On Reading: Searching for the Center

As we come to the end of 2010, I’ve recently had time off, which for me means lots of time to read and write.  It’s a luxury to be able to read and write for hours and hours--instead of my usual, stealing moments here and there--tucked away from the snowy winter inside a warm cabin.  I can’t think of a better way to spend the holiday.  I’ve had the time to look back on the year of reading, and I’ve been able to squeeze a few more titles into my 2010 list in my book journal.

When I heard that one of my favorite writers had a new book out about reading and writing, I rushed to get it into my hands.  And so a few days ago I began Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist.  Pamuk is not a YA author (but he’s an amazing writer, a Nobel Prize winner with many amazing books to his name).  Still, his comments about reading and writing reach across the Adult—Young Adult chasm; essentially, he’s writing about really great books.

One of the things that spoke to me in The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist is the idea that every literary (and I know that word “literary” is pretty loaded, but I’ll save my commentary for a later post) novel has what Pamuk calls a “secret center.”  Pamuk argues that this is what we search for when we read and when we write.  He writes,

What is the novel’s center made of?  Everything that makes the novel, I could reply.  But we are somehow convinced that this center is far from the novel’s surface, which we pursue word by word.  We imagine it is somewhere in the background, invisible, difficult to trace, elusive, almost dynamic…we act, as readers, exactly like the hunter who treats each leaf and each broken branch as a sign and examines them closely as he progresses through the landscape. (25)

I know that sometimes I feel this way when I write; and reading Pamuk’s book (it’s based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard), made me realize that it’s certainly what I do when reading a great book too.  It’s funny how non-readers can be mystified by readers.  They wonder how we can spend hours just, well, reading words on a page.  I mean, really, what are we doing?  We are hunting, exploring, searching.  We are looking for a center, solving the mystery of the novel.  And somehow, in solving that mystery—or even just in searching for it—we understand something about ourselves and something about the world.  And every one of us will come away from a book with something different.

I’ve always seen the act of writing as an act of hope.  Reading, too, is an optimistic act.  Pamuk confirms this instinct:

The power of a novel’s center ultimately resides not in what it is, but in our search for it as readers.  Reading a novel of fine balance and detail, we never discover a center in any definite sense—yet we never completely abandon the hope of finding it. (176)

These are the ideas I’ll be thinking about as I head into a new year of reading.  I’ll have the idea of that elusive center as I move into new landscapes, as I meet new characters, as I curl up with new stories.  From one reader to another: may you find many great books in the new year.

[Pamuk, Orhan.  The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.]

BOOKLIST: Best Five Books I Read in 2010

I guess it should come as no surprise that I’m a lover of lists.  It’s one of my favorite things about the end of the year: “Best Of” lists are everywhere.  That said, I had a pretty difficult time coming up with my own Best of 2010 list for this blog.  Still, I wanted it to be genuine, so I decided to limit my own list to The Best Five YA Books I Read In 2010 (though I’d think there would be a catchier title than that).  So I turned to my book journal and started paging through.  Five titles, I kept telling myself.  You only get five.

I came up with nine.  Then I hemmed and hawed and chopped without mercy.  And then I got all soft and decided to bend my own self-imposed rules (see the tie for spot number five).  So here’s what I ended up with…

in order…

THE BEST 5 BOOKS I READ IN 2010

1. King Dork by Frank Portman

2. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

3. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

4. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

5. (tie) Chasing Redbird by Sharon Creech and The Lost Conspiracy by Francis Hardinge

Move Over Holden (Forgive Me!!): KING DORK is Here

I just sat down to write about Frank Portman’s novel King Dork, and I’m actually kind of wordless, if that’s the version of speechless that’s applicable to a blog.  I don’t know if this is because the book was so amazing (it was) or because the plot is kind of complicated to summarize (you’ll see) or—and if I’m being honest with myself, this is probably at the root of my hesitation—because I fully recognize myself in King Dork’s descriptions of English-teachers-who-are-madly-in-love-with-Catcher-in-the-Rye.  You know that feeling when you wince and laugh at the same time?  That was me.  As Portman writes about these Holden-Caulfield-worshippers:

It’s kind of like a cult.  [Teachers] live for making you read [The Catcher in the Rye].  When you do read it, you can feel them all standing behind you in a semicircle wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles.  They’re chanting “Holden, Holden, Holden…” and they’re looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of The Catcher in the Rye for the very first time…I’ve been forced to read it like three hundred times, and don’t tell anyone but I think it sucks. (12)

So, um, yah.  There’s really no denying that I’m in the Holden Caulfield cult.  Perhaps the only thing that saves me—just a little—is that I don’t teach high school, and school authorities would probably have a pretty decent-sized conniption if I introduced ol’ Holden to the eighth grade required reading list.  But still.  I read page twelve with a little cringe of self-recognition, but also a pretty decent-sized guffaw.  Needless to say, I pressed on.

