Is there anybody out there? Just blog if you can hear me.

Hi there,
Are we up for a new book? Here are a couple that are on my radar..... What do you think?

1. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

OR

2. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials by Frances Hill

Long Lost Blogger

Hi Ladies-
I wish I could join in the blog, but I fear I will not be ready until probably Thanksgiving. I have been reading and will continue for the next month books that have been provided to TMS from Scholastic. I have to read every book so that I am able to defend having it on my shelf. A mom already complained this year about "Are you there, God? It's me Margraret" so I have to be pretty careful/aware of what the students are reading. Remember that I am teaching 7/8 graders and not 9/12! This winter, though, I will be able to rejoin.

Title suggestion

People seem to like the idea of our sister book blog!

My coworker Teri recommends this title to us: Special Topics in Calamity Physics. She says it's addicting and that she can't put it down!

War and Peace

Just finished a good novel, Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner. It’s set in the 1960s and is about an American woman, living in Japan, teaching English (if casting a movie version, I see her being played by Cate Blanchett).

Before reading the book, when I would hear Hiroshima, I would see a mental picture of a mushroom cloud. Now I will think of these characters….

Survivors of the atomic bombing are called hibakusha. At a Japanese friend’s funeral, the American woman mentions that the deceased was hibakusha; a comment that is met with stunned silence. Later she asks a friend why:

“I realize now that I shouldn’t have mentioned that Michi-san was an hibakusha – but could you please tell me why? I don’t understand.”

“The bomb survivors are associated with bad luck and death. Indeed with their exposure to radiation the victims themselves are considered a pollution. Hibakusha have become almost a pariah caste in Japan.”

“It’s hard to comprehend how victims of bombing could be considered outcasts.”

“This has its beginning long ago in Japanese thinking. Any group which is different or in some way shamed may be regarded as outcast.”

The book depicts war, not as a mushroom cloud or lines and colors on a map, but as it affects individual lives – the flesh of war – brothers, sisters, friends.

The woman falls in love with a man who is hibakusha. He loves her, too, but is unable to be happy because of the things he has experienced… and because of his guilt over being a survivor. The whole novel feels like that – like emotions held back. It’s a love story, but unlike Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights, there’s no heroine throwing herself in front of a train and there’s no tortured hero wandering the moors. It’s civilized and spare – and in that way feels real to me.

Finished King Dork

So, as discussed earlier, King Dork refers to Catcher in the Rye a lot. It also refers to a bunch of other books, so I thought I'd share this list, which has the titles and then also quotes from King Dork that refer to those books.

Music plays a big role in the book, too, and here's a list of the albums and bands to which he refers.

Enjoy!

Sometimes cravings

I constantly crave reading. The escape into a story. I sometimes crave writing. The process. The putting together of words. The release.

In Nov, an author< Mark Spragg, is visiting KS for a workshop and I get to be his chauffeur. I have not read his work, but plan to, of course, before his visit. His most well-known work is An Unfinished Life. It was made into a film (his wife wrote the screenplay) starring Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman.

I found an interview w/him and I liked this paragraph:
"I was awfully fond of Hemingway when I was a boy, no doubt for obvious reasons, but when I found Faulkner it changed my whole sense of the possibilities of language. I suppose everything I've tried to write since then has been an experiment in how best to structure a convincing narrative suspended between those two poles. I read, and reread, Welty, O'Connor, Lee, Capote, Steinbeck, a little later, Gide, Kazantzakis, Garcia Marquez, Hesse, Rilke, Miller. In short, I read every damn thing I could get my hands on. I do remember being greatly influenced by Lawrence Durrell. Also, from the time my brother and I were nine until we were in our mid-teens, my father required that we read a book a month of his choosing, and that at the end of the month we give an oral and written report of that book. My dad read largely for argument–and so his reading list included Darwin and Kant, Kierkegaard. Rousseau, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Emerson, Franklin, Plato, Marcus Aurelius. There were many others. There was a lot of chest-pounding and foot-stomping in our discussions. He told us that there were only two great themes. Our deaths, that is, our concerns about a possible afterlife, and our couplings in the face of that inevitability. I once asked him–it was when I was solidly a teenager–whether a truly great writer shouldn't concentrate his efforts on necrophilia. He didn't laugh. He suggested I reread Kierkegaard."

You read a lot about the writing process, but not so much about the reading process. Perhaps because it seems like it is natural and just happens. I disagree with that, however. I think people make conscious choices about how they want (or don't want) reading and books to be a part of their lives. And that relationship between what you read and what you write... there's a connection.

A Sad Stack

Hello friends who are also family.

Here's an interesting post from Metaxucafe. It's a list of what the poster considers the saddest books.

I would agree with Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (uff-da), haven't read The Awkward Age by Henry James or The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford or To The North by Elizabeth Bowen. I would probably agree with The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, too.

He mentions making space for Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and I gotta agree there, too. That Marquez is a beautiful writer - gets to you at a gut level with his vivid descriptions.

Does sad seem more real than happy? If a book is too happy, it feels like fantasy or fluff. Know what I mean? Or am I just morbid or at least pessimistic?

Is our book club in a summer hibernation? Can we start tickling it awake?