Archive for July, 2009
July 21, 2009 @ 7:53 pm | Filed under:
Books I’ve held this in drafts for far too long. Posting it now, incomplete (all my June books are included, but my notes are not), before Comic-Con begins and swallows up July as well.
YA fiction:
The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams. (Mentioned in this post.)
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. The sequel to The Hunger Games. I’ll post about this book in more depth after its pub date in September—perhaps we can have another open thread discussion. I thought this one was even better than the first, and I really think this series is some of the most relevant fiction I’ve read this decade, YA or otherwise. The way the government plays off the media, the blurring of the lines between authenticity and performance, the cultural force of reality television, the paralytic effect of governmental invasion of privacy: Collins is working with some of our thorniest contemporary issues.
Science fiction:
Genesis by Bernard Beckett. Another dystopian future, which seemed to be something of a theme for me this month. After plague and war decimate the human race, a small group of survivors build a protected, isolated island community called The Republic, modeled on Plato’s vision of the perfect society, but rigidly totalitarian. We learn about the history of The Republic via the oral examination given by the somber members of the esteemed Academy to Anax, an earnest young scholar who has prepared long years for this event in hopes of admission. Anax’s subject of specialty is the revolutionary, Adam Forde, whose subversive actions brought down The Republic many years before. A serious and captivating aspect of Adam’s history is his relationship with a robot possessing highly advanced simulated-consciousness technology, and their discussions about the nature of consciousness are incredibly gripping and thought-provoking.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
Nonfiction:
The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland. Harrowing. The true story of Mariatu’s escape from murderous rebels who chopped off her hands and burned her village in Sierra Leone. Chopped off her hands!
Chocolate Unwrapped by Rowan Jacobsen. (Posted about here.)
Adult fiction:
The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale. (My post; our discussion.)
Sunday.
Monday.
Tuesday.
…I might post something other than photos from our butterfly garden,
…but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
July 16, 2009 @ 8:39 pm | Filed under:
Comics Hannah makes a good point. San Diego Comic-Con is just a week away, and I’ve been poring over the schedule. The LOST panel, oh I’m there. And there’s a Dollhouse thing I plan to attend, baby permitting. The “Female Power Icons in Pop Culture” panel with Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Mitchell (that’s Juliet to you LOST fans) sounds interesting, but it’s early on, before my parents arrive to take over the child-wrangling.
Here are the schedules. Anything here strike your fancy, O Bonny Glen friends? Any events you’d especially like to hear more about? Any particular comic-book-or-pop-culture-related topics you’d like to discuss? You know how I suffer from option paralysis…
Summer did come, and summer was the season of Becky Jack. The kids were free (free!) from the constraints of homework and school days. And they would go stark raving insane with nothing to do, so the Jack home became a summer camp: summer projects (raising insects, quilting, coin collecting, studying kinds of clouds, family read-a-thons), sports (swimming, rafting, hiking, Little League), field trips (zoo, amusement park, bird preserve, lakes, mountains, rivers, meadows), service projects (neighborhood widow’s yard care, food bank drives), and just good hard play from sunup to sundown.
—The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale (see my post and our discussion)
Well, it couldn’t be more obvious that Becky Jack, the heroine of Shannon Hale’s novel, is a homeschooler at heart—probably an unschooler. Every time I read about her exultation over summer or her dejection over the return to school schedules, I wanted to have her over for sweet tea and a heart-to-heart about how she might want to think about a more permanent freedom from the constraints she bristled against.
But I didn’t quote that passage to toot a horn for the joy of unschooling. “The season of Becky” (a recurring phrase in the novel) has been in my head all week as my children and I zoom around town to and from a series of activities which are a departure from our usual routine. We’re all of a sudden spending a lot of time at the Y for swimming and gymnastics, and I finally got around to getting everyone caught up on dentist appointments. The desert heat has settled upon our corner of San Diego County, and on the days we aren’t at the Y, we’re holing up indoors after 10 a.m., playing lots of Wii and other games until the evening shade transforms the yard into a cool and breezy haven once more.
It’s still light out when Scott gets home from work, and I’m reluctant to leave him for the two evening hours we’ve carved out as my precious and fleeting work time. I make bruschetta with tomatoes and basil from the garden, and linger in the kitchen longer than I ought, dipping crusty bread into the garlicky, lemony juice, listening to Scott’s stories of pre-Comic-Con office bustle. Sparrows and finches gossip at the feeder, and the bees are slow and undulating in their flight, their saddlebags laden. A monarch butterfly dips low, low, and lands on a rosy-orange blossom, uncurling its delicate tongue to sip from the cup of nectar. The children are playing in the grass, or else they’ve disappeared, called away by their books and their music.