King Dork, born Tom Henderson and often called Chi-mo (an embarrassing nickname that has to do with clergy and those future-job-detector tests you take in school to discover your true calling) narrates King Dork.  He’s in a band that is renamed twenty-five times during the five-month span of the book.  He has one friend and spends a good chunk of his days trying to avoid the endless humiliations that psychopathetic “Normal” kids wreak upon him.  He spends most of the novel trying to unravel the secrets surrounding his father’s death, using a collection of his father’s old high school books, including, yes, the infamous Catcher.  He spends the rest of the book working on band improvement—in addition to the band naming and album design, he does manage to improve musically a little bit, moving from the two-man show featuring a clarinet and acoustic guitar that he has going in August to a noteworthy (actually, life-changing) performance at his school’s Festival of Lights in December—and, of course, trying to figure out girls.

I know it’s super-cliché to say that a book is “laugh-out-loud funny,” but here’s the thing: I actually did laugh out loud while I was reading King Dork, and that really doesn’t happen very often.  I haven’t read a book this good—this smart and original and weird and honest and, yes, “laugh-out-loud funny”—in a long time.  It is the best YA book I read this year.  Maybe the best book period.  It’s awesome.  Go read it.  Seriously.  And Happy Holidays too.


[Portman, Frank. King Dork.  New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.]

My Five (or six, or seven) Favorite Things About DEAD IS A STATE OF MIND

So…unless you’ve been living on another planet for a little while, you’ve probably noticed the recent vampirey-werewolfy trend in YA lit.  I readily admit to having read the full Twilight series, which to some people makes me part of a significant cultural club, and to others makes me kind of a literary failure, an English major whose tastes have managed to wither and evaporate in the years since Beowulf and Beloved.  But I respect any book that can get thousands of people reading (okay, and swooning). 

That said, I haven’t really been chasing after any new supernatural-esque books in recent months; I was kind of ready for a break from werewolves and vampires.  But by the time I realized that Marlene Perez’s Dead Is A State of Mind is, indeed, a book with werewolves, I was already too far in to turn back.  I might have read the back cover before diving in, and I would have gotten tipped off, but instead I read the title (see above) and glanced at the cover (purple) and opened it up.  I suppose I was in a purple state-of-mind.

Here are my five favorite things about Dead Is A State of Mind:

1.) I learned how to spot a fake fortune teller (the two top fake-fortune-teller predictions: You will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger and You will take a long journey.)

2.) It includes oleander: a beautiful and poisonous flower.  (This reminded me of the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch, which I read a long time ago but has really stuck with me.)

3.) The main character cooks, and there’s special attention paid to the details of food, such as “mac and cheese from scratch with three kinds of cheese” (144).

4.) There is a juke box that plays songs and reveals secrets to the protagonist—sort of a musical, clairvoyant, inanimate object sidekick.  (This is actually my very favorite detail, so perhaps I should have listed it first.)

5.) The book was in a series, but I didn’t have to have read the first book to get this one, and the ending leaves open the possibility of future tales set in Nightshade.

And actually, there's more than that.  I admired the way Perez kind of skipped over the convincing readers that a town of people populated by supernatural beings exists; she tells the story in the same matter-of-fact tone that the most realistic of novelists might take.  Nightshade's teenagers are just that: teenagers.  They fall in love and go to high school and shop at the mall.  The supernatural stuff?  It's just as much a part of everyday life as prom and math class.


So the next time a student comes looking for a new werewolfy-vampirey book, thanks to Marlene Perez, I have just the thing to put in his or her hands.

Book Journals: Create Your Own INFINITE BOOKLIST

I started keeping a book journal in the summer of 2006.  It’s nothing elaborate, just a black notebook where I write the title and author of every book I read.  I can’t even remember exactly why I started it, but I know its origins are found in conversation with my mom about our favorite books and the request of a friend for a list of book recommendations (one of my earliest booklists).  I don’t write anything about the books I read—no summary or ratings or anything like that; my only notation is “NF” to indicate the non-fiction books. 

Now that I have almost five years of records, I’m so glad I started.  It’s actually amazing how many books I’d forget about if I didn’t have my book journal to browse.  I have my beloved bookshelves (my husband has to keep building me new ones…I love the promise of an empty bookshelf), and certainly when my eye wanders over those spines, a thousand voices call out, a thousand remembered stories ease into the room.  But I don’t have every book on those shelves.  I don’t have the books I bring down to my classroom for my students to borrow.  I don’t have the books I’ve pressed into the hands of friends—“Read this; it’s amazing.”  Though I love having shelves full of books, I’m also a big believer in the art of passing great books on to other readers.  So my book journal allows me to peruse the titles I’ve read as if I have them all right in front of me, my infinite library.

