Chicken Spaghetti

Saturday Morning Reading, 05.19.12

A few highlights from this week's reading:

Tanita S. Davis, author of the newly released YA novel Happy Families, pens a wonderful tribute to the late Jean Craighead George's novel My Side of the Mountain. I loved that book when I was a kid. Loved it. Jean Craighead George died recently at the age of  92.

In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review (available online now), Judith Shulevitz writes about listening to audiobooks with her children. I smiled at her choices, "...or they’re books we’ve always meant to read but needed children as an excuse to do so" because I've felt the same way. See "Let's Go Reading in the Car."

The Nonfiction Detectives review Kelly Milner Hall's Alien Investigations: Searching for the Truth About UFOs and Aliens. I added the title to our library list immediately; my 12 year old can't get enough of this subject. Don't miss the other articles on the Detectives' blog; you'll find all kinds of good recommendations for young nonfiction fans.

After following a link from Page-Turner, the New Yorker's revitalized book blog, I was happy to add Rohan Maitzen's Novel Readings: Notes on Literature and Criticism to Google Reader. In a recent post, she makes the case for Middlemarch and book clubs, providing a number of helpful tips to taking on George Eliot's 1,000+-page classic. Maitzen is an English professor at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University.

I'm bookmarking this post from Misadventures of the Monster Librarian because of the folktale recommendations for second graders. "My" second graders (the class I read to once a week) like folktales a lot.

Speaking of second graders, I read Lita Judge's excellent nonfiction picture book Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why to them a few weeks ago. My crew was particularly delighted by the scat-bombing Scandinavian Fieldfare, mentioned by NC Teacher Stuff in his review. In our conversation after the read-aloud, I found out that several of the kids own parrots. Parrot stories abounded.

Advice from Emily Post, 1951: Hats

 

Shall I Wear a Hat?

Notwithstanding the continued practice of certain younger women to go hatless on all occasions, best taste exacts that in a city a hat be worn with street clothes in the daytime. In fact it is impossible for a hatless woman to be chic. With an evening dress a hat is incorrect—except on the stage in a musical review.

 from Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, by Emily Post. Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1951.

Reading excerpts from Emily Post's 1951 guide made three of us laugh til we cried. Hatless! Horrors. 

Image digitised by the State Library of Queensland, and provided to the Wikimedia Commons as part of a cooperative project. The original photograph is in the public domain. The metadata has been released by State Library of Queensland under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license.

Transcendence

I've been to Graceland a couple of times, and even wrote a little gift book about Elvis for a book packager years ago. The following passage, though, which comes from Darcey Steinke's memoir, Easter Everywhere, strikes me as about the truest thing I've ever read about E.P.

In Graceland light seems to come at you from all directions, as if the sun has liquefied and flowed into the floor, walls, and ceiling. I recognized in the glittery decor a longing for transcendence that is often labeled as tacky.

"A longing for transcendence." Beautiful.

Educational Bonus

She [Rosamond Vincy] was admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting and and out of a carriage.

I laughed when I came across that passage in Middlemarch; "the getting in and out of a carriage" was just too delightful. I've recently begun George Eliot's novel for the fifth or sixth time, but this go-round feels like I'll read all the way through. My copy, a Bantam Classic paperback, features an introduction by Margaret Drabble, but I'd like to finish the book before reading Drabble's words. Sometimes authoritative opinions can color what I read. At any rate, a literary classic seems just right for the cold spring that usually constitutes April around southern New England.

Image courtesy of Powell's Books

Quoted: Wild

"I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT [Pacific Crest Trail] life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear."

from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf, 2012). I highly recommend this new memoir/quest story.

Biographies

Biographile, whose tagline is "Real Stories. Real People. Great Reading.," is a new Random House site devoted to biographies. While most of the recommendations are strictly for adults, I recently wrote about some children's books from a variety of publishers.

Reading picture books together is often the beginning of a grand conversation about all kinds of subjects, from racial tolerance to fossils. Some children will be able to read the following illustrated biographies themselves, but given their rich vocabularies and somewhat higher reading levels, the books make ideal read-alouds for moms to share with kids.

To read the rest, go here. You'll also find Biographile pieces on biographies of Harriet Tubman, last night's NBCC (National Book Critics Circle) Awards, and more.

Arf! Arf! Dog Memoirs

For some time now I've been reading one dog book after another. My strategy for getting an actual dog has involved an obsession with Petfinder, talking about getting a dog ad infinitum, and reading stacks of books. The training guides are fine, but I especially liked the dog memoirs, or, really, writers' books about their pets. You can read about some of my favorites over at Biographile. (Scroll down on the page to "The 5 'Best in Show' Dog Memoirs.") Our real-life pooch arrives soon, too.

P.S. The thirteen puppies in the photograph need homes! Contact CARA, a nonprofit animal shelter in Jackson, Mississippi, if you're interested.

Image courtesy of CARA's Facebook page

Norman's Best Books of 2011

Once again I’ve asked my husband, Norman, to write about his best books of the year. Norman is always on the lookout for good suggestions and likes the reviews in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, People, and Oprah, as well as the ones on NPR.

Take it away. It's all yours, Norm. (See also Norman's Best Books of 2009 and 2010.)

I’ve read many good books this year, so I am happy that once again Susan asked that I share some of my favorites with Chicken Spaghetti readers. My top 5 books are Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman, Long Drive Home by Will Allison, Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère (translated from the French by Linda Coverdale), We the Animals by Justin Torres, and The Free World by David Bezmozgis. Yes, that’s 7 books but I didn’t have the heart to drop 2 of these great reads.

