord of the Flies 1167532
Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic.]]> 190 William Golding 3125738040 Mary 4 tenth-grade, re-reading, ya La Haine. Set in the riotous housing projects outside Paris, the film centers around three teenage boys who struggle, like Piggy and Ralph, to survive in a violent, lawless realm. With the added twist, of course, that the adult authorities who intermittently abandon and brutalize the young inhabitants of the projects only exacerbate the bloodshed, and that the boys' attempts to escape from this hell are actively prevented by these authorities. (Thanks to Simon for the recommendation!)]]> 3.57 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Mary
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2009/03/16
date added: 2014/07/24
shelves: tenth-grade, re-reading, ya
review:
Book number two in the tenth-grade curriculum, a course I've seriously considered titling "Teenage Wasteland." I think I'm going to teach this in tandem with a screening of the absurdly good French film La Haine. Set in the riotous housing projects outside Paris, the film centers around three teenage boys who struggle, like Piggy and Ralph, to survive in a violent, lawless realm. With the added twist, of course, that the adult authorities who intermittently abandon and brutalize the young inhabitants of the projects only exacerbate the bloodshed, and that the boys' attempts to escape from this hell are actively prevented by these authorities. (Thanks to Simon for the recommendation!)
]]> <![CDATA[NEWTISMS: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF NEWT GINGRICH]]> 725727 96 Geoff Rodkey 0671535331 Mary 2
Newt on his first wife: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president. And besides, she has cancer."]]> 3.00 1995 NEWTISMS: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF NEWT GINGRICH
author: Geoff Rodkey
name: Mary
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1995
rating: 2
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2013/12/19
shelves:
review:
Worth every penny of the fifty cents I paid for it at a bookstall in Astoria.

Newt on his first wife: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president. And besides, she has cancer."
]]> A Visit from the Goon Squad 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 Mary 3 3.70 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Mary
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2013/12/19
shelves:
review:
I blazed through this and raved about it while I was reading it, and I still maintain that it's clever, but it's not as important as it thinks it is, and there are few things more annoying than that to me.
]]> A Gate at the Stairs 6076387
As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes� are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.

The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.]]> 322 Lorrie Moore 0375409289 Mary 4
It was strange and sort of cringe-inducing to read an era I lived through seen through the eyes of a narrator who was my age at the time. (Tassie and I were both 18 and completely clueless and far away from New York when 9/11 happened on our TVs.) Moore really, really deftly captures the disgruntled but still dopily hopeful mind of exactly the kind of late-adolescent sardonic asshole I used to be at Tassie's age. If you're in your late twenties and thinking life is just a "long, slow drip of adult acne and bad OkCupid dates," as this one awesome blogger put it, read Gate at the Stairs and remember how stupid you actually USED to be and maybe feel a little bit better about how far you've come since then.


]]> 3.18 2009 A Gate at the Stairs
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Mary
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/02/01
date added: 2013/12/19
shelves:
review:
I'm sorry if you don't like this narrator, because she is actually me ten years ago.

It was strange and sort of cringe-inducing to read an era I lived through seen through the eyes of a narrator who was my age at the time. (Tassie and I were both 18 and completely clueless and far away from New York when 9/11 happened on our TVs.) Moore really, really deftly captures the disgruntled but still dopily hopeful mind of exactly the kind of late-adolescent sardonic asshole I used to be at Tassie's age. If you're in your late twenties and thinking life is just a "long, slow drip of adult acne and bad OkCupid dates," as this one awesome blogger put it, read Gate at the Stairs and remember how stupid you actually USED to be and maybe feel a little bit better about how far you've come since then.



]]> <![CDATA[A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments]]> 6748 Infinite Jest.]]> 353 David Foster Wallace 0316925284 Mary 5
The second most obvious thing to say is that DFW is terribly, terribly intelligent. Creepily, preternaturally so. He is the only person I have ever heard describe exactly what is so frightening about David Lynch films, which is a ridiculously difficult thing to do, to go out and define "lynchianness" when this is a thing that David Lynch himself would flat out refuse to define even if he was articulate enough to do so, which he is not. Only David Foster Wallace is. Really. I think that. Here's his definition: lynchianness "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." I mean. Jesus. Right?

So he is a funny genius, of which there are not many. Or, actually, any others that I can think of. Because I didn't say "comic genius," because DFW isn't one of those. He isn't a stand-up-comic type whose genius is a semi-conscious thing contingent upon timing and not getting enough attention as a child. There are and have been plenty of those, even discounting the fact that that term gets tossed around like confetti when a bunch of comedians get together, to the point that I think I've heard it used to describe Gilbert Gottfried. No, DFW is a funny genius, a genius who also happens to be a very funny person. I've never met one of those. Have you? Has anyone?

And now I will never meet him. Obviously. And, like, of course it's astoundingly unlikely that I would ever have gotten to meet him even if he hadn't killed himself. And even LESS likely that we would have had any sort of meaningful interaction beyond me deploying some heavily prepared bon mot while he signed a book. But still. There is something very profoundly upsetting about the fact that he is dead, and dead before his time, and dead by his own hand.

Because the last and perhaps slightly less obvious thing to say about DFW is that in addition to being a funny genius, he comes off as a good person. Part of what's so great about these essays is that they are so much more self-revelatory than those in Consider the Lobster. There is so much more of him—purposefully, nakedly, self-deprecatingly visible. And you can just tell he is (was) actually a big-hearted dude who liked tennis and dogs and rich food and was afraid of chickens. I'm a little afraid to read about him now because I don't want to find anyone saying he was actually a totally vain asshole who made people feel like crap. (Which is a legitimate fear, right? Because anyone who could make themselves seem that likable in an essay without actually being that likable would have to be a real piece of shit. AND because he was a person Harper's liked to employ to do déclassé stuff like take luxury cruises and go to state fairs, on the assumption that he would write about this stuff for its over-educated readers and lay bare exactly what was so déclassé about it, and I'm very glad they got back way more than they bargained for since DFW was such a stand-up, non-elitist kind of guy who drank Mr. Pibb and snidely poked fun at the "snooty northeastern publication" that employed him, but what if he WAS actually a total snob and the whole Mr.-Pibb/poking-fun-at-Harper's thing was an act for the benefit of folks like me who read Harper's but feel bougie and self-conscious when they do so and make sure to fold the cover back on the subway? God, that would be terrible, right?)

In short, I think I'm a little in love with David Foster Wallace in exactly the same sad, hopeless way I was in love with Truman Capote when I was fifteen. Before AND after I found out he was gay. And this makes reading DFW's work slightly difficult and pretty sad, actually.

I do like to think my taste in literary men—or my taste in the shadowy ghosts of male literary giants that haunt their work—has, like, improved since my adolescence. It has, right?
]]> 4.24 1996 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Mary
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2009/11/01
date added: 2013/12/19
shelves:
review:
It's a little impossible to describe how I feel about David Foster Wallace now that I've read this book. The most obvious thing to say about his writing is that it is deeply funny, in the way that a single phrase will hit your cortex on the subway in such a way as to make strangers stare at you because you just let out an actual, very loud "HA!" (When he calls Kyle MacLachlan a "potato-faced nerd," for instance, or when he is careful to note that a rural Illinois fair goer describes carnies as "traish" and then "spits brownly.")

The second most obvious thing to say is that DFW is terribly, terribly intelligent. Creepily, preternaturally so. He is the only person I have ever heard describe exactly what is so frightening about David Lynch films, which is a ridiculously difficult thing to do, to go out and define "lynchianness" when this is a thing that David Lynch himself would flat out refuse to define even if he was articulate enough to do so, which he is not. Only David Foster Wallace is. Really. I think that. Here's his definition: lynchianness "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." I mean. Jesus. Right?

So he is a funny genius, of which there are not many. Or, actually, any others that I can think of. Because I didn't say "comic genius," because DFW isn't one of those. He isn't a stand-up-comic type whose genius is a semi-conscious thing contingent upon timing and not getting enough attention as a child. There are and have been plenty of those, even discounting the fact that that term gets tossed around like confetti when a bunch of comedians get together, to the point that I think I've heard it used to describe Gilbert Gottfried. No, DFW is a funny genius, a genius who also happens to be a very funny person. I've never met one of those. Have you? Has anyone?

And now I will never meet him. Obviously. And, like, of course it's astoundingly unlikely that I would ever have gotten to meet him even if he hadn't killed himself. And even LESS likely that we would have had any sort of meaningful interaction beyond me deploying some heavily prepared bon mot while he signed a book. But still. There is something very profoundly upsetting about the fact that he is dead, and dead before his time, and dead by his own hand.

Because the last and perhaps slightly less obvious thing to say about DFW is that in addition to being a funny genius, he comes off as a good person. Part of what's so great about these essays is that they are so much more self-revelatory than those in Consider the Lobster. There is so much more of him—purposefully, nakedly, self-deprecatingly visible. And you can just tell he is (was) actually a big-hearted dude who liked tennis and dogs and rich food and was afraid of chickens. I'm a little afraid to read about him now because I don't want to find anyone saying he was actually a totally vain asshole who made people feel like crap. (Which is a legitimate fear, right? Because anyone who could make themselves seem that likable in an essay without actually being that likable would have to be a real piece of shit. AND because he was a person Harper's liked to employ to do déclassé stuff like take luxury cruises and go to state fairs, on the assumption that he would write about this stuff for its over-educated readers and lay bare exactly what was so déclassé about it, and I'm very glad they got back way more than they bargained for since DFW was such a stand-up, non-elitist kind of guy who drank Mr. Pibb and snidely poked fun at the "snooty northeastern publication" that employed him, but what if he WAS actually a total snob and the whole Mr.-Pibb/poking-fun-at-Harper's thing was an act for the benefit of folks like me who read Harper's but feel bougie and self-conscious when they do so and make sure to fold the cover back on the subway? God, that would be terrible, right?)

In short, I think I'm a little in love with David Foster Wallace in exactly the same sad, hopeless way I was in love with Truman Capote when I was fifteen. Before AND after I found out he was gay. And this makes reading DFW's work slightly difficult and pretty sad, actually.

I do like to think my taste in literary men—or my taste in the shadowy ghosts of male literary giants that haunt their work—has, like, improved since my adolescence. It has, right?

]]> <![CDATA[The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle]]> 85246 288 Dan Brown 1559708352 Mary 5 teacher-books 3.66 2007 The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle
author: Dan Brown
name: Mary
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2013/05/04
shelves: teacher-books
review:
I bought the book because Dan was a great classmate, and I finished it within hours because he's a ridiculously talented writer. The book is brave and gloriously honest. No glib prattle about "earning their respect," no sappy pseudo-inspirational horseshit. Just a frank, touching, and often funny record of what it was like to be a 22-year-old ex-film student who finds himself teaching fourth grade at an elementary school in the poorest neighborhood in America. Read it if you want to teach. Period.
]]> <![CDATA[Because They Wanted To: Stories]]> 84476
Tiny, smiling daddy --
Because they wanted to --
Orchid --
The blanket --
Comfort --
The girl on the plane --
The dentist --
Kiss and tell --
The wrong thing Turgor --
Respect --
Processing --
Stuff]]> 256 Mary Gaitskill 0684841444 Mary 5 3.94 1997 Because They Wanted To: Stories
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Mary
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction]]> 7521546
In prose so fine and wry it makes the back of your neck prickle, Jake Silverstein narrates a journey he undertook through the American Southwest and Mexico, looking to become a journalist. His picaresque travels are filled with beguiling and hilarious characters: nineteenth-century author Ambrose Bierce; an unknown group of famous poets; a twenty-first-century treasure hunter in the Gulf of Mexico; an ex-Nazi mechanic shepherding an old Mexican road race; a stenographer who records every passing moment; and various incarnations of the trickster devil.

As bold, ambitious, and funny as it is unconventional, Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a deep and lasting pleasure.]]> 231 Jake Silverstein 0393076466 Mary 3
So those are funny and awesome and include some smart, incisive stuff about the nature of journalism and poetry and fiction and truth-telling and whatnot. The rest is kind of a whiff. Somehow, the long, long true chapter about the deadliest road race in the world is kind of boring? I'm not sure how that happened. ]]> 3.41 2010 Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction
author: Jake Silverstein
name: Mary
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/08/01
date added: 2011/08/20
shelves:
review:
Uneven, but frequently clever. The format of the book is ingenious, if a little precious: it switches off between fact and fiction every other chapter, and Silverstein labels the chapters because he does not "wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done." The result is a patchwork novel-memoir chronicling the author's attempt (and spectacular failure) to be a real writer of some stripe, first a journalist and then a poet and then a journalist again. The first three chapters deliver hugely on the promise of the premise. There's the hilariously uneventful account of his search for the bones of Ambrose Bierce in and around Marfa, Texas. There's the tall tale of the very German New Yorker photographer looking for "ze shot" to convey the soul of Midland, Texas in a single picture. (Ze shot ends up pitting the teuton against junkyard dogs.) And there's the horribly true account of Silverstein's sojourn in Reno to compete for $25,000 after receiving a letter from the clearly bogus Famous Poet's Society. (He knows it's bogus, but he needs the money, and he predicts that competition at such an event won't be too stiff. This proves to be hubris. How will he compete with the man who wrote a poem about everyone in the world praying for world peace for a solid week in all the different time zones, complete with a chart illustrating the effectiveness of this scheme? He didn't know you could use visual aids! Or with the man whose poem includes the line "it takes both sunshine and rain to make rainbows"?

