I Am My Mother’s Daughter is a nonfiction piece about — you guessed it — mothers and daughters. There were many diverse interviews about all kinds of mother/daughter relationships, which I liked, but would have enjoyed more if I could have related to them on a personal level. For example, this probably would have spoken to me more strongly if I myself were a mother, as “mothers with mothers” was a prominent idea throughout the book. It would be great to find a book like this geared more for women my age, still on the precipice of adulthood and being your own person while still maintaining that weird, wonderful relationship with the one we call Mom.
#3. A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene
I recently read Meg Keene’s stellar book on wedding planning, A Practical Wedding. It is less about which flowers to buy or what kind of cake to serve and much more about how you should feel about your wedding and the people in it. You should be joyful, honest, and very flexible with whatever happens when it all comes together. (And only DIY your brains out if you actually like crafts.) But until it all comes together…it’s kind of okay to feel like the whole ordeal is overwhelming and irritating. There are a lot of tips about making the day meaningful, being nice to your budget, and that no matter what happens, your marriage should be at the forefront of such a big event. As the titles states, it is a very practical book. The best bit of practical advice I gleaned was this: getting married may be one of the finest moments of your life, but there are a whole lot of other good days out there too.
I read it at a very good time in the planning process, and would highly recommend it to anyone throwing any kind of marriage celebration, from an intimate reception at a favorite restaurant to a full-blown catered garden wedding.
Meg runs a really neat website too!
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Toddlers & Tea
I am currently reading Wuthering Heights, and it is a bit slow-going as it is such a change of pace for me. I normally read contemporary fare, but I am enjoying it and will hopefully hit a good stride with it soon.
Until then! Let me talk about how much I love the adorable trio of Eric Carle books called All Around Us. It includes three board books, one about the sky, one about the earth’s surface, and one about things that are underground. The bold pictures and simple words work great during preschool storytime. Each page is easily associated with a gesture too, like the sign language for “apple” when there is an apple tree, or the sign language and sound for a cat.
If you happen to lead preschool children in any capacity, there are a number of ways to engage the books:
1. Color, like on the page about rainbows
2. Sound, which can be applied to nearly all of them
3. Place, which is either Sky, Earth, Underground, or Sea.
4. American Sign Language, which can be applied to all of them
5. Gesture association, like beeping a car horn or mimicking a picture motion
The age group I work with – 16 months to 2+ years – responds very well to these, and let me tell you that it is no easy feat simultaneously engaging 10 rowdy toddlers on any given day. These books are an excellent everyday tool, allowing children to imagine the things all around them and, in effect, interact with those things. They especially like the alligator in the book…they all clap their hands tight and shout “CHOMP!” I like them a lot, too. The art is simple and beautiful.
While we are on the subject of not Wuthering Heights just yet, I need to tell you that although I am an Earl Grey devotee, this Christmas my fiance bought me a box of Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice. It. Is. Amazing. It is a bold cinnamon explosion, and if you are a fan of chai then you will enjoy this aromatic offering. It has been a great wintertime tea, and I suspect that it will be just as lovely over ice as the warmer months set in.
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#2. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The second book I chose for 2012 was Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her life growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
I chose it for several reasons. I saw the movie with my revolutionarily-inclined friend V when we were in college. She recently tweeted about reading the book herself and I remembered that, yes, I owned this book, and yes, now is the time to read it!
(On a side note, 2007-2008, the time when all this took place, was a great time in my life. It is when we are the most confused about where we’re going and WHAT we are that I think we make the boldest decisions. I think it is definitely when we learn the most about ourselves, even in retrospect. “Why did we so fervently play tag in the dark? Oh yes, because none of us could bear to be apart.”)
