Spring Break 2017 Fantasy Extravaganza

So this Spring Break, I decided that it would be nice to not do anything. And by "decided" I mean "procrastinated to the point where there was no point in planning anything." So, I was home, and really didn't want to spring clean my apartment, so I pulled out some books and started reading.
Procrastination at its finest.
I reread an entire series of books called The Song of the Lioness, because I was feeling very nostalgic and wanted something easy. There are four books in the series (Alanna: the First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant), and they follow the story of a young girl named Alanna who hides her identity in order to become a knight in a fantasy world where there is magic and sorcerers and gods and goddesses of everything. She makes unlikely friendships along the way and gets into all kinds of trouble and foils plots against the king and generally runs around being heroic. I love it.
It certainly doesn't hurt that there's a magical talking cat.
So, after I finished those four, I started in on the sequel series, The Immortals Quartet, but I only read the first one of those, Wild Magic, because after a while I get a little tired of reading books by the same author, even if I love Tamora Pierce more than almost anything. And then I realized that these books have been out for longer than I've been alive, and that's funny to me because when I read them for the first time, I was in middle school, and I could have sworn they were newly published then, but boy was I wrong on that one.
Then I started reading this other fantasy series by Sharon Shinn called The Twelve Houses, and I read the first couple of those: Mystic and Rider, and The Thirteenth House. Super engaging stories about magical people living in a kingdom where you have kings, and feudal overlords and all that good stuff. I've read the whole series before and I don't know why I didn't feel like I wanted to read something new, but sometimes there's just a real comfort in knowing where a story is generally going to go, even if you don't remember the exact details.

Good reading!
Caitlin

Book Talks

For extra credit, I give my students additional works to read and then we discuss them in small groups after school.
Because we are doing a unit on non-fiction, specifically relating to war and its impact on young children, I gave them titles of memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies of young people impacted by the same conflicts, or similar conflicts.

Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children, Why It Matters and What You Can Do
by Faith McDonnell and Grace Akallo

This was some propogandist BS, and I'm a little sorry that I had my students read this. The review seemed really good, but it was really poorly written, and the narratives were confusing and occasionally inaccurate.
Way too much emphasis on Jesus and Christianity, and the history of Christianity in Uganda.
Grace's story, of a girl kidnapped from her boarding school and sent to fight was compelling, but it was split up with historical chapters that didn't really relate well to the content of her own. Although her story would have been heart-rending, I just didn't care.


A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah

I'd read this before, and recommend it all the time to my students. This is what I was hoping for from Grace's story. It's horrific, and you feel his struggles and difficulties, as well as his hopes for the future.
This book really brings home to my students that these things could happen to anyone, and that people around the world are really more similar to them than different.

Good reading!
Caitlin

Restarting

Ok
So, this is embarrassing, but sometimes you just have to take a break from a thing even if you really love it.
Also, there was that year and a half where I didn't read a single book that wasn't for work.

So, here we go.
Take two.
Is this thing still on?

There's this thing at work where we're supposed to do something for Lent, and I'm certainly not about to give up my lattes and soda, so I'll just start reading and blogging again.
I mean, this goes hand in hand with my podcast with Liz, bsbookreports.com but this will also include anything that I read for work and all the other stuff.

So, hi world!
I've got like 18 drafts of blogs that I never wrote 5  years ago, and I think I'm just going to delete them and move on with my life.

Good reading!
Caitlin

6: The Weird Sisters

By: Eleanor Brown
Finished: March ?
Pages: 369

I bought this book at Book People in Austin, because I can't go to that bookstore and not buy something. This was a New York Times bestseller, which seemed like a good thing, and the tag line "See, we love each other. We just don't happen to like each other very much." made me giggle.
I did, however, think that it was going to be more, well, Shakespeare-y? I mean, yes, there were lots of quotes from Shakespeare, thanks to the scholarly father, but I wanted a little bit more thematic connection and less superficial chick lit. I finished it, but mostly because I felt obligated, and I mean, it wasn't terrible. Definitely not my cup of tea.
That is not to say, however, that there were no redeeming qualities, regardless of the fact that they weren't followed through in a way that I would have liked.
"Our family's vices-disorder and literature-captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour."

What really irritated me the most was that half the time I couldn't figure out exactly who was narrating the book, since in regards to the sisters it was sometimes from one specific sister's point of view, but at other times a weird "our" and "we" as if all of them were speaking at once that made me want to throw things. It certainly kicked me out of the narrative in a way that present tense never does.