So those are funny and awesome and include some smart, incisive stuff about the nature of journalism and poetry and fiction and truth-telling and whatnot. The rest is kind of a whiff. Somehow, the long, long true chapter about the deadliest road race in the world is kind of boring? I'm not sure how that happened.
]]> <![CDATA[Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students]]> 219973 Fires in the Bathroom has been through multiple printings and received the attention of teachers across the country. Now in paperback, Kathleen Cushman's groundbreaking book offers original insights into teaching teenagers in today's hard-pressed urban high schools from the point of view of the students themselves. It speaks to both new and established teachers, giving them firsthand information about who their students are and what they need to succeed.

Students from across the country contributed perceptive and pragmatic answers to questions of how teachers can transcend the barriers of adolescent identity and culture to reach the diverse student body in today's urban schools. With the fresh and often surprising perspectives of youth, they tackle tough issues such as increasing engagement and motivation, teaching difficult academic material, reaching English-language learners, and creating a classroom culture where respect and success go hand in hand.]]> 224 Kathleen Cushman 1565849965 Mary 2
I guess I would have found this more useful if I'd read it back before I was worth anything near my salt, in my first two years?
]]> 3.71 2003 Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students
author: Kathleen Cushman
name: Mary
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2010/06/01
date added: 2011/08/03
shelves:
review:
I guess mostly I wished Cushman would have backed off her own agenda for a little bit and allowed these kids time and space to craft their own ideas about good teaching. It sounds like she just sat in a room with them and goaded them to say certain things (including some awful things about former teachers of theirs who were presumably still in the classroom) and then had somebody write it all down word for word. There are some little nuggets of wisdom, and the kids are lovely and candid (but when aren't kids lovely and candid?), but mostly there's nothing in here that most teachers worth their salt don't already know.

I guess I would have found this more useful if I'd read it back before I was worth anything near my salt, in my first two years?

]]> <![CDATA[The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn]]> 141310
But is it? Dare we forget? The author of The Jim Dilemma argues that Twain's novel, in the tradition of all great literature, is invaluable for transporting readers to a time, place, and conflict essential to understanding who we are today. Without this work, she argues, there would be a hole in American history and a blank page in the history of African Americans. To avoid this work in the classroom is to miss the opportunity to remember.

Few other popular books have been so much attacked, vilified, or censored. Yet Ernest Hemingway proclaimed Twain's classic to be the beginning of American literature, and Langston Hughes judged it as the only nineteenth-century work by a white author who fully and realistically depicts an unlettered slave clinging to the hope of freedom.

A teacher herself, the author challenges opponents to read the novel closely. She shows how Twain has not created another Uncle Tom but rather a worthy man of integrity and self-reliance. Jim, along with other black characters in the book, demands a rethinking and a re-envisioning of the southern slave, for Huckleberry Finn, she contends, ultimately questions readers' notions of what freedom means and what it costs. As she shows that Twain portrayed Jim as nobody's fool, she focuses her discussion on both sides of the Jim dilemma and unflinchingly defends the importance of keeping the book in the classroom.]]> 159 Jocelyn A. Chadwick 1578060613 Mary 2 3.96 1998 The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn
author: Jocelyn A. Chadwick
name: Mary
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1998
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2011/08/03
shelves:
review:
Eh. "Black Perpectives on Huckleberry Finn" is a better choice for opening up debates about caricature and minstrelsy.
]]> <![CDATA[Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way]]> 11151351 This vastly expanded edition, as of October 2014, includes an afterword, a detailed look at further financial improprieties committed by Mortenson, an analysis of his recent claims of innocence, and fresh evidence from new sources from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the US.Greg Mortenson has built a global reputation as a selfless humanitarian and children’s crusader, and he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is also not what he appears to be. As acclaimed author Jon Krakauer discovered, Mortenson has not only fabricated substantial parts of his bestselling books Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, but has also misused millions of dollars donated by unsuspecting admirers like Krakauer himself.This is the tragic tale of good intentions gone very wrong.One hundred percent of Jon Krakauer's proceeds from the sale of Three Cups of Deceit will be donated to the "Stop Girl Trafficking" project at the American Himalayan Foundation ( THE AUTHORJon Krakauer is the author of "Eiger Dreams", "Into the Wild", "Into Thin Air", "Under the Banner of Heaven", and "Where Men Win Glory" and is the editor of the Modern Library Exploration series.PRAISE FOR "THREE CUPS OF DECEIT""The truth matters. Jon Krakauer's takedown of Greg Mortenson's book "Three Cups of Tea" and the charitable foundation he built from it is devastating. It is not just the fascinating story of a huckster who took publishers, philanthropists, journalists, academics, and a gullible public for a ride, but a detailed trip into the slippery netherworld where what matters most is what sells, not what really happened." —Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down""Packed with interviews and anecdotes that undercut Mortenson's image as a cheerful do-gooder, Krakauer's account of good intentions gone horribly wrong is a stunning example of investigative journalism." —Publishers Weekly“Krakauer forcefully claims that Mortenson improperly used his charity’s funds and failed to build all the schools he says he did.� —Elizabeth Taylor, Literary Editor, Chicago Tribune]]> 77 Jon Krakauer 1614520011 Mary 0 to-read 3.70 2011 Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Mary
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Super Sad True Love Story 7334201 The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,� as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.

After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork� effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness� and “sustainability� with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.

Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 331 Gary Shteyngart 1400066409 Mary 2
That was bitchy, I know. But still. Come on. M.T. Anderson's "Feed" did this earlier and better and more thoughtfully and that shit was YA.

Also I didn't finish it. Maybe it ended up being good and went somewhere original? I will defer to anyone who makes that point. ]]> 3.45 2010 Super Sad True Love Story
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Mary
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/06/01
date added: 2011/08/02
shelves:
review:
So, like, you can't just hyperbolize the most oft-repeated talking points on cable news and call it a dystopia. "OMG the Chinese are taking over the world! Everyone has iPhone-like devices that they look at instead of reading or talking to each other. It's a wooooorrrrrllllddd gone maaaaaaaad!"

That was bitchy, I know. But still. Come on. M.T. Anderson's "Feed" did this earlier and better and more thoughtfully and that shit was YA.

Also I didn't finish it. Maybe it ended up being good and went somewhere original? I will defer to anyone who makes that point.
]]> The Pale King 9443405
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.]]> 548 David Foster Wallace 0316074233 Mary 4
It's not like the space they're occupying in my brain is prime real estate, but I kind of wish they'd go away? They're creepy, is all. One of them is a ghost who killed himself after decades of mind-numbing labor in a mirror factory, for God's sake. ]]> 3.97 2011 The Pale King
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Mary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/04/02
date added: 2011/08/02
shelves:
review:
I finished this forever ago, on the last day of my spring break, actually, and it's still haunting me in lots of weird little ways. DFW's characters have one hell of a half life; they take a terribly long time to fade from your memory. Long, long after I've finished the book and forgotten most of the plot and even their names, the levitating rote examiner and the maniacal silver-haired Jesuit accounting professor and the dopey, fatherless Chicago burnout and the devastatingly beautiful but disgustingly narcissistic accountant are still bouncing around in my head, saying stuff about what I'm reading and doing. The twisted fictionalized version DFW created of himself, complete with the disfiguring acne and the blue-collar chip on his shoulder, is particularly tenacious.

It's not like the space they're occupying in my brain is prime real estate, but I kind of wish they'd go away? They're creepy, is all. One of them is a ghost who killed himself after decades of mind-numbing labor in a mirror factory, for God's sake.
]]> <![CDATA[Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?]]> 19634 Birds of America we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
Ěý
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.]]> 147 Lorrie Moore 1400033829 Mary 2 3.84 1994 Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Mary
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 2
read at: 2011/04/01
date added: 2011/07/06
shelves:
review:
I finished this book today and I've already forgotten everything but a few well-turned phrases and the creepy twist Moore tosses in at the climax.
]]> Howards End 3102 246 E.M. Forster 0486424545 Mary 5 3.97 1910 Howards End
author: E.M. Forster
name: Mary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1910
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/04/16
shelves:
review:
I always like a book that gives you new ways to think about stuff. A book like this by a wise, gentle old closeted gay English dude who spent his life, as Virginia Woolf said, "rowing old ladies about in boats": that's pure fucking gold. The combination of Forster's keen, incisive intellect and his sweet, palpable love for humanity makes for characters that stick to your ribs and honest-to-God life lessons that will help you make sense of your own shit. Seriously. Because of this book, I will for the rest of my life divide people into Wilcoxes and Schlegels, and I find this distinction enormously helpful, especially when I remember that the lesson (for lack of a better word) of the novel is for Wilcoxes and Schegels to stop hating on each other so much, since I'm a Schlegel and have had endless, endless trouble with Wilcoxes.
]]> Stitches: A Memoir 6407014
One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.

In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents' buried frustration and rage.

Believing that they were trying to do their best, David's parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son's respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David's cancer. Elizabeth, David's mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.

Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statement.

A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again. Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award (Young Adult); finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (Best Writer/Artist: Nonfiction; Best Reality-Based Work).]]> 329 David Small 0393068579 Mary 0 to-read 4.05 2009 Stitches: A Memoir
author: David Small
name: Mary
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bad Behavior 251356 Emperor of the Air has there been such excitement surrounding a debut short-story collection.

Daisy's valentine --
A romantic weekend --
something nice --
An affair, edited --
Connection --
Trying to be --
Secretary --
Other factors --
Heaven]]> 208 Mary Gaitskill Mary 4 3.90 1988 Bad Behavior
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Mary
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2011/04/01
date added: 2011/04/14
shelves:
review:
Four and not five stars only because the last story truly sucks. But the rest is just disgustingly good. Really fearless investigations into this particular nexus of sex, power, violence, and class that clicked into place for like ten seconds in the 1980s on the Lower East Side. You don't wish you'd been there, but you're glad Gaitskill was around taking notes.
]]> Like Life 19632 Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.]]> 192 Lorrie Moore 0375719164 Mary 4 4.09 1990 Like Life
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Mary
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2011/03/01
date added: 2011/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> A Room with a View 791344 E. M. Forster’s third novel has long been the most popular of his early works. A young girl, Lucy Honeychurch, and her chaperon—products of proper Edwardian England—visit a tempestuous, passionate Italy. Their “room with a view� allows them to look into a world far different from their own, a world unconcerned with convention, unfettered by social rituals, and unafraid of emotion. Soon Lucy finds herself bound to an obviously “unsuitable� man, the melancholic George Emerson, whose improper advances she dare not publicize. Back home, her friend and mentor Charlotte Bartlett and her mother, try to manipulate her into marriage with the more “appropriate� but smotheringly dull Cecil Vyse, whose surname suggests the imprisoning effect he would have on Lucy’s spirit.

A colorful gallery of characters, including George’s riotously funny father, Lucy’s sullen brother, the novelist Eleanor Lavish, and the reverend Mr. Beebe, line up on either side, and A Room with a View unfolds as a delightfully satiric comedy of manners and an immensely satisfying love story.]]> 199 E.M. Forster 1593082886 Mary 4 3.85 1908 A Room with a View
author: E.M. Forster
name: Mary
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1908
rating: 4
read at: 2010/06/14
date added: 2011/04/14
shelves:
review:
God, E.M. Forster, where were you when I was sixteen and didn't know any better than Jane Austen?
]]> <![CDATA[American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans]]> 833829
Until now, Hutchinson has been a polarizing figure in American history and letters, attracting either disdain or exaltation. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was haunted by the "sainted" Hutchinson, used her as a model for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Much of the praise for her, however, is muted by a wish to domesticate the heroine: the bronze statue of Hutchinson at the Massachusetts State House depicts a prayerful mother -- eyes raised to heaven, a child at her side -- rather than a woman of power standing alone before humanity and God. Her detractors, starting with her neighbor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, referred to her as "the instrument of Satan," the new Eve, the "disturber of Israel," a witch, "more bold than a man," and Jezebel -- the ancient Israeli queen who, on account of her tremendous political power, was "the most evil woman" in the Bible.

Written by one of Hutchinson's direct descendants, American Jezebel brings both balance and perspective to Hutchinson's story. It captures this American heroine's life in all its complexity, presenting her not as a religious fanatic, a cardboard feminist, or a raging crank-as some have portrayed her-but as a flesh-and-blood wife, mother, theologian, and political leader.

Opening in a colonial courtroom, American Jezebel moves back in time to Hutchinson's childhood in Elizabethan England, exploring intimate details of her marriage and family life. The book narrates her dramatic expulsion from Massachusetts, after which her judges, still threatened by her challenges, promptly built Harvard College to enforce religious and social orthodoxies -- making her midwife to the nation's first college. In exile, she settled Rhode Island (which later merged with Roger Williams's Providence Plantation), becoming the only woman ever to co-found an American colony.