I saw Ms. Satrapi speak at my school around the time her movie came out. She is a delightful speaker, so honest about her life and her work. I read this 300+ page history lesson in roughly three days. It is a personal story, recounting her childhood memories and young adult misadventures, as well as a national history of a place so few people outside of it understand. At times it feels like an educational program: page after page of intimate conversations about war or sex or unease, and suddenly a character is breaking the fourth wall to tell us what a word means in Persian or explain the moral motivation behind the burgeoning, repressive legal system…and then right back into the everyday life of a thoughtful Iranian woman. It is an excellent use of the comic form to convey important information without breaking the pace or mood of the story.
Whenever there is an international crisis, this book should be read. Crisis in the Middle East, crisis among our own people, crisis in Europe or South America or Asia or Africa or Australia. Although it is a book dedicated to recounting life through an Iranian perspective, it has the universal appeal of any government which goes through dynamic change. It has the universal appeal of confronting stereotypes, growing up and fitting in, finding your path in life, and reconciling the forever difficult line between tradition and modernity.
It is excellent. Go pick it up. She has written two other graphic novels since Persepolis, Embroideries and Chicken with Plums. I hope to add those to my 2012 list!
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#1. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk
The first book of 2012 is Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. It is a series of short stories all taking place within the locked confines of a Writers’ Retreat concocted by the old and mysterious Mr. Whittier.
Would you abandon your life for three months to create your masterpiece? Just one suitcase, a pre-dawn bus to Somewhere Else full of strangers, and three months of isolation. The stories are told by the writers, prisoners to this unique promise; stories to pass the time, ignore their restraints, and to declare themselves the true hero of the big, grand finale. “The Story of Us,” as they call it, the story of a group of people peppered with unusual personalities such as Lady Baglady, Mother Nature, and The Missing Link. The mythology that will make them famous and rip them to shreds.
I loved this book. I just really enjoy Chuck Palahniuk. (Rant, a story I voraciously audiobooked in the summer of 2010, is one of the most intricately told stories about childhood, home, time travel, and demolition derbies you will ever find. Do it ASAP.) He is quickly becoming my favorite author in the way he is able to sew stories without ever dropping a stitch. No name is a throwaway name, no questionable eccentricity is ever left unexplained by the last page.
There is tons of squicky business in all of his books, though this one probably takes the cake. Stories like “Guts” and “Hot Potting” make it hard to eat lunch afterward. All the poems that precede the short stories, they left me breathless. They are actually quite moving character studies amid a torrent of bloodshed and sexual depravity.
One of the most compelling elements of this book, besides the band of increasingly diabolical characters, is the atmosphere. Without going into much detail – discovering the beautifully molding, surreal setting of the book is a delightful revelation I would hate to deprive a would-be reader of – it is a place where it is easy to imagine everyone’s demons coming out to play. The oppression in the details of the mundane, of the abruptly bizarre, is like a character in and of itself.
I have only one issue with this book, though I suppose it is an aspect of the story which is somewhat open to interpretation. It is a narrative detail at the very end – if any of you have read Haunted, please let me know if you have had similar thoughts.
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2012
Upon reviewing the last year of my life, I made a ghastly discovery: I only completed five books! They were (mostly) good books, but…there were only five of them. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I was tempted to count The Museum of Doctor Moses by Joyce Carol Oates, but I read/audiobooked the majority of that collection in November 2010 and just happened to finish it one Saturday into the new year.
My decision, then, was to make only one resolution for the upcoming year: read 25 books. I have an ongoing count of books in my personal journal – in which I frankly have no idea what I am counting to, or from, yet the count continues still – but since I am posing this as a separate challenge to myself I wanted to make a different space for it.
The goal is, officially, to complete 25 pieces of substantial work, whether they be comic books, poetry books, self-help books, or novels. I will probably also use this space to talk about delicious teas to accompany various books and the children’s books I love to read working in my preschool class.
2012 is going to be a busy year for me – there will be wedding planning and springtime trips and wedding doing and moving house and changing most of my life all around, etc. etc. We will see how things pan out.
I am currently reading/audiobooking Haunted, also by Palahniuk. I am not sure whether or not this book will take me into 2012 or if I will somehow blast through it before midnight on Saturday.
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Earl Grey and A Million Words 