Summer has never been the Season of Lissa—it’s spring that sets my heart soaring, always has been—but I am enjoying this Season of Becky, and feeling quite Beckyish indeed as the bright, hot days of July and August unroll before us. I’m a little envious of Becky’s neighborhood, with its impromptu backyard softball and kick-the-can—we used to live in a neighborhood like that in Virginia, and a very special place it was—but our summer rhythm is its own brand of nice, and I love knowing it is stretching out before us for many weeks to come, with Comic-Con (a major event in these parts, where “these parts” = both this city and this household) anchoring the middle, and a local unschooling conference waiting for us in September, promising to be a lively and colorful celebration of this lifestyle I love so much.*
*And in the spirit of not sugarcoating, I’ll add that at the very moment I finished typing that last sentence, a minor household volcano erupted, and in the space of three minutes, three different members of this mostly-happy family came at me with various shades of Bad Mood. Sometimes this wife-and-mother thing is a bit like finding yourself in the middle of a spontaneous game of paintball and you’re the one whose job it is to wipe the paint spatters off all the players while ducking and dodging the flying color-bombs yourself. But, you know, it’s probably a sign of a very successful and satisfying summer day that people are falling apart at the bedtime end of it. Off I go now to see if I can mop up some more paint.
July 14, 2009 @ 7:05 pm | Filed under:
Books I started a “books read in June” post before June ended, and it’s still sitting there in drafts though I’ve opened it at least a dozen times, adding a sentence here and there. Dunno why I’m being sluggish with that. Perhaps it’s because one has to be sluggish somewhere, and everything else is go, go, go these days. In a good way. All our usual activities are suspended for the summer, but we went and got ourselves busy with new things. We’re very busy relaxing, if that makes any sense at all.
We’re busy playing Farm Town and Farmville on FaceBook. My kids don’t have FB accounts yet but they use mine to keep our farms in tiptop shape. This is enormously fun in so many ways that I could spend a whole long post enthusing about nothing else. Beanie maintains the Farmville farm (a simpler, less socially interactive game) and Rose does most of the planting on our Farm Town place. She also likes to look for the green dot that indicates Aunt Molly’s online, and the two of them will chat while Rose harvests and plows for my little sis. This is the aspect of the game that makes Farm Town such great fun—you earn more money for your crops if you ‘hire’ someone else to harvest them, and there’s a chat window so you can talk as you work. Yesterday I had a few minutes of delightful conversation with my twelve-year-old nephew in Virginia and my sweet friend from New Zealand while I worked on my ever-growing flower garden. (Next to the social aspect, my favorite part of the game is endlessly rearranging our trees and flowers.)
Meanwhile, Rose and Bean hold intense discussions of the merits and profit margins of various crops. I’ve been amused at how much math they wind up doing quite as a matter of course. If grapes cost X amount and are ripe in 4 hours, and potatoes cost Y amount and take a full day to grow, but potatoes sell for twice as much as grapes (and don’t forget the 20 gold plowing cost), what brings the biggest profit over the course of a day? Lots of percentages, too: if sunflowers are a 3-day crop and they’re 95% ready, how many hours until they can be harvested? And so forth. Good stuff.
Rose started reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler last night. It’s probably been four years since I read it aloud, so she’s enjoying it like new all over again. Gosh, I love that book. I’m of a mind to pinch it from her and re-read it myself.
Beanie, meanwhile, is tearing through the Warriors books again, and Jane’s Agatha Christie kick continues in full force. Scott is glued to his 33 1/3 series. I’m drifting a bit, haven’t settled fully into any one book since finishing The Actor and the Housewife. This happens to me sometimes; I get option paralysis. The table is piled with so many enticing-looking books, and I’ll read a chapter of this and a chapter of that, and they’re BOTH good, oh and so is that one over there, what a great opening, and I won’t be able to make up my mind which one to go with first. “I have an idea,” says Scott, ever so helpfully. “What if you just grabbed one and, you know, READ it?” Smartypants.
So I’m reading, simultaneously, Lost by Jacqueline Davies and Graceling by Kristin Cashore, and at night in the dark on my Touch I dip into A Room with a View, an old favorite, a rich and delicious indulgence. While the baby breathes softly beside me, I’m basking in the greens and golds of Florence, the breathtaking sea of violets, the sudden unexpected kiss. Have yet to return to England and that prissy Mr. Vyse.