The seeds of the American struggle for women's and human rights can be found in the story of this one woman's courageous life. American Jezebel illuminates the origins of our modern concepts of religious freedom, equal rights, and free speech, and showcases an extraordinary woman whose achievements are astonishing by the standards of any era.]]> 312 Eve LaPlante 0060562331 Mary 0 to-read 3.54 2004 American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans
author: Eve LaPlante
name: Mary
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How I Made It to Eighteen: A Mostly True Story]]> 7260186
Based on the author's experiences, How I Made it to Eighteen is a frank portrait of what it's like to struggle with self-esteem, body image issues, drug addiction, and anxiety.

How I Made It to Eighteen is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.]]> 160 Tracy White 1596434546 Mary 0 to-read 3.30 2010 How I Made It to Eighteen: A Mostly True Story
author: Tracy White
name: Mary
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Weathercraft 7627836 Weathercraft is Woodring’s first full-length graphic novel set in this world—indeed, Woodring’s first graphic novel, period!—and it features the same hypnotically gorgeous linework and mystical iconography.


As it happens, Frank has only a brief supporting appearance in Weathercraft, which actually stars Manhog, Woodring’s pathetic, brutish everyman (or everyhog), who had previously made several appearances in “Frank� stories (as well as a stunning solo turn in the short story “Gentlemanhog�).


After enduring 32 pages of almost incomprehensible suffering, Manhog embarks upon a transformative journey and attains enlightenment. He wants to go to celestial realms but instead altruistically returns to the unifactor to undo a wrong he has inadvertently brought about: The transformation of the evil politician Whim into a mind-destroying plant-demon who distorts and enslaves Frank and his friends. The new and metaphysically expanded Manhog sets out for a final battle with Whim...


Weathercraft also co-stars Frank’s cast of beloved supporting characters, including Frank’s Faux Pa and the diminutive, mailbox-like Pupshaw and Pushpaw; it is both a fully independent story that is a great introduction to Woodring’s world, and a sublime addition to, and extension of, the Frank stories.


Weathercraft will be a defining graphic novel of 2010.]]> 104 Jim Woodring 1606993402 Mary 0 to-read 4.14 2009 Weathercraft
author: Jim Woodring
name: Mary
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Home Land 544046
The Eastern Valley High School Alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes, is bursting with tales of former students include a bankable politician and a famous baseball star, not to mention a major-label recording artist. Then there is the appalling, yet utterly lovable, Lewis Miner, class of '89--a.k.a Teabag--who did not pan out. Home Land is his confession in all its bitter, lovelorn glory.

Winner of the Believer Book Award
New York Times Notable Book of the Year]]> 229 Sam Lipsyte 0312424183 Mary 4
This is the ethos of Lewis "Teabag" Miner, an outcast and geek in high school who grew up into a slightly larger, fatter outcast and geek with precisely one friend, no prospects, and an insatiable urge to speak truth to power—or at least to the powerful alums who run his alumni newsletter.

Lots of reviews invoke Holden Caulfield, but this narrator—a lonely, lascivious man-child maniacally bent on "updating" his more successful high school classmates on his tawdry wreck of a life—reminds me much more of a Yankee Ignatius J. Reilly, as unhappily wedded to his native New Jersey as Reilly was to New Orleans.

The Wrathful Anomie of a White Dude Who Cannot Grow Up is hardly new territory, but Lipsyte's vicious, hilarious, and sometimes really, really beautiful prose makes it well worth reading. It's also the first time in a LONG time a novel has succeeded in shocking me, both with its stubbornly unpredictable plot and with some truly disgusting descriptions of bodily matters normally left in the realm of metaphor. (Seriously, if by some strange chance you are an underage student of mine actually reading this review, do not tell anyone I recommended this book to you. Because I didn't. This book is not for you. It would probably stunt your intellectual and emotional growth and most likely scar you for life.)

AND, also much to Lipsyte's credit, this is the first time I've read a novel with a narrator who has problems with women that didn't make me feel like the author just needed an outlet for his own misogyny.

]]> 3.63 2004 Home Land
author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Mary
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2010/07/22
date added: 2010/07/26
shelves:
review:
"I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it."

This is the ethos of Lewis "Teabag" Miner, an outcast and geek in high school who grew up into a slightly larger, fatter outcast and geek with precisely one friend, no prospects, and an insatiable urge to speak truth to power—or at least to the powerful alums who run his alumni newsletter.

Lots of reviews invoke Holden Caulfield, but this narrator—a lonely, lascivious man-child maniacally bent on "updating" his more successful high school classmates on his tawdry wreck of a life—reminds me much more of a Yankee Ignatius J. Reilly, as unhappily wedded to his native New Jersey as Reilly was to New Orleans.

The Wrathful Anomie of a White Dude Who Cannot Grow Up is hardly new territory, but Lipsyte's vicious, hilarious, and sometimes really, really beautiful prose makes it well worth reading. It's also the first time in a LONG time a novel has succeeded in shocking me, both with its stubbornly unpredictable plot and with some truly disgusting descriptions of bodily matters normally left in the realm of metaphor. (Seriously, if by some strange chance you are an underage student of mine actually reading this review, do not tell anyone I recommended this book to you. Because I didn't. This book is not for you. It would probably stunt your intellectual and emotional growth and most likely scar you for life.)

AND, also much to Lipsyte's credit, this is the first time I've read a novel with a narrator who has problems with women that didn't make me feel like the author just needed an outlet for his own misogyny.


]]> <![CDATA[Billy Hazelnuts (Billy Hazelnuts, #1)]]> 383520 Sock Monkey and one of America's most popular weekly comic strips, Maakies, delivers his first original graphic novel for Fantagraphics, Billy Hazelnuts. Billy Hazelnuts transmutes nursery rhymes and the golem myth into a storybook about Becky, girl scientist, her friend Billy Hazelnuts (who was created from cooking ingredients by tailless mice), and their journey to find the missing moon while battling an evil steam-driven alligator with a seeing-eye skunk.



Millionaire fuses the darker spirit of older fairy tales with an absurdist adventure story, throws gender politics into the mix, and brings it to life with his dementedly charming and meticulous drawing style that is utterly transporting. Billy Hazelnuts features all-new characters, a first for Millionaire after building a tremendous following for his Sock Monkey and Maakies characters, which is sure to delight existing fans as well as introduce an entirely new audience to his breathtaking line and imagination.]]> 111 Tony Millionaire 1560977019 Mary 4 3.83 2006 Billy Hazelnuts (Billy Hazelnuts, #1)
author: Tony Millionaire
name: Mary
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2010/07/01
date added: 2010/07/08
shelves:
review:
If the art wasn't so strikingly similar, it'd be hard to believe the same guy made this and Maakies. The online comic is so gross and violent and demented and cynically hard-boiled it makes me sort of queasy. But Billy Hazelnuts, while pretty disgusting (it does star a Golem fashioned by vengeful mice out of garbage and houseflies) is also sort of delicate and sweet-natured and gently funny. And there's a really rewarding depth to the dream-logic of the plot. Not bad for a thirty-minute read.
]]> Swallow Me Whole 2970434
In his most ambitious book to date, Powell quietly explores the dark corners of adolescence -- not the cliched melodramatic outbursts of rebellion, but the countless tiny moments of madness, the vague relief of medication, and the mixed blessing of family ties. As the story unfolds, two stepsiblings hold together amidst schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, family breakdown, animal telepathy, misguided love, and the tiniest hope that everything will someday make sense.

Deliberately paced, delicately drawn, and drenched in shadows, Swallow Me Whole is a landmark achievement for Nate Powell and a suburban ghost story that will haunt readers long after its final pages.

2009 Eisner Award Winner for Best Graphic Album (New), Eisner Award Nominee for Best Writer/Artist and Best Lettering, 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for Young Adult Fiction, Ignatz Award Winner for Outstanding Artist and Outstanding Debut, and official selection of YALSA's Great Graphic Novels For Teens.]]> 216 Nate Powell 1603090339 Mary 1 comics 3.65 2008 Swallow Me Whole
author: Nate Powell
name: Mary
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2008
rating: 1
read at: 2010/07/01
date added: 2010/07/08
shelves: comics
review:
Yawn. Who knew a graphic novel about teenage schizophrenia could be so boring?
]]> Shortcomings 227350 Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive Japanese American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl). Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real antihero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cultlike fan following and has earned status as one of the most widely acclaimed cartoonists of our time.

Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine's iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13.]]> 108 Adrian Tomine 1897299168 Mary 4 comics 3.64 2007 Shortcomings
author: Adrian Tomine
name: Mary
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2010/07/01
date added: 2010/07/08
shelves: comics
review:
What seems like a neat, tightly coiled little story about Ben Tanaka—an Asian guy with an Asian girlfriend and a secret jones for blue-eyed blondes—slowly, terribly unfurls into something huge and messy and truthful and disturbing. There are moments in here that make you cringe so hard your shoulders graze your ears. Some of the most intelligent writing about race and masculinity I've ever read.
]]> Planet of Slums 1257012 228 Mike Davis 1844671607 Mary 4 nonfiction
Which is not to say it isn't also incredibly erudite and well researched. That is, of course, what makes it scary. It's one of those books that makes you entirely reorganize the shelves in your brain. Here's Davis's take on war, for instance: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around [slums:] that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion."

Here is just a smattering of the super-scary facts:

One third of the global urban population lives in slums.

Right now, almost half of the developing world's urban population is sick from a preventable disease associated with poor sanitation. There will be about 5 million preventable deaths of children under five years old in slums by 2025.

In Cairo's slum, called the City of the Dead, a million people live in homes they made out of tombs.

"In Mumbai, slum-dwellers have retreated so far into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park that some are now being routinely eaten by leopards."

Because of disinvestment in public services like heat and water and housing required by the IMF, "Millions of poor urban Russians... suffer conditions of cold, hunger, and isolation uncannily reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad."

In wealthy suburbs in Cape Town, the rich and middle class encircle their communities with ten-thousand-volt fences that were originally designed to discourage lions, so great is their fear of the poor who live in the hellish slums they build HIGHWAYS OVER to avoid seeing. Similar walled communities in China and Southeast Asia have names like "Orange County."

A slum in Nairobi has 10 working latrines (which are really just glorified pits) for 40,000 people. (This from a horrifyingly informative sub-chapter titled "Living in Shit.") In Indian slums, women can only defecate between two and five in the morning, because the only places to relieve oneself are public parks, and modesty demands that they not be seen doing this, so they don't eat during the day.

Desperately poor slum-dwellers in Kinshasa have taken to blaming their poverty on disabled children, whom Pentacostal preachers have convinced them are evil witches. The children are torturously "exorcised" and then abandoned in the streets.

And it just goes on and on. This litany of awful, awful facts.

Here's the closest thing Davis offers to a solution. It's one sentence in the last chapter, nestled into a discussion of how the Pentagon and military academies are now basically training our armies the art of fighting poor people in slums: "Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism."

Oh, and here's the last sentence: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos of their side."

Sleep tight.]]> 3.95 2006 Planet of Slums
author: Mike Davis
name: Mary
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2010/07/07
date added: 2010/07/07
shelves: nonfiction
review:
Good luck figuring out what to do with yourself once you've finished this book. The title might sound hyperbolic, but Davis underpins his terrifying thesis exhaustively with this tidal-wave-o'-super-scary-facts-delivered-nonchalantly prose style, which, along with the occasional offhand allusion to Bladerunner and the profligate use of the adjective "Orwellian," makes this probably the scariest thing I have ever, ever read.

Which is not to say it isn't also incredibly erudite and well researched. That is, of course, what makes it scary. It's one of those books that makes you entirely reorganize the shelves in your brain. Here's Davis's take on war, for instance: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around [slums:] that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion."

Here is just a smattering of the super-scary facts:

One third of the global urban population lives in slums.

Right now, almost half of the developing world's urban population is sick from a preventable disease associated with poor sanitation. There will be about 5 million preventable deaths of children under five years old in slums by 2025.

In Cairo's slum, called the City of the Dead, a million people live in homes they made out of tombs.

"In Mumbai, slum-dwellers have retreated so far into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park that some are now being routinely eaten by leopards."

Because of disinvestment in public services like heat and water and housing required by the IMF, "Millions of poor urban Russians... suffer conditions of cold, hunger, and isolation uncannily reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad."

In wealthy suburbs in Cape Town, the rich and middle class encircle their communities with ten-thousand-volt fences that were originally designed to discourage lions, so great is their fear of the poor who live in the hellish slums they build HIGHWAYS OVER to avoid seeing. Similar walled communities in China and Southeast Asia have names like "Orange County."

A slum in Nairobi has 10 working latrines (which are really just glorified pits) for 40,000 people. (This from a horrifyingly informative sub-chapter titled "Living in Shit.") In Indian slums, women can only defecate between two and five in the morning, because the only places to relieve oneself are public parks, and modesty demands that they not be seen doing this, so they don't eat during the day.

