Thank you, mystery librarian

I discovered recently that my book, which is available to libraries as an ebook through Overdrive, is now part of the collection at Oakland (CA) public library. This makes me so happy. I have been a patron of the OPL libraries for most of my adult life. Also, for reasons I don’t fully understand, it seems to be having a positive effect on sales.

So thank you, anonymous librarian who added me to the collection! Maybe I met you at a conference and don’t remember. Drop me a note if you see this so I can aim my gratitude to the right person.

I also love bringing my used books to the Bookmark Bookstore, run by Friends of the Oakland Public Library, because I know they will find good homes, AND that those sorting through them will recognize good stuff to add to the collection (not always a sure thing.) You can contact the Bookmark Bookstore at 510-444-0473 or visit them at www.fopl.org. Donations support library collections!

I first moved to Oakland when I was an UG at Bezerkeley, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I’ve lived there off and on, but always seem to return. I love Lake Merritt, and the amazing wildlife, human and animal, that hangs out there.

Did you know Lake Merritt is the oldest wildlife refuge in California (1869)? Amazing birds. And bonsai garden. And a sensory garden, And a Japanese garden. And a palm garden. And gondolas. And…geese.

So yes, I am familiar with the less savory attributes of geese, dear readers.

Could my parents have been undercover spies?

This is going to be a slight ramble.

There needs to be a special word, german or otherwise, for that sensation when something triggers a vague memory from the past. This usually happens to me in regard to my childhood, which is separate geographically, as well as in time, from the rest of my life.

Last night the local PBS channel showed a documentary on Jens Jensen, the founder of landscape architecture in this country (okay, I guess there was Olmsted, too). I didn’t recognize the name, although as the documentary went on, I kept thinking — “Hey, I’ve been there!” I watched the whole thing, amazed I’d been ignorant of this man who’d designed so much of the landscape around me in childhood.
Jens Jensen documentary

It’s possible he’s responsible for the existence of the park where we did our “wilderness” and eco training in 6th grade. (For any Chicagoland people reading this, it was Camp Reinberg. Picture me in the rain with a compass trying to find my way back to camp with only a garbage bag with holes cut in it for a rain parka, with the monsoon rains sheeting down…)

Who knew? And I am sure I must’ve been in the Garfield Park conservatory (pictured above), only I have no clear memory of it, and I never had any luck asking my parents about my childhood. Unless they decide to spontaneously tell the story at some awkward social occasion.

Which is why I suspect them of having a secret life.
Bootleggers? Running guns to Canada? Working undercover for Interpol?

There were stories (and sometimes pictures) of places I have no memory of being. Some were cute (me posing as a lion at the Biltmore estate) some were just odd.

For example, I never learned anything more about this one:

“You were so taken with that parrot in the restaurant, do you remember?”

No.

“The owner said you were the smartest baby she’d ever seen.”

No Mom, I don’t remember. How old was I?

“You would’ve been about 2 or 3.”

And where was this?

“Louisiana.”

What the heck was I doing in Louisiana?
What were you doing in Louisiana?

“That’s none of your business.”

See what I mean?

Any question about what these 2 people were up to before they had kids got this response:

“That’s my life, not yours.”

“We’re entitled to have our own private lives, it has nothing to do with you.”

Nuh-uh.

Nobody else’s parents were secretive about their past life. Nobody on tv behaved that way. AND my Dad was always reading spy novels.

Suspicious, right?

Let us ponder what mischief might occur in Louisiana, even with a 2 year old in tow. Anything can happen during naps.

A ghost story for the dark of the year

The shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, is tomorrow. That makes it the perfect time to review a horror novel I read recently. The story climaxes at the dark of the year, when the forces of darkness overwhelm any trace of light in the arctic night.

Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter: A Ghost Story is an old-fashioned horror story, in the tradition of M.R. James, who in my book was the most frightening of all the British 19th-century horror writers.

I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but I found the twists and turns that built up the suspense quite satisfying.

An amateur arctic expedition journeys to the arctic circle to take scientific readings and right away we feel the echoes of failed expeditions looming over this one. But there’s another threat hinted at from the beginning. It won’t be just amateur planning, overconfidence or the hidden demons of the members of the expedition that will doom it to fail.

Hardened sailors fear the place the expedition will be based, and one finally comes out and explains that the place is haunted by something that happened there years ago. Of course stalwart British upper-class adventurers, intent on doing science, laugh at such notions.

