Just a couple of quick things

I'm taking a vacation/blogation (for real this time), but quickly before I do, a couple of book notes:
-JoAnn Mapson's Solomon's Oak has more heart than any book I've read in a long time
-Tracks by Louise Erdrich: Fleur Pillager is my new literary hero; this is a book that puts the reader under a spell and does not let go
-Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao- Wow!
-The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni: I haven't finished yet, but this is one of the best YA books I've read in a long, long time; it's really pretty awesome, and sort of punk rock too.

Opening Up the Book Journal

A fellow reader recently sent me a link to this article about a book journal or, as Pamela Paul calls it, a “Book of Books.”  It’s a great article, and it sent me back to look through my book journal, which I wrote about last year here.  About her Book of Books, Paul writes, “Over the years, [Bob has] become in certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might be, not about what happened but about how what happened made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.”  It’s true: even though my book journal is only a list of titles and authors, with notations for fiction and non-fiction, it tells a story of my reading evolution over the past six years.  I can see all the books my mom has sent for our Book Club of Two, the point at which I started reading books for my MFA, and the increase in YA titles when I started The Infinite Booklist.  So, inspired by Paul’s article, I thought I’d try something new by opening up my book journal here once in a while.

So now and again, I’ll post a page from my book journal, and then I’ll note my favorite book from that page.  I already peeked, and I can tell sometimes I might have to choose two—after all, I read Amitav Ghosh and Philip Pullman for the first time on the same page—but I’ll try to stick to my favorites.

So here’s the first page of my Book Journal from June 2006 (I'm not sure why the picture came out all wacky, but anyway...)

My favorite book on this first page?
While The Lie That Tells A Truth remains one of my favorite craft books about writing, and while Electric Universe and Ordinary Wolves both shook my world a little bit, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place remains one of my all-time favorite books.

But Just One More Quick Thing

I know I just posted that I was taking a vacation from blogging, but I also just started reading Louise Erdrich's Tracks, and I have to say that it's mesmerizing.  Every time I pick it up, I feel like I've been put under some sort of magic literary spell.
That's all for now...

So...

So, I haven’t posted in a very long time.  (All those post dates on the sidebar won’t allow me to pretend to myself that I’ve been anything but blog-negligent.)  It’s not that I haven’t been reading, nor that I haven’t read any books worthy of a bit of gushing (I’m looking at you, Snow Child).  But I just haven’t been feeling bloggy.  I considered just taking The Infinite Booklist off the air (or whatever the proper web-term is), but for now I’m just posting to say that I’m going to take an official vacation from blogging, at least for a while.

So…until the next, whenever it may be…

SWAMPLANDIA! Earns Its Exclamation Points!!

Swamplandia! Swamplandia!  Swamplandia!  This is one of those books that I wanted to talk about and recommend almost as soon as I started reading it.  And then I’d add, “Well, let me finish it first, and then I’ll tell you for sure.”  I think that while I was reading, a part of me thought the book was so amazing that I wasn’t sure a perfect ending—and ending that matched the book—could possibly exist.  But now I’m done, and it’s safe to say, I strongly recommend this book.  It was one of those books that I wanted to sneak in at any possible moment, even if it meant just reading a few pages before slipping off to sleep.  Every page is surprising and a little bit strange, which is just how I like it.

Swamplandia! (and, yes, every time I saw one of those mid-sentence exclamation points, the punctuation nerd in me—the same nerd who remembers being told every writer gets only three exclamations points in her entire life—got a shudder of delight) tells the story of the Bigtree family as they recover from the loss of their mother, wife, and star attraction at Swamplandia!, an alligator-wrestling themed swampland park.  The narration is shared between Ava Bigtree, a thirteen-year-old alligator wrestler who’s determined to follow in her mother’s footsteps and save the park; and her older brother Kiwi, who has his own vision of heroism, one that involves saving the Swamplandia! but also going to college and using lots of big words and learning not to sound like an alien life form to the mainlanders.  Kiwi begins his quest on the Florida mainland, a place as odd and terrifying as the swamplands Ava finds herself negotiating without her parents or siblings: it quickly becomes clear that either place will take the courage of an alligator-wrestler to survive.