Desperately poor slum-dwellers in Kinshasa have taken to blaming their poverty on disabled children, whom Pentacostal preachers have convinced them are evil witches. The children are torturously "exorcised" and then abandoned in the streets.

And it just goes on and on. This litany of awful, awful facts.

Here's the closest thing Davis offers to a solution. It's one sentence in the last chapter, nestled into a discussion of how the Pentagon and military academies are now basically training our armies the art of fighting poor people in slums: "Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism."

Oh, and here's the last sentence: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos of their side."

Sleep tight.
]]> <![CDATA[Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn]]> 84349 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examines the novel’s racist elements and assesses the degree to which Twain’s ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism.
Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, these essays include personal impressions of Huckleberry Finn, descriptions of classroom experience with the book, evaluations of its ironic and allegorical aspects, explorations of its nineteenth-century context, and appraisal of its effects on twentieth-century African American writers. Among the issues the authors contend with are Twain’s pervasive use of the word “nigger,� his portrayal of the slave Jim according to the conventions of the minstrel show “darky,� and the thematic chaos created by the “evasion� depicted in the novel’s final chapters.
Sure to provoke thought and stir debate, Satire or Evasion? provides a variety of new perspectives on one of this country’s most troubling classics. Contributors. Richard K. Barksdale, Bernard W. Bell, Mary Kemp Davis, Peaches M. Henry, Betty Harris Jones, Rhett S. Jones, Julius Lester, Donnarae MacCann, Charles H. Nichols, Charles H. Nilon, Arnold Rampersad, David L. Smith, Carmen Dubryan, John H. Wallace, Kenny Jackson Williams, Fredrick Woodard]]> 281 0822311747 Mary 4 3.68 1991 Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn
author: Editor-James S. Leonard; Editor-Thomas A. Tenney; Editor-Thadious M. Davis
name: Mary
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2010/04/01
date added: 2010/07/07
shelves:
review:
Seriously, absolutely imperative if you're going to teach Huck Finn. Charles Nilon's essay "Freeing the Free Negro" about the "evasive" ending of the novel is especially enlightening.
]]> Push 71332 177 Sapphire 0679766758 Mary 3
I also like that the author acknowledges her debts to The Color Purple, which is in many ways Push's urtext, but that she also complicates and builds upon Walker's explorations of the intersections between incest, sexual abuse, sexuality, gender, poverty, and racism. (For example, Jermaine, a lesbian in Precious's remedial reading class, is quick to point out that she is gay, and that she was sexually abused by men, but that the former fact predated the latter. "Men did not make me this way," she insists, "Nothing happened to make me this way.") ]]> 3.89 1996 Push
author: Sapphire
name: Mary
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/07/07
shelves:
review:
I haven't seen Precious, but I'd been sort of dreading reading Push because the previews for the film made me think it'd be some tired teacher-savior narrative. It's not. Sapphire makes Precious herself so prodigious and vital that it necessarily relegates the teacher, Ms. Rain, to a supporting role. She's just a teacher, and a pretty good one, and she does her job. But the book is about Precious. I like that.

I also like that the author acknowledges her debts to The Color Purple, which is in many ways Push's urtext, but that she also complicates and builds upon Walker's explorations of the intersections between incest, sexual abuse, sexuality, gender, poverty, and racism. (For example, Jermaine, a lesbian in Precious's remedial reading class, is quick to point out that she is gay, and that she was sexually abused by men, but that the former fact predated the latter. "Men did not make me this way," she insists, "Nothing happened to make me this way.")
]]> Ragtime 1063370 Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.]]> 320 E.L. Doctorow 0679602976 Mary 4 3.97 1975 Ragtime
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Mary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2010/06/01
date added: 2010/07/07
shelves:
review:
"Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable." A brisk short-sentence march through early 20th-century New York City that somehow manages to keep up its breakneck pace through 17 years of history and 300+ pages. It is also miraculously unpretentious, and sometimes really, really hilarious. Harry Houdini is one of the parade of historical personages that people the novel, and by far the most compellingly rendered, which seems fitting since Doctorow's plot is Houdini-esque in its ridiculous daring and its tendency towards spectacle. You spend a lot of time wondering how in God's name Doctorow is going to pull this next trick off, and then he does, and you feel compelled to cheer but also wonder if he might not be a little bit crazy to even attempt such a thing.
]]> Long Day's Journey Into Night 1257269 175 Eugene O'Neill 0300046014 Mary 3 Hair-raising. 4.11 1956 Long Day's Journey Into Night
author: Eugene O'Neill
name: Mary
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1956
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/07/07
shelves:
review:
Hair-raising.
]]> Transformations 47734 112 Anne Sexton 061808343X Mary 4 poetry
Thanks, Anne Sexton, for explaining why I've felt the need to read some poetry. ]]> 4.14 1971 Transformations
author: Anne Sexton
name: Mary
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2010/06/26
shelves: poetry
review:
"It is not enough to read Hesse/ and drink clam chowder/ we must have the answers."

Thanks, Anne Sexton, for explaining why I've felt the need to read some poetry.
]]> The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 517188 150 Muriel Spark 0060931736 Mary 5 favorites 3.73 1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
author: Muriel Spark
name: Mary
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2010/02/01
date added: 2010/03/02
shelves: favorites
review:
Catholics! Fascists! Why hasn't James read this a million times?
]]> <![CDATA[The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1)]]> 2118745
But how do you escape when your pursuers can hear your every thought?]]> 479 Patrick Ness 1406310255 Mary 0 to-read 3.95 2008 The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1)
author: Patrick Ness
name: Mary
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Macbeth 1506839 William Shakespeare 0671457195 Mary 5 forclass Hamlet, for instance, includes a picture of a harrow keyed to the "harrow up my soul" line, which does more to help kids understand how Hamlet is feeling than any three-line scholarly footnote on Elizabethan farming practices. ]]> 4.19 1623 Macbeth
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mary
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1623
rating: 5
read at: 2007/10/01
date added: 2010/01/26
shelves: forclass
review:
For the record, these Folger editions are my favorite for secondary classrooms. The annotations are kept to a useful minimum and handily occupy the left page, unlike scholarly editions in which footnotes crowd in tiny text at the bottom, teem with information that is more or less useless to high school kids, and manage only to intimidate the crap out of them. The Folger annos even have friendly illustrations of the harder-to-explain stuff; the Folger Hamlet, for instance, includes a picture of a harrow keyed to the "harrow up my soul" line, which does more to help kids understand how Hamlet is feeling than any three-line scholarly footnote on Elizabethan farming practices.
]]> Infinite Jest 75786 A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie—as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel.

On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1079 David Foster Wallace 0316066524 Mary 5 favorites
Ok, I will say this for anyone who is contemplating reading this thing: appropriately enough for a book about addiction and obsession, it really rewards binge reading. Get ready to burrow down in this thing like a foxhole and wonder where the last four hours went.

And I will also say this: I honestly need help figuring out what to do with myself now. If you're anything like me, this book will change the way you think about reading and novels and what fiction is capable of doing to you. Since I finished this, I've picked up and fumbled at other books I'd planned to read next. Meh. Honestly, and I'm not being at all hyperbolic here, after Infinite Jest, all other novels seem like they're bringing knives to a gun fight.

Please don't tell me to read DeLillo. Or Pynchon. I think it's best to just stay out of that whole milieu until I get over this. Also, DeLillo sucks. There. I said it.

And DFW's short stories... It's just that they all read like chapters in what promises to be an amazing tome and I just end up pissed that there isn't in fact an amazing tome once they end and they are just profoundly unsatisfying.

Pretty much all I can get into these days, fiction-wise, is making an elaborate, possibly useless timeline of the major events of IJ on this ever-lengthening Word Document while I skim through it and get snagged places and just end up re-reading.

So I think maybe I'll just turn right around and read it again. Yeah, I just decided that right now. So, like, if you don't hear from me for a few days and the neighbors start to complain about a smell coming from my apartment, you'll know what to do. ]]> 4.30 1996 Infinite Jest
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Mary
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2010/01/03
date added: 2010/01/03
shelves: favorites
review:
I can't say anything new about this book. So I won't. Believe the hype.

Ok, I will say this for anyone who is contemplating reading this thing: appropriately enough for a book about addiction and obsession, it really rewards binge reading. Get ready to burrow down in this thing like a foxhole and wonder where the last four hours went.

And I will also say this: I honestly need help figuring out what to do with myself now. If you're anything like me, this book will change the way you think about reading and novels and what fiction is capable of doing to you. Since I finished this, I've picked up and fumbled at other books I'd planned to read next. Meh. Honestly, and I'm not being at all hyperbolic here, after Infinite Jest, all other novels seem like they're bringing knives to a gun fight.

Please don't tell me to read DeLillo. Or Pynchon. I think it's best to just stay out of that whole milieu until I get over this. Also, DeLillo sucks. There. I said it.

And DFW's short stories... It's just that they all read like chapters in what promises to be an amazing tome and I just end up pissed that there isn't in fact an amazing tome once they end and they are just profoundly unsatisfying.

Pretty much all I can get into these days, fiction-wise, is making an elaborate, possibly useless timeline of the major events of IJ on this ever-lengthening Word Document while I skim through it and get snagged places and just end up re-reading.

So I think maybe I'll just turn right around and read it again. Yeah, I just decided that right now. So, like, if you don't hear from me for a few days and the neighbors start to complain about a smell coming from my apartment, you'll know what to do.
]]> Mumbo Jumbo 761156 The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the Ages

Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.]]> 224 Ishmael Reed 0684824779 Mary 0 not-now about this book but I hate this book?]]> 3.86 1972 Mumbo Jumbo
author: Ishmael Reed
name: Mary
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: not-now
review:
Oh I give up. Is it weird that I like reading Henry Louis Gates writing about this book but I hate this book?
]]> The Bluest Eye 519524 Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus

]]> 224 Toni Morrison 0451183673 Mary 4 4.01 1970 The Bluest Eye
author: Toni Morrison
name: Mary
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
As unmercifully intrepid in its interrogation of shame and longing as the little black girl in its opening pages who dismembers a blue-eyed baby doll "to see what it was that all the world said was lovable." Falters only in its headlong zeal for purity of voice.
]]> Feed 169756 Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon—a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world—and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.]]> 308 M.T. Anderson 0763622591 Mary 5 ya 3.55 2002 Feed
author: M.T. Anderson
name: Mary
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: ya
review:
A horrifying and ruthlessly honest dystopian novel. Envisions an unfettered, hyperbolic America that bears an unsettling resemblance to our own. I can't wait to teach this thing.
]]> The Misfits (The Misfits, #1) 291896
Skeezie, Addie, Joe, and Bobby -- they've been friends forever. They laugh together, have lunch together, and get together once a week at the Candy Kitchen to eat ice cream and talk about important issues. Life isn't always fair, but at least they have each other -- and all they really want to do is survive the seventh grade.

That turns out to be more of a challenge than any of them had anticipated. Starting with Addie's refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance and her insistence on creating a new political party to run for student council, the Gang of Five is in for the ride of their lives. Along the way they will learn about politics and popularity, love and loss, and what it means to be a misfit. After years of getting by, they are given the chance to stand up and be seen -- not as the one-word jokes their classmates have tried to reduce them to, but as the full, complicated human beings they are just beginning to discover they truly are.]]> 304 James Howe 0689839561 Mary 4 ya 3.76 2001 The Misfits (The Misfits, #1)
author: James Howe
name: Mary
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: ya
review:
A clever, sensitive tween political allegory. Unabashedly liberal and frequently hilarious.
]]> Weetzie Bat (Weetzie Bat, #1) 44353 Weetzie Bat. This poetic roller coaster swoop has a sleek new design to match its new sister and brother books, Goat Girls and Beautiful Boys. Rediscover the magic of Weetzie Bat, Ms. Block's sophisticated, slinkster-cool love song to L.A., the book that shattered the standard, captivated readers of all generations, and made Francesca Lia Block one of the most heralded authors of the last decade.

This could be a book about cheap cheese and bean burritos, slinkster dogs, lanky lizards and rubber chickens ...Or strawberry sundaes with marshmallow toppings, surfing, stage-diving and sleeping on the beach ...It could even be a book about magic. But what it's definitely about is Weetzie Bat, her best friend Dirk and their search across L.A. for the most dangerous angel of all ...true love.]]> 128 Francesca Lia Block 0060736259 Mary 3 ya 3.76 1989 Weetzie Bat (Weetzie Bat, #1)
author: Francesca Lia Block
name: Mary
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: ya
review:
A queer-tastic L.A. fairytale, complete with genies, witches, and a character named My Secret Agent Lover Man. I wouldn't teach this one, I don't think, but I'd shelve it in class and be sure that it would get passed around like crazy among certain students.
]]> Out of the Dust 25346 227 Karen Hesse 0439771277 Mary 4
As an aside, why are the covers of Hesse's books all so ungodly awful? They might as well sell them already covered with dust and marked with stickers that say "Incredibly Boring Historical Fiction: Now With More Facts! Just try not to learn from this book, you little bastards!" ]]> 3.76 1997 Out of the Dust
author: Karen Hesse
name: Mary
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
A solid YA book. Hesse lulls you into thinking these characters are in for a moderately miserable time, but twists the knife on the story with surprising brutality about 50 pages in.