The narrator, who is not upper class and has something to prove to the others, is left there alone by a series of accidents. We suspect that something terrible must happen to him, but the actual day by day accretion of fear, and the growing dark, maintain the suspense. Paver’s use of a sled dog as a pivotal character who adds to the terror, is wonderful, and in keeping with her other works that featured a knowledgeable depiction of wolf behavior.

That would be the younger YA series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. They’re fast-paced and suspenseful, and I highly recommend them too, especially for reluctant readers.

Scare yourself with this winter’s tale of ghosts, solitude, and darkness.

If it’s not a book, is it really even a gift?

If you’d like to give a paperback copy of The Third Kind of Magic to as a gift, (do you know someone who’d love the story of a smart and independent girl?) I urge you to buy it from your local bookstore. Many of them have fast shipping.

It’s also available online from Kobo and B&N. All of these outlets get their copies from Ingram, a wholesaler who ships right away.

I am posting this so you can get the book in time for the holidays.

The paperback is available at your local bookseller

Why local bookstores?
Three reasons:

It’s important to support local stores so they’ll survive, especially bookstores which add so much to the community and our reading lives.
Browsing at a local bookstore makes you look infinitely cool, and demonstrates you are not becoming completely virtual. Besides you might find something wonderful (a gift for you, perhaps?)
Because the ‘Zon has just listed my book as being unavailable for 8 days. Just in time for holiday sales. Thanks, robot masters!

(Tip o’ the hat to Greedy Reads bookstore for the chalkboard image.)

Artists at work

NYRB is publishing translations of Tove Jansson’s writing that haven’t been available before in English, and we’re so lucky.

I loved the first memoir I read, The Summer Book, reflecting the memories of a child. Now I’ve read her adult memoir entitled Fair Play. The books are very different, written in differing styles, but they form parts of a while.

The first is a wonderful retelling of the feelings, images, and myths of childhood. The second is a matter-of-fact recounting of how two artists live and work together — and the give and take required to make that work.

“Fair Play” here means balancing needs, creating companionship without getting in each other’s way – and not using weaknesses against each other.

The stories illuminate the understanding, civility, silence, distance and patience between these two women, and the quirks that must be allowed for.

My favorite passage was the story of the chaos her partner creates when rearranging artwork on the walls and then the amazing change it makes when she’s finally completed her work and the juxtaposition of pieces changes their impact and meaning. The scenes set in a hotel in the USA while they traveled cross-country on a Greyhound bus were funny and interesting too, rather like one’s own travel journals, strange and interesting things happen, but is it a story? Does it round itself off? Perhaps it’s simply an anecdote to retell years later.

The tension of trying to be there for your partner, while focusing on your art wholeheartedly, touched and inspired me.

It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine

Summer is just about over, but we still have some middle-grade adventures to complete!

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the concept for City of Ember, because I have read a lot of survival after the end of the world stories. But the author was profiled in the local newspaper and I was intrigued by the story of how she came to write it, and it’s not a dystopia.

I was charmed when I began reading it. The book reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, with that exacting level of detail of how people live, what they eat (potatoes and turnips), and what they wear. For them it’s entirely normal to live with no sky, and with lights that go out at a certain time of night. The emotional heart of the story are the explorations of two young people finding their way in the world, when everything is an adventure, not gloom and doom. Although there’s plenty of gloom when the lights go out. And of course the satisfying middle grade trope of adults in power being a threat, even to themselves.

I wanted to find out how the kids would get out of their predicament, and what had caused it (being of the duck-and-cover generation, I naturally assumed nuclear war) and by the end of the book I still don’t know why the underground city was built, or why they had to stay there for several hundred years. Apparently I must read the next book, The People of Sparks.

Our brains are wired to look for experiences that will help us survive; maybe that’s why we never tire of imagining what we’d do when the apocalypse finally comes. I recommend the book, especially for younger readers, because there’s nothing too scary in it, yet the suspense is satisfying.

Brontë action figures! You know you want them

In honor of the bio-flick on tonight on the local PBS station – all the Brontës — all of them! I bring you one of my all time favorite U-Toob videos.
For that Gothic Transformer kind of mood.

Follow up 9/23: I watched the film and it was a horrible disappointment. I wasn’t too surprised, considering the anti-feminist writer they thought suitable for the job (she did the *Amazing Mrs. Pritchard* which set back women in politics by about 50 years, and no, it wasn’t even funny.). Amazing how they always choose the woman who won’t threaten patriarchal assumptions too much (“of course the brother is more important”).