This book is wild and wonderful!  Read it!!  You’ll enjoy every exclamation point.  Not a one is undeserved.  (!).

Love and Other Annoyances: DELIRIUM

Love is beautiful and wonderful and amazing.  Sometimes.  It is also the root of some of our very deepest pain.  If you could protect yourself from the pain, would you give up the wonders?  Lauren Oliver’s dystopia Delirium is about a society that has decided that’s exactly what they want: a nice, even existence with sensible life pairs that are assigned at eighteen, pairings that will never cause either party any pain.  It’s a society that has found a cure for love.  One catch: you don’t get to choose whether or not you want to take the antidote.  It’s required.

Enter Lena Haloway, a seventeen-year-old who has been counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, the day she will receive the cure.  She lives with the fear that she might catch the disease of love before she gets the antidote, a disease that could jeopardize the life of safety and contentment she’s long seen as her due.  And then, on the day of her evaluation, Lena finds herself saying that Romeo and Juliet is “beautiful” when she’s supposed to say “frightening.”  And then she says that her favorite color is that of the sky “Right before the sun rises…the pale nothing color,” when she’s supposed to say “Blue.”  When a herd of cows painted with the words NOT CURE. DEATH comes storming through the labs, Lena catches a glimpse of a laughing boy, and her world starts to fracture.

I love a book with a great question at its center, and that’s definitely the case with Delirium.  I mean, I love “love,” but I’m not sure I’d say that if I were suffering a broken heart.  Is passion always better than security?  Is freedom better than safety?  Is one perfect kiss worth the pain of loss?  I know what I’d say—and it’s pretty clear where Oliver stands—but I not only followed Lena’s evolution with a rather ravenous zeal, I’m also looking forward to seeing where her decision takes her in the sequel: Pandemonium.

Take A Visit to DEAD END IN NORVELT

It’s been a while since I last blogged.  Part of that is that I’ve been busy doing miscellaneous other things, from writing to teaching to snowmachining, but part of it is that I’ve found it difficult to follow up on my response to The Fault in Our Stars, as it’s pretty rare to encounter a book that you know will be one of the best you read all year, especially when you read that book in February.

But if you’re going to follow up on such a book, probably a good place to go is to a Newbery-Medal winner, right?  And that’s exactly what I did, with Jack Gantos’s Dead End in Norvelt.

Dead End in Norvelt stars an awesome kid named Jack Gantos, who finds himself very, very grounded after shooting a gun his father brought back from World War II.  In Jack’s defense, the kid had no idea the gun was loaded when he aimed at the distant drive-in movie screen for some participatory, non-sanctioned viewing.  On the other hand, Jack’s also a kid who, when his mother asks him, “[D]oes your dad know you have all this dangerous war stuff out?”  Jack replies, without skipping a beat, “He always lets me play with it as long as I’m careful,” which, as he himself points out a second later, “wasn’t true.”  In fact, Jack quite clearly recollects his father telling him that “This swag will be worth a bundle of money someday, so keep your grubby hands off it.” 

This book reminded me a little bit of The Teacher’s Funeral, in that it’s set in the midwest, and in a different time period (granted, the two books are set years apart, but it’s all history to the modern reader, especially the modern reader under age sixteen).  It’s funny and sweet, and I think it would appeal to kids who like books with crazy facts in them about everything from war to mummies, as those are just the kinds of facts that appeal to young Jack.  Plus, there’s a bunch of dead people, and obituary writing, and mystery, plenty of bloody noses, and an old plane that might just get off the ground again.  It’s all just kind of great, a book that takes flight from the very first scene, with a little boy and a Japanese gun and a distant drive-in movie screen.