As an aside, why are the covers of Hesse's books all so ungodly awful? They might as well sell them already covered with dust and marked with stickers that say "Incredibly Boring Historical Fiction: Now With More Facts! Just try not to learn from this book, you little bastards!"
]]> The Dialectic of Freedom 96716 Special 2018 Edition

From the new Introduction by Michelle Fine, Graduate Center, CUNY:

Why now, you may ask, should I return to a book written in 1988? Because, in Maxine's words: 'When freedom is the question, it is always time to begin.'

In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene argues that freedom must be achieved through continuing resistance to the forces that limit, condition, determine, and--too frequently--oppress.

Examining the interrelationship between freedom, possibility, and imagination in American education, Greene taps the fields of philosophy, history, educational theory, and literature in order to discuss the many struggles that have characterized Americans' quests for freedom in the midst of what is conceived to be a free society. Accounts of the lives of women, immigrants, and minority groups highlight the ways in which Americans have gone in search of openings in their lived situations, learned to look at things as if they could be otherwise, and taken action on what they found.

Greene presents a unique overview of American concepts and images of freedom from Jefferson's time to the present. She examines the ways in which the disenfranchised have historically understood and acted on their freedom--or lack of it--in dealing with perceived and real obstacles to expression and empowerment. Strong emphasis is placed on the focal role of the arts and art experience in releasing human imagination and enabling the young to reach toward their vision of the possible.

The author concludes with suggestions for approaches to teaching and learning that can provoke both educators and students to take initiatives, to transcend limits, and to pursue freedom--not in solitude, but in reciprocity with others, not in privacy, but in a public space.]]> 168 Maxine Greene 0807728977 Mary 5 favorites
]]> 4.13 1988 The Dialectic of Freedom
author: Maxine Greene
name: Mary
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves: favorites
review:
God bless Maxine Greene's brittle old bones. I hope she never, ever dies.


]]> <![CDATA[Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth]]> 34072 Guardian First Book Award 2001.]]> 384 Chris Ware 0224063979 Mary 5 comics Believe the hype. 4.08 2000 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
author: Chris Ware
name: Mary
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves: comics
review:
Believe the hype.
]]> Autobiography of Red 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."ĚýĚý-- The Village Voice

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]> 160 Anne Carson 037570129X Mary 5 favorites verse, for God's sake. Read it.]]> 4.28 1998 Autobiography of Red
author: Anne Carson
name: Mary
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves: favorites
review:
Retelling of one of Herakles' thirteen labors from the vantage point of the winged red monster he slays, adapted from fragments of an obscure Greek poet and re-imagined as a gorgeous, heartbreaking gay love story. In verse, for God's sake. Read it.
]]> <![CDATA[Consider the Lobster and Other Essays]]> 6751
Contains: "Big Red Son," "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think," "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," "Authority and American Usage," "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," "Up, Simba," "Consider the Lobster," "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Host."]]> 343 David Foster Wallace 0316156116 Mary 3 nonfiction R.I.P., D.F.W. 4.19 2005 Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Mary
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2009/11/15
date added: 2009/11/15
shelves: nonfiction
review:
R.I.P., D.F.W.
]]> La Perdida 761719
Cuando la relación de mutua tolerancia entre Harry y Carla llega a su inevitable fin, ella reniega de su mundo de anglófonos expatriados y se busca su propio grupo de amigos: el guapo Óscar, un camello con ínfulas de DJ, y el carismático Memo, un mujeriego pseudointelectual de izquierdas.

Los evocadores dibujos en blanco y negro de Jessica Abel hacen cobrar vida a la ciudad de México de ayer y de hoy, desplegando la oscura historia de Carla frente a los legados de Burroughs y Kahlo. Un relato sobre el deseo juvenil de vivir una vida auténtica y las consecuencias de confiar en las respuestas sencillas, La perdida –arraigada en las especificidades de la vida en México y universal a la vez� es una historia sobre encontrarse a uno mismo al perderse.]]> 288 Jessica Abel Mary 5 comics, favorites 3.32 2002 La Perdida
author: Jessica Abel
name: Mary
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/08/16
shelves: comics, favorites
review:

]]> Lush Life 1862313 A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the other lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidoscopic portrait of the new New York.]]> 464 Richard Price 0374299250 Mary 4 3.73 2008 Lush Life
author: Richard Price
name: Mary
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/04/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time]]> 233745
How Sassy Changed My Life will present for the first time the inside story of the magazine's rise and fall while celebrating its unique vision and lasting impact. Through interviews with the staff, columnists, and favorite personalities we are brought behind the scenes from its launch to its final issue and witness its unique fusion of feminism and femininity, its frank commentary on taboo topics like teen sex and suicide, its battles with advertisers and the religious right, and the ascension of its writers from anonymous staffers to celebrities in their own right.]]> 144 Kara Jesella 0571211852 Mary 3 3.70 2007 How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time
author: Kara Jesella
name: Mary
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2009/04/01
date added: 2009/04/15
shelves:
review:
And I can now add Sassy Magazine to the list of cool things I missed out on by being born at just exactly the wrong time.
]]> Grendel 195931 Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic. This is the book William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."]]> 152 John Gardner 034524303X Mary 4
It's a gorgeous, perfect scene, and I'm tempted to type the whole thing, but I won't. Here are some of the more amazing snippets:

"He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heartstring scratcher, memory scraper."

"I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle... Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out over the surrounding hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his neighbor's chest."

"If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art's fault, not the Shaper's. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?"

]]> 3.81 1971 Grendel
author: John Gardner
name: Mary
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 2009/04/01
date added: 2009/04/15
shelves:
review:
My favorite bits are those in which Grendel describes his fraught relationship with the "Shaper," the harpist and poet who entrances and moves him to tears even while he sings of Grendel's accursed origins and inherently evil nature. To make matters worse, the Shaper glorifies men, whom Grendel knows from his constant vigil on the margins of the meadhall to be no less murderous than himself. This hypocrisy fills him with rage even while the sheer beauty of the poet's song inveigles him and "infects" his own running commentary, making it more poetic, more beautiful, and, Grendel thinks, less true. Eventually, Grendel can't help but stagger out into the crowd bawling "Friend!" at which point, predictably, the men shriek in horror and try to kill him.

It's a gorgeous, perfect scene, and I'm tempted to type the whole thing, but I won't. Here are some of the more amazing snippets:

"He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heartstring scratcher, memory scraper."

"I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle... Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out over the surrounding hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his neighbor's chest."

"If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art's fault, not the Shaper's. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?"


]]> I Am the Messenger 19057 protect the diamonds
survive the clubs
dig deep through the spades
feel the hearts

Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without much of a future. He's pathetic at playing cards, hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey, and utterly devoted to his coffee-drinking dog, the Doorman. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery.

That's when the first ace arrives in the mail.

That's when Ed becomes the messenger.

Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary) until only one question remains: Who's behind Ed's mission?]]> 357 Markus Zusak Mary 0 to-read 4.03 2002 I Am the Messenger
author: Markus Zusak
name: Mary
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot DĂ­az 1594489580 Mary 0 not-now 3.89 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
author: Junot DĂ­az
name: Mary
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2009/03/16
date added: 2009/03/16
shelves: not-now
review:

]]> Written on the Body 15054 Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.]]> 190 Jeanette Winterson 0679744479 Mary 4
]]> 4.11 1992 Written on the Body
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Mary
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2009/02/18
shelves:
review:
An unnamed, ungendered, unreliable narrator; gorgeous, often hilariously digressive storytelling; rollicking, reckless, but still nearly perfect prose. Imagine that Woolf's Orlando managed to cram all his/her lives and lovers into a single era and had a better sense of humor about the whole thing.


]]> The Night of the Gun 2509481
That long-ago night he was so out of his mind that his best friend had to pull a gun on him to make him go away? A visit to the friend twenty years later reveals that Carr was pointing the gun.

His lucrative side business as a cocaine dealer? Not all that lucrative, as it turned out, and filled with peril.

His belief that after his twins were born, he quickly sobered up to become a parent? Nice story, if he could prove it.

The notion that he was an easy choice as a custodial parent once he finally was sober? His lawyer pulls out the old file and gently explains it was a little more complicated than that.

In one sense, the story of "The Night of the Gun" is a common one -- a white-boy misdemeanant lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding, and a support group that will go unnamed. But when the whole truth is told, it does not end there. After fourteen years -- or was it thirteen? -- Carr tried an experiment in social drinking. Double jeopardy turned out to be a game he did not play well. As a reporter and columnist at the nation's best newspaper, he prospered, but gained no more adeptness at mood-altering substances. He set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded all too well, including two more arrests, one that included a night in jail wearing a tuxedo.

Ferocious and eloquent, courageous and bitingly funny, "The Night of the Gun" unravels the ways memory helps us not only create our lives, but survive them.]]> 385 David Carr 1416541527 Mary 3 memoir
The first chapters are seriously dazzling, and not just because the gritty subject matter (drug den robberies, crack babies, fistfights with spouses) matches Carr's hard-boiled, super-literate-private-eye storytelling style. (Carr nonchalantly invokes Proust when trying to explain the terrible joy of his first hit of cocaine in a bar bathroom.)

There is some truly brilliant insight into memory, identity, and addiction woven into his slightly mad method, which involved interviewing everyone he could track down from his past to investigate and fact-check every last detail of his "junkie memoir." And Carr explains that he did this not only because junkies (and even ex-junkies) are unreliable narrators, but because memoir is a deeply flawed genre in need of some heavy-duty journalistic underpinning, which is not a tough sell in the age of James Frey and Herman Rosenblat.

Carr is at his best when he's talking trash about his genre: "Dead addicts don't leave behind an uplifting tract, so the narratives are generally told by people who can go on Oprah and stand like a barker in front of their abasement." He is keenly aware of the perils of his project, but he does not back down before them, choosing instead to barrel into them with candor and humor: "If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote I was recovered addict who obtained custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare, and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we're talking."

Which begs the question (which Carr loses no time in asking): why write a junkie memoir at all, however gussied up in journalistic finery? Carr's embarrassment at his own narcissism is palpable, especially when doing things like taping the interview with the washed-up mother of his children, who was smoking crack when her water broke. "Even if the conception of the memoir is venal, or commercial, or flawed, there is intrinsic value in reporting," he insists, and soldiers on despite misgivings.

Maybe this was unavoidable, but the project begins to peter out, or rather sink under its own expanding sense of self-importance, as the memoir wears on. It doesn't ever get maudlin, but the ending edges toward a smarminess you'd hoped unsentimental Carr would successfully avoid.




]]> 3.79 2008 The Night of the Gun
author: David Carr
name: Mary
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2009/02/17
shelves: memoir
review:
I tried to be generous and split the difference between a five-star beginning and a two-star whimper of a fifth act.

The first chapters are seriously dazzling, and not just because the gritty subject matter (drug den robberies, crack babies, fistfights with spouses) matches Carr's hard-boiled, super-literate-private-eye storytelling style. (Carr nonchalantly invokes Proust when trying to explain the terrible joy of his first hit of cocaine in a bar bathroom.)

There is some truly brilliant insight into memory, identity, and addiction woven into his slightly mad method, which involved interviewing everyone he could track down from his past to investigate and fact-check every last detail of his "junkie memoir." And Carr explains that he did this not only because junkies (and even ex-junkies) are unreliable narrators, but because memoir is a deeply flawed genre in need of some heavy-duty journalistic underpinning, which is not a tough sell in the age of James Frey and Herman Rosenblat.

Carr is at his best when he's talking trash about his genre: "Dead addicts don't leave behind an uplifting tract, so the narratives are generally told by people who can go on Oprah and stand like a barker in front of their abasement." He is keenly aware of the perils of his project, but he does not back down before them, choosing instead to barrel into them with candor and humor: "If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote I was recovered addict who obtained custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare, and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we're talking."

Which begs the question (which Carr loses no time in asking): why write a junkie memoir at all, however gussied up in journalistic finery? Carr's embarrassment at his own narcissism is palpable, especially when doing things like taping the interview with the washed-up mother of his children, who was smoking crack when her water broke. "Even if the conception of the memoir is venal, or commercial, or flawed, there is intrinsic value in reporting," he insists, and soldiers on despite misgivings.

Maybe this was unavoidable, but the project begins to peter out, or rather sink under its own expanding sense of self-importance, as the memoir wears on. It doesn't ever get maudlin, but the ending edges toward a smarminess you'd hoped unsentimental Carr would successfully avoid.





]]> <![CDATA[The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1)]]> 169762 368 M.T. Anderson 0763624020 Mary 0 to-read 3.54 2006 The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1)
author: M.T. Anderson
name: Mary
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Mary 4 ya 3.89 2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
author: Mark Haddon
name: Mary
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/12/28
shelves: ya
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle]]> 4420281
Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977—with his wife and three young children—intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.

Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the PirahĂŁ, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.]]> 304 Daniel L. Everett Mary 4 nonfiction ]]> 3.94 2008 Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
author: Daniel L. Everett
name: Mary
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2008/11/01
date added: 2008/12/28
shelves: nonfiction
review:
So, my boyfriend bought this book for himself, but before he could read it I picked it up one Saturday and glanced over it and before I knew it I'd spent the whole afternoon reading the thing. And not only could I not put it down, I couldn't stop myself from reading out loud whenever I got to some mind-bogglingly weird fact, which was about every other page, so I pretty much completely ruined this book for James by bursting out every few minutes with, "Ok, so they have this one word that means 'to come in or out of my immediate experience' and they don't have history or mythology or anything because they can only talk about events that they have actually personally witnessed," or "Whoa, they don't have numbers. Like, ANY numbers. And when he tries to teach them numbers it doesn't work and they get all pissed off and give up and go back to just saying 'a bunch.'" It's also worth saying that Everett himself—a Christian missionary turned field linguist turned atheist who brought his entire family to live in the jungle for years of their lives—is just as fascinating as the Piraha people he set out to convert.

]]> Arsenic and Old Lace 178599 104 Joseph Kesselring 0856761222 Mary 0 to-read One of these days, Kayla! 4.14 1939 Arsenic and Old Lace
author: Joseph Kesselring
name: Mary
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:
One of these days, Kayla!
]]> <![CDATA[The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher [with CD]]]> 74814
The book is used in thousands of school districts, in over 65 countries, and in over 1000 college classrooms. It works and it s inspiring.

Included in this 3rd edition is a free 38 minute Enhanced CD, Never Cease to Learn. This bonus CD features Harry Wong with a special introduction by Rosemary Wong. The motivational message delivered is one all educators must hear and see.]]> 338 Harry K. Wong 0962936065 Mary 3 teacher-books 3.92 1991 The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher [with CD]
author: Harry K. Wong
name: Mary
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/10/29
shelves: teacher-books
review:
Do not panic. Do not panic. Do not panic. OH MY GOD IT'S MID-AUGUST. Do not panic. Do not panic. Do not panic.
]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Mary 5 tenth-grade, re-reading, ya 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Mary
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/08/16
shelves: tenth-grade, re-reading, ya
review:
The is the first book I'm teaching in tenth grade. So much fun to read again. If at least six girls don't fall ass-over-elbows in love with Holden Caulfield, I'm not doing my job right.
]]> Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Mary 5 tenth-grade 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Mary
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/08/14
shelves: tenth-grade
review:
Just astonishing. Lahiri's characters will crawl up inside your head and start throwing the furniture around in there. She sweeps nonchalantly from continent to continent and from era to era, writing with the same rapier insight about an old Punjabi refugee in Calcutta clinging to her shattered life and a hopeless affair between a married Indian i-banker and a young white girl in Boston. These stories engulf, implicate, inveigle. This is the one book I will teach next year that I truly, truly love.
]]> Darkness Visible 756429 Book by Golding, William 265 William Golding 0571116469 Mary 4
Maybe I need to read, you know, The Devil Wears Prada, or something. I'm giving myself the heebie jeebies over here. Or maybe I'll just re-read Jimmy Corrigan again while I listen to Xiu Xiu on repeat and induce some sort of angsty catatonia. Onward to the center of the sun!]]> 3.41 1979 Darkness Visible
author: William Golding
name: Mary
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/08/05
shelves:
review:
So this is the last of the whole inherent-blackness-of-the-human-soul reading list I've inadvertently embarked upon lately. I don't know what I was expecting, picking up a book that takes its title from Milton's famously oxymoronic description of hellfire.

Maybe I need to read, you know, The Devil Wears Prada, or something. I'm giving myself the heebie jeebies over here. Or maybe I'll just re-read Jimmy Corrigan again while I listen to Xiu Xiu on repeat and induce some sort of angsty catatonia. Onward to the center of the sun!
]]> Say You're One of Them 2296567
In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.

Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.]]> 358 Uwem Akpan 0316113786 Mary 2
There's also something off-puttingly preachy in his tone. Which is hardly a surprise, as Akpan is a Jesuit priest, and I should probably just get over it, but I couldn't.

The book failed to make the cut for the tenth grade curriculum for both of the reasons above. Unless they choose it themselves, there's nothing most kids hate more than a book that's trying so overtly to teach them some moral lesson, and I thought they'd yawn over the plodding pace. Back to the drawing board, I guess.]]> 3.54 2008 Say You're One of Them
author: Uwem Akpan
name: Mary
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/08/05
shelves:
review:
There's something a bit off about the pacing in these stories about the nightmarish experiences of African children, and I can't tell if it's purposeful or not. Akpan—unlike other writers who delve into brutality and gore—either has no sense of timing or has eschewed it for effect. His chase scenes and uber-violent tableaux read at the same slow, steady trot as descriptions of a childhood friendship. The result is unnerving, and then, at least for me, annoying.

There's also something off-puttingly preachy in his tone. Which is hardly a surprise, as Akpan is a Jesuit priest, and I should probably just get over it, but I couldn't.

The book failed to make the cut for the tenth grade curriculum for both of the reasons above. Unless they choose it themselves, there's nothing most kids hate more than a book that's trying so overtly to teach them some moral lesson, and I thought they'd yawn over the plodding pace. Back to the drawing board, I guess.
]]> <![CDATA[John Dollar (Wsp Contemporary Classics)]]> 119268
On a festive seafaring expedition, the tightly knit British community confronts disaster in the shape of an earthquake and ensuing tidal wave. Swept overboard, Charlotte, John Dollar, and eight young girls who are Charlotte's pupils awake on a remote island beach. As they struggle to stay alive, their dependence on John overwhelms him, and an atmosphere of menace and doom builds, culminating in shocking and riveting scenes of both death and survival.]]> 224 Marianne Wiggins 0671039555 Mary 4 Lord of the Flies, but with a bunch of Victorian schoolgirls in Rangoon." Apparently, Wiggins read Golding's book on a plane and thought, "It would never happen that way with girls."

I think her next thought must have been, "It would be WAY worse, and with more cannibalism and torture and rape." John Dollar is probably the most macabre work of literature I've ever set my hands on. It takes Golding's basic plot and turns it inside out, then spirals off in ten different directions, all of them impossibly terrifying. Not for the faint of heart. I read it with the idea of possibly adding it to my tenth-grade curriculum, which already includes Lord of the Flies. But no. I can't teach this thing. I'm already spending enough of my own money on classroom supplies without having to buy a class set of barf bags.]]> 3.57 1989 John Dollar (Wsp Contemporary Classics)
author: Marianne Wiggins
name: Mary
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/08/05
shelves:
review:
Sweet toasted Jesus, this book is violent. It was recommended to me as "Lord of the Flies, but with a bunch of Victorian schoolgirls in Rangoon." Apparently, Wiggins read Golding's book on a plane and thought, "It would never happen that way with girls."

I think her next thought must have been, "It would be WAY worse, and with more cannibalism and torture and rape." John Dollar is probably the most macabre work of literature I've ever set my hands on. It takes Golding's basic plot and turns it inside out, then spirals off in ten different directions, all of them impossibly terrifying. Not for the faint of heart. I read it with the idea of possibly adding it to my tenth-grade curriculum, which already includes Lord of the Flies. But no. I can't teach this thing. I'm already spending enough of my own money on classroom supplies without having to buy a class set of barf bags.
]]> Ten Little Indians 843834 In Alexie’s first story, “The Search Engine,� Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. In “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,� an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem� starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawn shop window the fancy-dance regalia that was stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother.
Even as they often make us laugh, Alexie’s stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.]]> 243 Sherman Alexie 080214117X Mary 0 tenth-grade, to-read 3.97 2003 Ten Little Indians
author: Sherman Alexie
name: Mary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves: tenth-grade, to-read
review:

]]> Krik? Krak! 600404
When Haitians tell a story, they say "Krik?" and the eager listeners answer "Krak!" In Krik? Krak! Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty.]]> 224 Edwidge Danticat 067976657X Mary 4 tenth-grade 4.16 1996 Krik? Krak!
author: Edwidge Danticat
name: Mary
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/08
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves: tenth-grade
review:
Normally, I'm not a huge fan of spare, opaque prose, or of single-author short story collections, but Danticat is such a master of this genre I was drawn helplessly in. These stories weave together, interlocking without overlapping, and the writing is as wry and precise as it is sparse.
]]> The Secret Life of Bees 37435 The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.]]> 302 Sue Monk Kidd 0142001740 Mary 3 eleventh-grade 4.10 2001 The Secret Life of Bees
author: Sue Monk Kidd
name: Mary
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/06/25
shelves: eleventh-grade
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Mary 5 favorites



Warning: This book will destroy you. I have never been so completely and utterly decimated by a novel. I don't need a book club; I need a support group.


On a side note: Maybe these are fightin' words, and I only ever read Blood Meridian, but I'll take McMurtry over McCarthy any day of the week. No Faulknerian pretensions, no torture-porn, no dogged insistence upon rendering the West as a nightmare-landscape of irredeemable violence and sorrow. McMurtry paints the West in more colors than red, creating a world as tawdry, savage, absurd, and beautiful as the Texas of my own memory. ]]> 4.53 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Mary
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2008/06/11
date added: 2008/06/25
shelves: favorites
review:
Thanks, Broadway street-book dude. Cowboys telling fart jokes and falling in love with sullen whores are EXACTLY what I want to read about right now.




Warning: This book will destroy you. I have never been so completely and utterly decimated by a novel. I don't need a book club; I need a support group.


On a side note: Maybe these are fightin' words, and I only ever read Blood Meridian, but I'll take McMurtry over McCarthy any day of the week. No Faulknerian pretensions, no torture-porn, no dogged insistence upon rendering the West as a nightmare-landscape of irredeemable violence and sorrow. McMurtry paints the West in more colors than red, creating a world as tawdry, savage, absurd, and beautiful as the Texas of my own memory.
]]> <![CDATA[Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture]]> 1838003 232 David Buckingham 0745628303 Mary 5 teacher-books
Buckingham's prose is so controlled and scholarly you almost miss it when he drops a bomb. To wit: "To a much greater extent than in conventional academic subjects, teacherly attempts at imposing cultural, moral, or political authority over the media that children experience in their daily lives are very unlikely to be taken seriously. If, as in many cases, they are based on a paternalistic contempt for children's tastes and pleasures, they certainly deserve to be rejected. It is for these reasons that protectionist approaches to media education—whether cultural, moral, or political in nature—are at least redundant, if not positively counter-productive."

And this is Britain he's talking about. If Buckingham saw the protectionist, find-the-hidden-hegemony-in-everything buzzkill that constitutes nearly all media ed here in the states, I think he'd break out the exclamation points.


Kids are already critical of the media they consume, says Buckingham, citing studies of the sophisticated ways children experience media from their earliest years. Thinking you're going to blow their minds with a big shiny word like "representation" is pure condescension. Instead, Buckingham starts where all good teachers should—with respect for students' capabilities and regard for their interests. Where he goes from there is simply amazing.]]> 3.95 2003 Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture
author: David Buckingham
name: Mary
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2008/04/01
date added: 2008/05/27
shelves: teacher-books
review:
This book is a miracle. A practical resource for teachers; a thorough, measured take on the short, fraught history of media ed; a sound theoretical backbone; ungodly careful scholarship; and hands-down the source of the smartest insights about socio-economic class and adolescents I've ever read.

Buckingham's prose is so controlled and scholarly you almost miss it when he drops a bomb. To wit: "To a much greater extent than in conventional academic subjects, teacherly attempts at imposing cultural, moral, or political authority over the media that children experience in their daily lives are very unlikely to be taken seriously. If, as in many cases, they are based on a paternalistic contempt for children's tastes and pleasures, they certainly deserve to be rejected. It is for these reasons that protectionist approaches to media education—whether cultural, moral, or political in nature—are at least redundant, if not positively counter-productive."

And this is Britain he's talking about. If Buckingham saw the protectionist, find-the-hidden-hegemony-in-everything buzzkill that constitutes nearly all media ed here in the states, I think he'd break out the exclamation points.