A few other good things:
"She didn't think about God a lot. None of us did. He was just there if we needed him. Kind of like an extra tube of toothpaste under the sink."
Though, let's be honest, do you see what I mean? Who the hell is talking?
One of the sisters talking about how she broke up with a boyfriend after he asked her how many books she read in a year, and her reply was "A few hundred"
"How do you have time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.
This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup...Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put." (78)

It's witty and amusing, and touching at times, but I got tired of the sisters, and I got tired of their problems, and I just think that I am just not the kind of reader that these sort of books are written for. And that's okay.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

5: The Night Circus

By: Erin Morgenstern
Finished: February 27
Pages: 387

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." -Oscar Wilde


I fell in love with the packaging of this book a long time before I actually read it. I suppose it should come as no surprise, since the covers are lined in black and white striped paper, and the intervening pages between chapters and sections look as if you were staring up, out of a striped tent, at the starry sky. This novel is a feast for the senses and the emotions. It fascinates me that a book taking place in a world that is almost entirely black and white can have such detailed and inspired imagery. This is the story of a game, a challenge between two opposing forces, to the death. Okay, that might be a little spoiler-y, but I figured this out really early on and I don't feel bad about saying it. The circus is a world of black and white, even the ground is magically painted, and everything in it, and all the decorations and tents and fascinating illusions are equally white, black, and shades of grey, populated with imaginative and fantastic people, costumes, acts, like Cirque du Soleil on steroids but with magic.
I read this in two sittings, half each time. It reads quickly and poetically to its surprising yet heartwarming conclusion.

"The circus arrives without warning. The black sign painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, the one that reads:
Opens at Nightfall
Closes at Dawn"

The circus has a huge clock, which tells not only the time, but stories, and changes just as magically as the rest of the circus. It is a beautiful dream of a clock, made by Herr Thiessen, who becomes just as involved int he circus as any outsider can be. Writing about his experiences, he brings together strangers who love the circus as much as he does. "We add our own stories," he says, "each visitor, each visit, each night spent at the circus. I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared." (223)
The varied cast of characters is my favorite thing, next to the imagery, but the two are intrinsically tied.
There is Celia, the illusionist and one of the two combatants. "She lifts her hand in a delicate gesture at the raven. In response it caws again and spears it s large wings, taking flight and swooping toward the state, gaining speed as it approaches. Descending quickly it dives, flying directly at Celia and not wavering or slowing as it reaches the states, but approaching at full speed. Chandresh jumps back with a start, almost falling over Marco as the raven crashes into Celia in a flurry of feathers. And then it is gone. Not a single feather remains and Celia is once again wearing a puffed-sleeve black jacket, already buttoned over her black-and-white gown. Celia bows, taking the opportunity to retrieve her gloves from the floor" (77)
While her relationship with Marco, the other combatant, is perhaps the more romantic one, I feel that the relationship between her and Herr Thiessen, the clockmaker, is more heart warming and sweet. Communicating through letters and writings about Le Cirque des Reves, they become friends, but do not meet. When they finally do, Freiderick surprises Celia because he doesn't ask about her tricks.
"'Why haven't you asked me how I do my tricks?' Celia asks, once they have reached the point where she is certain he is not simply being polite about the matter.
Frederick considers the question thoroughly before he responds.
'Because I do not with to know,' he says. 'I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.'" (183)
Then there is Marco, whose studious exterior belies his temperamental and passionate nature. He grows to love Celia even knowing that someone terrible must happen to one of them.
Isobel, the fortune teller who is both Marco's lover, and the circus's temperance.
The twins, born the night the circus opened, with special talents all their own. Poppet who can see the future in the stars, and Widget who can tell the stories of the past, and read the past in people's eyes.
Tsukiko, a mysterious, secretive woman who is the circus's first performer, and a contortionist.
When one of the characters dies, Marco creates a place for Celia, so that she can feel comforted even when he is gone from the circus. It is one of my favorite places in the circus, and one that I wish was real enough to visit.
"The Pool of Tears
Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of our mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness.
Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.
The stone feels heavier in your hand.
When you drop it in the pool to join the rest of the stones, you feel lighter. As though you have released something more than a smooth polished piece of rock." (283)

I think that it would be difficult to read this book and not want to visit the circus. I am so impressed by this first work by what seems to be an up and coming great writer.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