Instead of examining how the shared imaginative lives of all the Brontë children created a unique imaginative and literary education, the film fed us scene after scene of Branwell’s self-destruction, unending and boring stupors and rages, once again relegating the 3 most astonishing British writers of the 19th-Century to secondary characters in the story of their feckless brother. Even now.

Honestly, the action figure clip is a better introduction to their writing.

Sitting here in limbo…

Waiting for the tide to flow. Remember that old Jimmy Cliff song?

Even though I feel a tad superfluous writing a review of Lincoln in the Bardo, a book that’s already been widely praised, this is my blog and I get to write what I like.

It’s not really surprising that I loved the novel since I find myself consistently amazed by George Saunder’s fiction, as well as his writing on writing. Hard to think of anyone else I can say that about. Oh, maybe Virginia Woolf and Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read some of his essays on being a writer, go forth and find them.

I’d been saving the book for a vacation treat and was not disappointed. Frankly, I was awed by what he did with language and the voices of his characters. To evoke 19th-century diction and inject poetic, coined language like hammer blows of Anglo-Saxon is no mean feat. (Reminded me a little of Alan Garner (Strandloper) and Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker) and their attempts to push us out of our comfort zone in English.

The book is a playful, funny, frightening lucubration on death. I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead a couple of times over the years and don’t necessarily remember details, except the parts that were eerily similar to the afterlife judging depicted in Egyptian tombs. I do remember that once you’re in a bad place in your mind it’s hard to get out, your mind generating the horrible things you encounter. The “monstrous” elements of the hell realms were frightening, but there was the subtext that maybe they’d been created by the observer.

I did like the echoes in the story of the Minister, both with the Book of the dead, and with other Tibetan stories about those who “die” and are sent back to tell what they’ve seen (in an effort to get their listeners to worry enough about the Bardo to straighten up and fly right).

I can’t say more about my favorite bits without giving things away. The ending was deeply satisfying and left one grateful for the journey.

A hopeful, warm book, that constantly surprised. It reminds us our mortality is a fundamental reason to be kind.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – Review

This is a book to read slowly and savor, to fully taste the sense of being on an island in the sea with long days of sleeping, swimming, gardening and fishing ahead of you.

The interactions between the grandmother and grandchild are idiosyncratic and never sentimental. I felt I was a guest in someone’s tiny cottage over the summer, observing a way of life different from mine.

Although clearly founded in memories of the author’s past, I couldn’t tell whether the author was the grandmother or the grandchild. Isn’t that marvelous? They were equally emotionally present throughout the book, neither voice dominating.

A marvelous summer book, to help you remember the long days of daydreaming and exploration we associate with childhood.

Books for kids (and adults) who love animals

My middle-grade adventures continue. This time I’m revisiting two books I’ve read before. The point of the exercise is to learn from the masters, to recognize what’s done well, and these books do so many things well.

In How to Speak Dolphin, Ginny Rorby creates a complex and emotionally honest story about Lily, the older sister of an autistic brother. Never sentimental, this book is deeply moving, presenting Lily’s dilemma of whether to help Nori, a young dolphin being held in captivity for human use, or ignore the animal’s suffering because relating to Nori is one of the few things that make her autistic brother happy.

Lily’s friend Zoe, who just happens to be blind, keeps pushing Lily. She has no doubt that keeping social animals like dolphins in captivity is cruel and never justified. I won’t provide any spoilers but will say the ending wasn’t easy or simple but felt true to the realities of the world we live in.

This was the second book of Ms. Rorby’s that I read. The first one was much more emotionally wrenching thanks to my own experiences with animals kept for medical research, and the kinds of research I was exposed to in my primatology courses.

That book, Hurt Go Happy, won Ms. Rorby the Schneider Family Book Award. Joey Willis is deaf and her mother won’t allow her to learn sign language. That changes when she meets the chimp Sukari, who signs, and Joey secretly begins to learn it too. When Sukari is moved from a relatively loving and safe situation to a prison-like facility where animals are “stored” for medical experimentation, Joey has to decide what to do. The book can be hard to read, but everything is based on fact and the story is immediately relatable for kids and adults alike. The human characters are placed in difficult situations and Rorby’s characters always have enough complexity for us to empathize with them as well as the animals that are trapped or endangered by humans.

Well-researched, powerfully written, and based in fact, I highly recommend both books to readers of all ages.