Going Back To Work After 30 Years

You have to be of a "certain age" to fully appreciate this one.

You know who you are.

Alpha Mail

When I first read the description on the jacket of Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn I wasn't sure what "epistolary" meant. The full line is, "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." Turns out, it's a book written entirely in letter form, much like my other fave, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Ella, who is also a character in the book, is a wonderfully clever metaphor about totalitarianism, societal pressure and ignorance that makes me wonder why it isn't on every high school reading list. Like Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (which, thankfully, IS on the local HS reading list), this is the story of fictional townspeople who take mythology so literally that they've lost sight of reality. The island of Nollop, named for Nevin Nollop, who supposedly invented the 35-letter panagram, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," worships the phrase so much that it is inscribed in tiles in the town square. When the tiles begin to become unglued (either from old age or divine purpose), so do the town leaders who take it as a heavenly sign that the god-like deceased Nollop does not want the people to use those particular letters anymore. The people can neither speak the letters nor write them upon punishment first by warning, then public humiliation, and finally by banishment from the island...or death. Ah...Big Brother slash 451 slash Orwellian dilemmas! I LOVE 'em! At first, it's fairly easy to give up "q" or "z" but how do you communicate without vowels? As the people become progressively (and literally) tongue-tied, the reader is forced to try to figure out what their haltingly stunted - and censored - mail to each other is trying to say. Eventually, they are all banished including, predictably, even the banishers themselves, and what remains of the town is left to try to rebuild after seeing the error of their misguided ways. This is a quick read with deep implications which reminds me of so many of the great round table discussion stories like "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson, which I read and loved in high school. When I discussed Ella Minnow Pea with my 19-year old son, surprisingly, he had a lot to say about it. Huh? This coming from a boy who NEVER has anything to say about books. So again, I'm wondering, why is this story not required reading for high schoolers? Nothing against classic faves such as Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter but (I've said it a hundred times) if you want to hook kids, you have to give them something they can relate to, and kids today have zip in common with whale hunting. If the reader doesn't care about the story there can be no critical thinking. Perhaps it's time to redefine the term "classics" and let's get the kids reading again.

Darwinism

Evolution humor....get it?! Well, eventually some of you will.
We're not in Kansas anymore!!

Existential Grafitti

Tim Tam Temptation

Okay, anybody seen these around? A couple of foodie feeds I subscribe to have been touting the chocolate-y deliciousness of these popular Australian cookies so of course, I must have them. Apparently, they're to-die-for and only available recently here in the U.S. at Target stores through March 2009. They're described as, "Chocolate wafer cookies filled with velvety chocolate cream and drenched in milk chocolate." They come in chocolate creme

and caramel. Go forth and find. You know where to send 'em. (drool....)

Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 "Should I Read This?"

Usually, when people at the library ask me, "Should I read this?" I hesitate to answer. How should *I* know? Don't YOU know? But since part of my job is to at least point them in the right direction, my first question to them is, "Well, what was the last book you read?" If the last book was similar in style and difficulty to the title in question, then probably their new choice is a good one. However, if the only reason they want to read the book is because Oprah recommended it...well, I'll try to steer them another direction. For example, a customer asked me if she should read O's latest pick (at that time), Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. And the customer's last book? That would be (drumroll) Apocolipstick by Sue Margolis. (silence...sound of crickets chirping) Not exaaactly similar genres. Needless to say I pointed her towards some nice, safe chick lit titles. For this exercise, I picked one of my current favorites, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and used Novelist Plus to find a read-alike. This database searched by keywords and tags and found mostly World War II books or books written in the form of letters. I then used What Should I Read Next and found titles recommended by readers, which I found to be more helpful. Coincidentally, one title, A Month of Summer, by Lisa Wingate caught my eye just last week. Library Thing made some great suggestions also, including The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, which has been on my TBR list for awhile. Exercise 2 asked us to find two books for a 4th grade girl who likes animals and two books for a 13 year old boy who likes ghost stories. Librarybooklists.org was very helpful in finding not only obvious choices like Charlotte's Web by E.B. White but also Wackiest Whitehouse Pets by Kathryn Gibbs Davis. As for the teen ghost fan, I found great YA books like Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins and Daemon Hall by Andrew Nance. Exercise 3 had us searching for books similar to Dean Koontz's. WhatshouldIreadnext.com made it easy to find Castle Waiting: The Lucky Road by Linda Medley, Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan and The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard. Novelist Plus turned up similar mixtures of sci-fi and horror with Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. Finally, in Exercise 4, the task was to find the next in a series of books starting with Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce. This was simple using Mid-Continent Public Library 's series database. The next titles in the YA Song of the Lioness series are: In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man and Lioness Rampant. Whew! I found this an interesting, if exhaustive, exercise regarding research. Perhaps two out of four of these lessons would have been sufficient. No time to read now....