Kids are already critical of the media they consume, says Buckingham, citing studies of the sophisticated ways children experience media from their earliest years. Thinking you're going to blow their minds with a big shiny word like "representation" is pure condescension. Instead, Buckingham starts where all good teachers should—with respect for students' capabilities and regard for their interests. Where he goes from there is simply amazing.
]]> <![CDATA[Class: A Guide Through the American Status System]]> 60044
Based on careful research and told with grace and wit, Paul Fessell shows how everything people within American society do, say, and own reflects their social status. Detailing the lifestyles of each class, from the way they dress and where they live to their education and hobbies, Class is sure to entertain, enlighten, and occasionally enrage readers as they identify their own place in society and see how the other half lives.]]> 208 Paul Fussell 0671792253 Mary 0 to-read 3.90 1983 Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
author: Paul Fussell
name: Mary
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing]]> 566744 181 Gerald Graff 0393924092 Mary 4 teacher-books
As such, high school seems the better forum to teach a lot of these very basic writing skills. I used this to help me scaffold a persuasive paper I assigned to eleventh graders and they really seemed to appreciate the help. Graff breaks down the elements of good academic persuasive writing into such useful, manageable chunks that it was a breeze to design mini-lessons around them. I never used the text itself with the kids, but it came in really handy in the planning stages.]]> 3.73 2006 They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
author: Gerald Graff
name: Mary
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2008/05/27
date added: 2008/05/27
shelves: teacher-books
review:
I think I would have hated this book if I were assigned it as a freshman in college. But I was kind of an asshole then, as are most college freshman.

As such, high school seems the better forum to teach a lot of these very basic writing skills. I used this to help me scaffold a persuasive paper I assigned to eleventh graders and they really seemed to appreciate the help. Graff breaks down the elements of good academic persuasive writing into such useful, manageable chunks that it was a breeze to design mini-lessons around them. I never used the text itself with the kids, but it came in really handy in the planning stages.
]]> <![CDATA[We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (Multicultural Education Series)]]> 57571 172 Gary R. Howard 0807746657 Mary 0 teacher-books, forclass 3.74 1999 We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (Multicultural Education Series)
author: Gary R. Howard
name: Mary
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2008/05/27
date added: 2008/05/27
shelves: teacher-books, forclass
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Understanding by Design (ASCD)]]> 128102
The second edition, a refined work, has been thoroughly and extensively revised, updated, and expanded, including improvement of the UbD Template, the key terms of UbD, dozens of worksheets, and some of the larger concepts. The authors have successfully put together a text that demonstrates what best practice in the design of learning looks like, enhancing for its audience their capability for creating more engaging and effective learning, whether the student is a third grader, a college freshman, or a faculty member.]]> 384 Grant Wiggins 0131950843 Mary 4 forclass, teacher-books
Yeah.

But I certainly can't think of a better way to plan than the approach so laboriously extolled in this tome. It's a smart, methodical way to make truly rigorous curricula that demand authentic learning, not coverage or cute performance tasks. And I'd say it's worth it to give the opening chapters a thorough read. Most teachers only get a forced march through the UbD Workbook templates during some dreary PD, and I don't think that does the method justice or convinces anybody it's worth using. That said, start skimming about halfway through or you will want to smash things into tiny bits with your bare fists if you have to read one more anecdote explaining how the hypothetical teacher they use as an example improves his Health curriculum with UbD. "They could design MENUS! ZOMG!"

]]> 3.95 1998 Understanding by Design (ASCD)
author: Grant Wiggins
name: Mary
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2008/05/27
shelves: forclass, teacher-books
review:
This thing is such an institution at Teachers College we use UbD as a verb. As in, "Did you UbD this novel yet?"

Yeah.

But I certainly can't think of a better way to plan than the approach so laboriously extolled in this tome. It's a smart, methodical way to make truly rigorous curricula that demand authentic learning, not coverage or cute performance tasks. And I'd say it's worth it to give the opening chapters a thorough read. Most teachers only get a forced march through the UbD Workbook templates during some dreary PD, and I don't think that does the method justice or convinces anybody it's worth using. That said, start skimming about halfway through or you will want to smash things into tiny bits with your bare fists if you have to read one more anecdote explaining how the hypothetical teacher they use as an example improves his Health curriculum with UbD. "They could design MENUS! ZOMG!"


]]> <![CDATA[Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students]]> 853384 186 Gregory Michie 0807738883 Mary 4 teacher-books, forclass
Just fold the cover back if you're going to read it in public and enjoy a quite well written teacher narrative by—wonder of wonders—someone who is actually still teaching.

On a semi-related note: is it just me, or is Taylor Mali a bit of a douche?

]]> 4.06 1999 Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students
author: Gregory Michie
name: Mary
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2008/03/29
shelves: teacher-books, forclass
review:
As with most ed books, you have to ignore the thoroughly outdated, cringe-inducing cover design. (Ah, all-lower-case Courier Bold, you glorious emblem of mid-nineties grittiness! You font of kings! How brightly shone your light, and how briefly!)

Just fold the cover back if you're going to read it in public and enjoy a quite well written teacher narrative by—wonder of wonders—someone who is actually still teaching.

On a semi-related note: is it just me, or is Taylor Mali a bit of a douche?


]]> Spring Snow 272154
메이지 시대가 종언ěť� ęł í•ęł� 다이ě‡� 시대가 ě‹śěž‘ë� 1912ë…�. ë§ě“°ę°€ě—� 후작가ěť� 후계ěž� 기요아키ëŠ� 빼어ë‚� 미모ëˇ� 주위ěť� 선망ěť� 받지ë§� ě¤ëˇśě§€ ěžę¸° ěžě‹  외ě—ëŠ� ę·� ë„구ě—게ëŹ� 관심이 없는 í미ě � 몽ě가이다. 그는 아야쿠라 백작ěť� ë”� 사토코가 ěžě‹ ěť� 사랑한다ëŠ� 사실ěť� 알면서도 ë‰ë‹´í•ę˛Ś ë°ěť‘한다. 그러ë‚� 사토코와 황족ěť� 결íĽěť� 결정ëěž ę¸°ěš”ě•„í‚¤ëŠ� 뒤늦ę˛� ěžě‹ ěť� ë§ěťŚěť� 깨닫ęł� 사토코를 ěś íąí•� ę¸ě§€ë� ę´€ęł„ě— ëą ě ¸ë“ ë‹¤.

기요아키와 ë°ëŚ€ëˇ� ë‰ě˛ í•ęł  이지ě ěť¸ ę·¸ěť ěąśęµ¬ íĽë‹¤ëŠ� 배후ě—ě„ś 은밀íž� 그들ěť� 돕지ë§�, ë‘� 사람ěť� 사랑ěť� 깊어ě§ěëˇ� í„실ěť� ě••ë°•ěť� 더해 간다. ë§ěą¨ë‚� 기요아키와 사토코가 막다ëĄ� ęłłě— ëŞ°ë ¸ěť� ë•� 폭발í•ë“Ż 파국ěť� ë‹Ąěłě¤ęł , 이루지 못한 ěťěť 집ë…은 다음 ěťěť„ í–Ąí•´ ë‚ě•„ę°€ë©�, íĽë‹¤ëŠ� ę·� 모든 ę˛ěť 목격ěžëˇś 남겨진다.]]> Yukio Mishima Mary 0 not-now
But I don't. Sigh.]]> 4.07 1967 Spring Snow
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Mary
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2008/03/29
date added: 2008/03/29
shelves: not-now
review:
It's so sad when you have to admit to yourself that you don't have time in your life right now to read the first in a tetralogy of modern Japanese novels that includes sentences like, "'I can't tell you why,' she answered, deftly dropping ink into the clear waters of Kiyoaki's heart."

But I don't. Sigh.
]]> Blankets 25179 A young man comes of age and finds the confidence to express his creative voice.

Craig Thompson's poignant sequential-art memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence.

Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of escape. Over time though, their personal demons resurface and their relationship falls apart. It's a universal story, and Thompson's vibrant brushstrokes and unique page designs make the familiar heartbreaking all over again.]]> 582 Craig Thompson 1891830430 Mary 4 graphic-novels 4.05 2003 Blankets
author: Craig Thompson
name: Mary
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2008/03/09
shelves: graphic-novels
review:

]]> Oleanna 759910 80 David Mamet 067974536X Mary 4 forclass, drama 3.61 1993 Oleanna
author: David Mamet
name: Mary
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2008/02/01
date added: 2008/02/24
shelves: forclass, drama
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom: Content, Process, Product, and Assessment]]> 1542778 144 Barbara King-Shaver 032500577X Mary 1 teacher-books, forclass Differentiated Instruction for Total Idiots: An Assortment of Painfully Obvious Ideas.

I also learned that this book is much more entertaining if you read it in the voice of TV's . ]]> 3.26 2003 Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom: Content, Process, Product, and Assessment
author: Barbara King-Shaver
name: Mary
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at: 2008/02/01
date added: 2008/02/24
shelves: teacher-books, forclass
review:
I learned that this book ought to be retitled Differentiated Instruction for Total Idiots: An Assortment of Painfully Obvious Ideas.

I also learned that this book is much more entertaining if you read it in the voice of TV's .
]]> Metamorphoses 116504 120 Mary Zimmerman 0810119803 Mary 3 forclass 4.07 2002 Metamorphoses
author: Mary Zimmerman
name: Mary
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2008/02/24
date added: 2008/02/19
shelves: forclass
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fences (The Century Cycle, #6)]]> 539282
From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.]]> 101 August Wilson 0452264014 Mary 3 forclass 3.88 1986 Fences (The Century Cycle, #6)
author: August Wilson
name: Mary
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1986
rating: 3
read at: 2008/02/19
date added: 2008/01/29
shelves: forclass
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Teaching Language and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas, and Materials (Language Studies in Education)]]> 1483205 280 Yu, Ren Dong 159311088X Mary 2 forclass 2.75 2000 Teaching Language and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas, and Materials (Language Studies in Education)
author: Yu, Ren Dong
name: Mary
average rating: 2.75
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2008/02/19
date added: 2008/01/29
shelves: forclass
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock]]> 195089 With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.
]]> 320 Kirk Varnedoe 069112678X Mary 0 to-read 4.27 2006 Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock
author: Kirk Varnedoe
name: Mary
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bone: The Complete Edition 92143 This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9781888963144.

An American graphic novel first! The complete 1300 page epic from start to finish in one deluxe trade paperback.

Three modern cartoon cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, spending a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies. After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone are separated and lost in a vast uncharted desert. One by one they find their way into a deep forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures. It will be the longest -- but funniest -- year of their lives.]]> 1332 Jeff Smith Mary 3 graphic-novels
But this adorably geeky English teacher from one of the Carolinas presented it at a graphic novel forum at NCTE as the only thing the kids in his highly resistant 7th-grade classroom would read cover to cover. And it is oddly gripping, I must say. ]]> 4.45 1991 Bone: The Complete Edition
author: Jeff Smith
name: Mary
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/21
shelves: graphic-novels
review:
If somebody had come up to me with this brick and said, "Hey, you should read this! It's like Walt Kelly having a J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired fever dream! For hundreds and hundreds of pages!" I probably would have blinked a couple times and changed the subject.

But this adorably geeky English teacher from one of the Carolinas presented it at a graphic novel forum at NCTE as the only thing the kids in his highly resistant 7th-grade classroom would read cover to cover. And it is oddly gripping, I must say.
]]> <![CDATA[The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts]]> 30852 204 Maxine Hong Kingston 0679721886 Mary 4 memoir Eat your heart out, Amy Tan. 3.74 1976 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
author: Maxine Hong Kingston
name: Mary
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/13
shelves: memoir
review:
Eat your heart out, Amy Tan.
]]> <![CDATA[Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents (Language & Literacy Series)]]> 490003 200 Deborah Appleman 080773974X Mary 4 teacher-books
Also awesome is Appleman's impassioned defense of the act of teaching literary theory to adolescents � especially the closing chapter on the danger of not teaching teenagers to look at their world through different lenses ]]> 3.98 2000 Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents (Language & Literacy Series)
author: Deborah Appleman
name: Mary
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/13
shelves: teacher-books
review:
Gloriously useful. Complete with ready-to-use lessons and handouts to get kids thinking critically about literature � literally. Includes chapters devoted to Marxist, feminist, reader-response (aptly titled "The Promise and Peril of Reader Response), and decontructionist criticism, each with vignettes about how these approaches worked in actual classrooms.

Also awesome is Appleman's impassioned defense of the act of teaching literary theory to adolescents � especially the closing chapter on the danger of not teaching teenagers to look at their world through different lenses
]]> <![CDATA[How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read]]> 1143788 In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics and readers around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do). Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"—from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten—and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them. It's a book for book lovers everywhere to enjoy, ponder, and argue about—and perhaps even read.

Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and of many other books.

Jeffrey Mehlman is a professor of French at Boston University and the author of a number of books, including Emigré New York. He has translated works by Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot, and other authors.]]> 185 Pierre Bayard 1596914696 Mary 4 nonfiction
But you have to remember that Bayard, being French, was subjected to an extremely conservative pedagogical tradition (which I know without having read Pedagogy of the Oppressed is built upon what Freire abhors as the "banking" model of education). While kids in the States were talking about how books made them feel in seminars led by their reader-response-crazed teachers and getting back i-search papers with smiley-face stickers affixed to the top, French kids were getting grilled on Balzac's oeuvre in a zero-grade-inflation system renowned for its rigor. Bayard does like hyperbole, but the literature classroom in which he learned what reading meant might actually have been, as he puts it, "a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation."