4: Remember Ben Clayton

By: Stephen Harrigan
Finished: January 12
Pages: 368

Wendy was so very right about this one. This is a book of heart break, war, and loneliness, and the different ways that parents can fail their children. I haven't read a lot of books in my day that make something as boring as sculpture making a fascinating read. I find sculpture beautiful, but I also feel that it would make a deeper connection if there were pictures. However, this novel discusses the art so clearly that the artwork comes to life upon the page.
It is sometimes difficult for me to think that Comanches roamed the plains of Texas little more than a 100 years ago, and that there were people who lived through that time and saw the advancement of Texas to its own country and then a state of the union is a fascinating and fast history. This story follows the lives of three families and how the mutual drive towards a sculpture to remember a boy named Ben also becomes the drive to reconnect the past with the present, and keep the past alive. The first family is a father and daughter pair of sculptors, the father, Gil, a successful but arrogant and prideful man whose choices lead his family to tragedy. His daughter, Maureen, is trying to make it as a sculptor in her own right.
The second family is the aforementioned Ben's, living with regret and loneliness in the hills of west Texas after the war, disagreements, and death separate a man and his son forever.
The third isn't a family. The third is Ben's friend, Arthur, who survives the battle that killed Ben, with horrifying superficial and psychological scars. After the war, he stays in France, helping to fix what had been broken in the war. The task of restoring the soil of France to productivity gave him an abstract satisfaction, but it was not as deep or a genuine as another feeling he could not hold on to for more than a few moments at a time, let alone define. This sensation had something to do with not really wanting the trees to grow again or the birds to be sweeping across the blank gray sky or rising from the reborn fields. he had taken some sort of comfort in the complete deadness of everything, in the silence, in the understanding that the world had been seeking an end for itself and had finally found it. He had been content to share in that stasis of oblivion, and he rested that life was starting to surge on." (82) Arthur has already lost his family back home in Ranger, Texas to influenza, and losing Ben seems to break him. " The last thing he remembered was...staring in stupefaction at Ben's already dead body. He remembered the feeling of betrayal as well, the sense that Ben had purposely left him for some plane of experience that was more interesting...Even the death of his family, which he know should have left him howling with sorrow and shock, was something he seemed to have accepted with fatalistic understanding. It was not that he had ceased to feel, only that he had ceased to be impressed." (91)
Maureen's difficulties with her father originate from a number of problems, mostly her independence, and one of them is her on again off again suitor, a professor from the University of Texas who comes to visit. Vance is an amusing man:
"I don't know, a rough character like myself, lurking around his daughter."
"You're hardly a rough character."
"As if you would know. You didn't see me get into a saloon brawl the other day over Spenser's use of the Petrarchan sonnet." (145)
The most tragic figure, yet the one I understood the least was Ben's father, Lamar, who survived living with Indians, and carving a hard life for himself out of the desolation that is the West Texas Plains, and I both wanted to hug him and smack him upside the head.
"All his life he had treated the things that brought him pride and comfort as if they were shameful secrets--even his love for his own son. There were times when Ben was older, when they were riding fence together or camped out during the roundup, that he had felt such contentment in being with him that he thought he ought to say something out loud about it. But he never had, not that he could recall. he had expected Ben to know his own value to his father just as he had expected Gilheaney tonight to know the quality of his own work. You shouldn't have to tell people what ought to be plain to them already." (189)
The book is staggering in the depth of emotion and sorrow that can be felt from chracters that, at the time, seem like pictures. Thinking back on it brings a tightness in my chest because it is just so real. Listen, you have to read this book to really understand the emotional punch behind the random quotes I stick up here because they stuck out to me while I was reading.
"It was different from the model he had seen in Gilheaney's studio that first time, the one that had startled him so much he had forgotten who he was and where he was. It wasn't like Gilheaney was trying to steal Ben away anymore. Ben was there, in the statue, all by himself. It wasn't like he was put there by the artist, like he was shaped by Gilheaney's hands; it was like he and Poco had just showed up on their own.
It was there in the face, whatever it was: the quality that made Lamar believe that the sculptor had succeeded. He saw the innocence and trust that had been in Ben's eyes when he was a boy, when he had been so proud to ride and work alongside his father. He saw some kind of wanting in that face too, not a lack of anything but an expectation, the bright sort of yearning that Sarey used to have when she talked about what it would be like to see Europe or some other such place.
But there was anger too, and you couldn't miss it. Lamar didn't know how Gilheaney had got it into Ben's expression, but it was there. It was the fury that had been in Ben's face the last time Lamar had seen him, a fury Lamar had never been able to erase from his memory and that Gilheaney had somehow seen and understood and sealed into the sculpture.
The funny thing was that from one moment to the next you did not know what you were looking at: the innocence of a child, the buoyant expectation of a young man, or the anger of a betrayed son. They were all bound up together, like they might be in a living face, impossible to pin down or pry apart." (328)
"If Lamar Clayton had had an artist's vision, if he could have detected the fate of his son as it slumbered in the stone of his own tragic life, there might have been a better ending than this forlorn monument. But even an artist's eye, as Gil had learned, could not necessarily detect what was buried in the hearts of the people the artist was supposed to love." (329)

I leave you with the image as I see it in my mind. Driving on a pretty deserted two lane highway through west Texas. Surrounded by rolling hills, and mesas, and gullys, to the side there is a man standing next to his horse, looking out at the wide free land, one hand resting against the saddle. It seems as if in a moment he will put foot to stirrup, shove off the ground and into the saddle, and ride back into the past from whence he came, but instead the statue that tells no one to remember Ben Clayton stands forever looking into the sunset, and into heaven.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Year in Review: 2011

Best Voice: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Biggest Waste of Time (that I actually finished): Someday my Prince Will Come

Hardest Read: The Passage by Justin Cronin (not because it was long!)

Most Recommended: Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

Best Young Adult Book: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Most Amusing: This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

Shortest Book: Light Boxes (174 pages)

Longest Book: The Passage (766 pages)

Book Total: 48 (ugh)

Pages Total: 16,971

Best Month: April with 11 books

Worst Month: October with 1 book