Rules of Civility and The Hare with Amber Eyes are favorites that I encouraged Susan to read (as in, “Have you read it yet? Have you? Have you?”), and I have given both as gifts to others. Rules of Civility, by first-time author Amor Towles, is a wonderful story of three young people in New York City circa 1938. I was so taken by the characters when not reading the book I often found myself thinking about the them. Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a true story of family, survival, and art, and the fact that Mr. de Waal is an artist (he’s a ceramist) comes through in his vivid and detailed descriptions of palaces, furniture, and his family’s collection of netsuke (small, Japanese carvings of boxwood and ivory).

This Beautiful Life and Long Drive Home were well-told stories about how mistakes (and in the case of Long Drive Home a tragic mistake) can destroy a family. Lives Other Than My Own and We the Animals were deeply moving books, with the former containing two gracefully told stories of loss and the latter being a wild ride of a book that reminded me of the writing of Junot Diaz. David Bezmozgis’s The Free World is about the Krasnansky Family as they flee Latvia in 1978 and have to spend months in Italy before they can emigrate to their final destination. The Free World was the best of the books I read by the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” noteworthy authors, though The Tiger’s Wife (Téa Obreht) and Swamplandia! (Karen Russell) weren’t far behind. (Notice how I snuck in two more must reads!)

Though not in my Best of the Best grouping, I also would recommend the following well-written novels: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal, Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar, Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin (translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim), Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman, Bent Road by Lori Roy, Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson, Faith by Jennifer Haigh, Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, The Submission by Amy Waldman, and A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen. I also add to this grouping The Marriage Plot, but I have to admit that it took me several chapters before I fully got into the story, and the book was not nearly as captivating as Jeffrey Eugenides’s last book, Middlesex.

While novels are usually my favorite books, I was very glad to have read An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken (an outstanding memoir), Just Kids by Patti Smith (one of the best stories of love, friendship, and coming of age in New York), Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller (a fascinating story about the author’s parents and their multitude of challenges living in Africa), An Exclusive Love: A Memoir written by Johanna Adorján and translated from the German by Anthea Bell (the story of Adorján’s grandparents who survived the Holocaust but couldn’t bear the thought of living without one another in the final years of their lives), and The Empty Family by Cólm Toibín (a short story collection by the author of the excellent 2009 novel Brooklyn).

A few lighter reads that proved to be entertaining include An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, My New American Life by Francine Prose, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky (translated from the German by Tim Mohr), and Starting from Happy by Patricia Marx. And, lastly, what would a year be without a few good mysteries, where Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson and A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny were among my favorites.

Happy reading in 2012,
Norman

The Chicken Spaghetti Gift Guide 2011

Hark! Here is a gift guide for the holidays. Some books are for grown-ups, some for children. At the end of the post, I've linked each title to Powell's. I have no affiliation with the store, but have ordered from it successfully in the past.

For the writer who doesn't mind a fist fight or two (or twenty):
Townie, author Andre Dubus III's memoir of his surprisingly hardscrabble upbringing—one of the best books about writing that I've read in ages.

For the preschooler on the verge of big-sisterhood or big-brotherhood:
Pecan Pie Baby, in which Jacqueline Woodson taps into the "What about me?" emotions of a soon-to-be sibling with humor and love.

For the subversive fifth grader in your life:
Spy vs. Spy Omnibus, vintage Mad Magazine cartoon comedy.*

For the friend who wants to cook more often and better:
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School. The subtitle says it all: "How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices Into Fearless Home Cooks."

For the toddler who scampers away at bedtime:
Hide-and-squeak, Heather Vogel Frederick's rhyming story of Mouse Baby and her papa. Featuring big, joyful illustrations by C.F. Payne.

For the student artist:
Drawing from Memory, Allen Say's fascinating picture-book memoir of an apprenticeship to a famous Japanese cartoonist.

For the grown-up fan of Doctor De Soto:
Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies and Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig, a collection of previously unpublished work by the New Yorker cartoonist and children's book author.

For the viewer of TV shows like "Ghost Hunters" and "The Othersiders" who needs a dose of reality:
Witches! Rosalyn Schanzer's narrative nonfiction history (for kids 10+) of the Salem witch trials.

For the parade lover:
Balloons Over Broadway, a captivating picture book about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and the puppeteer who started it all. Readers of all ages will want to look at it again and again to see the details of the art.

*Note: The hardcover Spy vs. Spy Omnibus is the only one on this list that I haven't read. I am going by my son's love for the library copy of an earlier paperback collection, Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook (2001).

Details

Dubus, Andre III. Townie: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2011).

Flinn, Kathleen. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices Into Fearless Home Cooks (Viking, 2011).

Frederick, Heather Vogel. C.F. Payne, illustrator. Hide-and-squeak (Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Prohias, Antonio. Spy vs. Spy Omnibus (MAD Books, 2011).

Say, Allen. Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011).

Schanzer, Rosalyn. Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (National Geographic, 2011).

Steig, Jeanne. William Steig, illustrator. Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies and Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig (Abrams ComicArts, 2011).

Sweet, Melissa. Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).

Woodson, Jacqueline. Sophie Blackall, illustrator. Pecan Pie Baby (Putnam, late 2010).

National Book Award for Kids' Lit to First-Time Author

A debut author has won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Last night at the National Book Award ceremony in New York, Thanhha Lai took home the prize for her autobiographical novel in verse, Inside Out & Back Again. Elizabeth Burns, who blogs at A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy, reviewed the book here, adding, "Am I the only one hoping this becomes a series that follows Ha [the protagonist] through her childhood and teenage years?"

The other winners were Jesmyn Ward, for Salvage the Bones (fiction); Stephen Greenblatt, for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (nonfiction); and Nikki Finney, for Head Off & Split (poetry).

For more on the awards and the evening, hop over to NPR's Monkey See blog.