Also, Bayard rules at inventing names for things that ought to already have names � like "screen book," the book we invent and discuss to suit our own mostly subconscious purposes, which might not bear the tiniest resemblance to either the actual book or the screen books of the persons with whom we are discussing the actual book. ]]> 3.44 2007 How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
author: Pierre Bayard
name: Mary
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/13
shelves: nonfiction
review:
I contradict Bayard's most basic premise by saying so, but this book is worth reading. Yeah, he's a French psychoanyist, and yeah, some of his loopier views on the act of discussing books made me cringe. ("We need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.")

But you have to remember that Bayard, being French, was subjected to an extremely conservative pedagogical tradition (which I know without having read Pedagogy of the Oppressed is built upon what Freire abhors as the "banking" model of education). While kids in the States were talking about how books made them feel in seminars led by their reader-response-crazed teachers and getting back i-search papers with smiley-face stickers affixed to the top, French kids were getting grilled on Balzac's oeuvre in a zero-grade-inflation system renowned for its rigor. Bayard does like hyperbole, but the literature classroom in which he learned what reading meant might actually have been, as he puts it, "a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation."

Also, Bayard rules at inventing names for things that ought to already have names � like "screen book," the book we invent and discuss to suit our own mostly subconscious purposes, which might not bear the tiniest resemblance to either the actual book or the screen books of the persons with whom we are discussing the actual book.
]]> <![CDATA[Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1)]]> 9516
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.]]> 153 Marjane Satrapi 037571457X Mary 5 ya, graphic-novels Ruthless and gorgeous. 4.27 2003 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1)
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Mary
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves: ya, graphic-novels
review:
Ruthless and gorgeous.
]]> Luna 316445 A groundbreaking novel about a transgender teen, selected as a National Book Award Finalist!

Regan's brother Liam can't stand the person he is during the day. Like the moon from whom Liam has chosen his female name, his true self, Luna, only reveals herself at night. In the secrecy of his basement bedroom Liam transforms himself into the beautiful girl he longs to be, with help from his sister's clothes and makeup. Now, everything is about to change: Luna is preparing to emerge from her cocoon. But are Liam's family and friends ready to welcome Luna into their lives?

Compelling and provocative, this is an unforgettable novel about a transgender teen's struggle for self-identity and acceptance.]]> 248 Julie Anne Peters 0316011274 Mary 3 ya 3.83 2004 Luna
author: Julie Anne Peters
name: Mary
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves: ya
review:
Ok, so there's a lot I didn't like about this thing, and I positively hate Peters's self-congratulatory tone in all of her interviews about this book, but as someone quite reasonably pointed out in our Adolescence and Literature class, it's kind of the only game in town as far as young-adult transgender lit goes. And if you want to talk meaningfully about gender in a secondary class, transgender issues are a damn good way to get the ball rolling.
]]> <![CDATA[The Chocolate War (Chocolate War, #1)]]> 17162 Do I dare disturb the universe? Refusing to sell chocolates in the annual Trinity school fund-raiser may not seem like a radical thing to do. But when Jerry challenges a secret school society called The Vigils, his defiant act turns into an all-out war. Now the only question is: Who will survive? First published in 1974, Robert Cormier's groundbreaking novel, an unflinching portrait of corruption and cruelty, has become a modern classic.

A New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year]]> 267 Robert Cormier 0375829873 Mary 2 ya 3.50 1974 The Chocolate War (Chocolate War, #1)
author: Robert Cormier
name: Mary
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1974
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves: ya
review:

]]> Witness (Scholastic Gold) 26480 The Barnes & Noble Review

Karen Hesse's Newbery Award-winning skills are put to great use in Witness, a poetic tale about friendship, fanaticism, and the deadly undercurrents of racial prejudice. The story takes place in a small Vermont town in the year 1924, revealing the devastating impact of the Ku Klux Klan on this pastoral, insular community. At the heart of the tale are two motherless girls who come to the attention of the newly formed Klan: 12-year-old Leanora Sutter, who is black, and 6-year-old Esther Hirsch, who is Jewish.


Hesse tells her story, which is based on real events, through the eyes of 11 different characters. Each point of view is expressed in poetic form, but with a stark clarity of difference that makes the voices unique and identifiable. There is a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons reveal him as a zealot and whose actions brand him as a hypocrite. There is a middle-aged farm woman named Sara who takes Esther under her wing despite the warnings of her neighbors, trying to help the child understand why the Klan has marked her and her widowed father as targets for their hatred. Esther's only other friend is Leanora, who is about to learn some harsh lessons on tolerance and hatred herself at the hands of the Klan. And linking them all together is 18-year-old Merlin Van Tornhout, a young man struggling to fit in with the adult world and determine for himself the difference between right and wrong. The remaining characters who circle the periphery of this core group reflect the various mind-sets and biases that were common during this era of fear and persecution, even in a setting as bucolic as the Vermont countryside.


Hesse weaves real historic events into her tale, such as the murder trial of the infamous kidnappers Leopold and Loeb, giving the work a definite period flavor. Using prose that is both sparse and powerful, she builds the tension with a slow crescendo of inevitability that ends in violence, but also offers up an unforgettable lesson on the true power of friendship and acceptance. (Beth Amos)

]]> 161 Karen Hesse 0439272009 Mary 5 ya 3.71 2000 Witness (Scholastic Gold)
author: Karen Hesse
name: Mary
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves: ya
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Make Lemonade (Make Lemonade, #1)]]> 250924 An award-winning novel about growing up and making choices.

Virginia Euwer Wolff's groundbreaking novel, written in free verse, tells the story of fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, who is determined to go to college—she just needs the money to get there.

When she answers a babysitting ad, LaVaughn meets Jolly, a seventeen-year-old single mother with two kids by different fathers. As she helps Jolly make lemonade out of the lemons her life has given her, LaVaughn learns some lessons outside the classroom.]]> 200 Virginia Euwer Wolff 0805080708 Mary 3 ya 3.69 1993 Make Lemonade (Make Lemonade, #1)
author: Virginia Euwer Wolff
name: Mary
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves: ya
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence]]> 535756 274 Nancy Lesko 0415928346 Mary 5 forclass, teacher-books 3.86 2001 Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence
author: Nancy Lesko
name: Mary
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2008/01/03
shelves: forclass, teacher-books
review:
If there's one book that ought to be required reading for all secondary school teachers, it's this one. Lesko will have no truck with "confident characterizations" of teenagers as miserable, unpredictable, pop-culture-obsessed, hormone-crazed automatons. She subjects some our our society's most nefarious assumptions about people under 20 to a scathing critique, tracing them to such unexpected origins as the Boer War and German Romanticism and exposing the racist, sexist notions at their core. Anybody with the gall to say "we see and think adolescence as always a technology of whiteness, of masculinity, and of domination" is fine by me. Plus, she does some pretty fancy theoretical footwork using Bakhtin's concept of "abstract adventure time" to relate young people's temporal experience to that of concentration-camp internees.
]]> Vernon God Little 11711 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780571215164

Named as one of the 100 Best Things in the World by GQ magazine in 2003, the riotous adventures of Vernon Gregory Little in small town Texas and beachfront Mexico mark one of the most spectacular, irreverent and bizarre debuts of the twenty-first century so far. Its depiction of innocence and simple humanity (all seasoned with a dash of dysfunctional profanity) in an evil world is never less than astonishing. The only novel to be set in the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas, Vernon God Little suggests that desperate times throw up the most unlikely of heroes.]]> 279 D.B.C. Pierre Mary 2
Ew. Also, what?

It gets worse. Think The Chocolate War if it were longer, more bloated with pretentious notions of itself as literature, more anti-feminist, and about a school shooting. Yikes.]]> 3.62 2003 Vernon God Little
author: D.B.C. Pierre
name: Mary
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/02
shelves:
review:
A lot went wrong with this first novel, but the most irritating literary offense for me was the way the not-entirely-authentic-but-still-close-enough-to-be-funny Texas dialect gets away from Pierre and spins off into pure nonsense. Combine hyperbolic pidgin Texas vernacular with a cheerfully misogynist, wholly unlikable narrator, and you get sentences like this: "I surf her upholstery with my nose, map her sticky heem along glimmering edges to the panty-leg, where the tang sharpens like slime-acid chocolate, stings, bounces me back from her poon."

Ew. Also, what?

It gets worse. Think The Chocolate War if it were longer, more bloated with pretentious notions of itself as literature, more anti-feminist, and about a school shooting. Yikes.
]]> <![CDATA[In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning]]> 70378 The best way to teach is to learn together with the students. One of the rare breed of teachers who do know this is Nancie Atwell.
- The New York TimesReading this book can be revolutionary. . . . Atwell leads us to new understandings of teaching and learning in a workshop classroom.
- Voices from the Middle When first published in 1987, this seminal work was widely hailed for its honest examination of how teachers teach, how students learn, and the gap that lies in between. In depicting her own classroom struggles, Nancie Atwell shook our orthodox assumptions about skill-and-drill-based curriculums and became a pioneer of responsive teaching. Now, in the long awaited second edition, Atwell reflects on the next ten years of her experience, rethinks and clarifies old methods, and demonstrates new, more effective approaches.

The second edition still urges educators to "come out from behind their own big desks" to turn classrooms into workshops where students and teachers create curriculums together. But it also advocates a more activist role for teachers. Atwell writes, "I'm no longer willing to withhold suggestions and directions from my kids when I can help them solve a problem, do something they've never done before, produce stunning writing, and ultimately become more independent of me."

More than 70 percent of the material is new, with six brand-new chapters on genres, evaluation, and the teacher as writer. There are also lists of several hundred minilessons, and scripts and examples for teaching them; new expectations and rules for writing and reading workshops; ideas for teaching conventions; new systems for record keeping; lists of essential books for students and teachers; and forms for keeping track of individual spelling, skills, proofreading, homework, writing, and reading.

The second edition of In the Middle is written in the same engaging style as its predecessor. It reads like a story - one that readers will be pleased to learn has no end. As Atwell muses, "I know my students and I will continue to learn and be changed. I am resigned - happily - to be always beginning for the rest of my life as a teacher."

]]> 546 Nancie Atwell 0867093749 Mary 3 forclass, teacher-books 4.28 1987 In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning
author: Nancie Atwell
name: Mary
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/01/01
shelves: forclass, teacher-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker]]> 116828
Including these twenty-eight profiles:

“Mr. Hunter’s Grave� by Joseph Mitchell
“Secrets of the Magus� by Mark Singer
“Isadora� by Janet Flanner
“The Soloist� by Joan Acocella
“Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce� by Walcott Gibbs
“Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody� by Ian Frazier
“The Mountains of Pi� by Richard Preston
“Covering the Cops� by Calvin Trillin
“Travels in Georgia� by John McPhee
“The Man Who Walks on Air� by Calvin Tomkins
“A House on Gramercy Park� by Geoffrey Hellman
“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?� by Lillian Ross
“The Education of a Prince� by Alva Johnston
“White Like Me� by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Wunderkind� by A. J. Liebling
“Fifteen Years of The Salto Mortale� by Kenneth Tynan
“The Duke in His Domain� by Truman Capote
“A Pryor Love� by Hilton Als
“Gone for Good� by Roger Angell
“Lady with a Pencil� by Nancy Franklin
“Dealing with Roseanne� by John Lahr
“The Coolhunt� by Malcolm Gladwell
“Man Goes to See a Doctor� by Adam Gopnik
“Show Dog� by Susan Orlean
“Forty-One False Starts� by Janet Malcolm
“The Redemption� by Nicholas Lemann
“Gore Without a Script� by Nicholas Lemann
“Delta Nights� by Bill Buford]]> 625 David Remnick 0375757511 Mary 5 forclass 4.16 2000 Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker
author: David Remnick
name: Mary
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2007/10/01
date added: 2008/01/01
shelves: forclass
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parvana's Journey (The Breadwinner, #2)]]> 834019 Parvana's Journey, the Taliban still control Afghanistan, but Kabul is in ruins. Parvana's father has just died, and her mother, sister, and brother could be anywhere in the country. Parvana knows she must find them. Despite her youth, Parvana sets out alone, masquerading as a boy. She soon meets other children who are victims of war -- an infant boy in a bombed-out village, a nine-year-old girl who thinks she has magic powers over landmines, and a boy with one leg. The children travel together, forging a kind of family out of sheer need. The strength of their bond makes it possible to survive the most desperate conditions.

All royalties from the sale of this book will go to Women for Women, an organization that helps women in Afghanistan.]]> 199 Deborah Ellis 0888995199 Mary 4 ya Mud City,. ]]> 4.13 2002 Parvana's Journey (The Breadwinner, #2)
author: Deborah Ellis
name: Mary
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2008/01/01
shelves: ya
review:
This is our sixth-grade "read-aloud" text. The kids are absolutely obsessed with Parvana, and a few of them have already bought the sequel, Mud City,.
]]> <![CDATA[One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest]]> 332613 9780451163967

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy � the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.]]> 325 Ken Kesey Mary 4 forclass 4.20 1962 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
author: Ken Kesey
name: Mary
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2008/01/01
shelves: forclass
review:

]]>