And I always find my book journal full of surprises, especially now, at the end of the year, when I go back and look at my year of reading.  There are always books in the early months that I might have thought I read years, not months, ago.  There are the titles that make me smile and sigh, remembering the delight of the story.  There are sequences I find strange, yet intriguing and oddly revealing, such as this one from early spring: I moved from The Half-Known World by Robert Boswell to Congo by Michael Crichton to The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov to The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson to The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin to The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver to Savvy by Ingrid Law.  There are sequences I look at and think of my luck—seeing one great book right after another—such as when I read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell followed by Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and topped off with the Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.

It’s as if my book journal tells a story.  Sure, it’s a story with an audience of one, but perhaps that’s enough.  And the coolest thing?  It keeps going and going, and I never know what will happen next.

I'm a Member of the Sarah Dessen Fan Club

Okay.  I’m not in any official Sarah Dessen fan club.  I can’t even say for certain that one exists (though I’d bet on it).  But I am—fully, enthusiastically, whole-heartedly—a fan.  I’m also proud to say that I have ushered others into Sarah Dessen fandom, which as it turns out, is a very easy task.  A student came up to me just last month, a copy of The Truth About Forever in her hands, and said, “Mrs. Davis, you’ve gotten me completely hooked on these Sarah Dessen books.”  Few things make me happier than knowing someone has discovered not just a book, but an author with lots of books, that she loves.  As I said in my very first post on this blog, it’s one of the (many) great things about my job.

So, Sarah Dessen.  First, I want to note that I am not an ill-informed gusher.  I just finished reading my fifth Sarah Dessen book, This Lullaby.  Before that, I read The Truth About Forever, Just Listen, Dreamland, and Lock and Key.  I have to rack my brain to think of any other authors in this category.  Reading Dessen’s books brings me back to being a middle-schooler (well, we called it “junior high” back then) and escaping into the one author who really seemed to know what it was like to be a girl, growing up, wanting to fall in love, managing friendships and family and school, and just trying to figure everything out.  For me, Sarah Dessen follows in the footsteps of YA author-icon Judy Blume.  Like Blume, Dessen writes about real girls with real families and real problems and real joys.  There’s nothing fancy-pants or pretentious about Sarah Dessen, which isn’t to say that she’s not a really super talented writer.  She is.  She just happens to be a super amazing writer who writes about teenagers falling in love. 

That said, if someone told Remy at the beginning of This Lullaby, that she was entering into a love story, she would have crossed her arms and disagreed with them emphatically.  As she puts it, early in the novel, at the beginning of her post-senior year summer: “I had no illusions about love anymore.  It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn’t.  People weren’t meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say” (57).  These are Remy’s thoughts just before she heads off to her mother’s wedding.  Correction: her mother’s fifth wedding.  Of course, she didn’t plan on meeting Dexter.  Sloppy, clumsy, goofy, musician Dexter.

If someone held me up against a wall and forced me to choose my favorite of all of the Sarah Dessen books I’ve read so far (granted, an unlikely scenario), I’d probably pick Just Listen, for the music and the characters and just the way the ending—picture a car wash, loud music…and yes, a girl and a boy—stuck with me long after I put the book down.  But I’m lucky in that I don’t have to choose.  And I’m even luckier that there are many more Sarah Dessen books ahead of me, including her new book that is coming out this spring.  If you want a sneak peak at the plot of What Happened to Goodbye, you can find the back flap blurb (and a story about Sarah’s last minute scramble over changes in the proofs to fix mistakes in basketball lingo) on her blog.

And if you haven’t ever read a Sarah Dessen book, I think the fan club can always use a new member.   

Foiling Kidnappers, Bugging Phones, and Spotting Fake Diamonds with KIKI STRIKE: INSIDE THE SHADOW CITY

Did you know that beneath a small Turkish town there lies an immense underground city?  Did you know that when a person lies, her voice often rises and she may hold her head unnaturally still?  Did you ever realize that baby monitors can make excellent spying devices?  Did you know that looking bland can often be the best form of disguise?  What about the fact that if you have a tooth knocked out, you only have thirty minutes to get to a hospital and get the tooth returned to its place before it dies?  Kristen Miller's novel Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City includes these tid-bitty treasures along with information about How to Follow Someone...Without Getting Caught, How to Prepare for Adventure (everything from a compass to chewing gum included in the supplies list), How to Spot A Fake Diamond, and How to Respond When You're Attacked by Wild Animals, Frozen Alive, and/or Bitten By A Rattlesnake.  Yes, the book is that awesome.

It follows Ananka Fishbein after she discovers an underground city revealed by a sinkhole outside her New York City apartment.  Before Ananka finds the legendary Shadow City, she spent most of her days reading from her parents' immense collection of books on every subject imaginable.  Thus, she's an expert on "at least five subjects" including "1. giant squid 2. human sacrifice among the Aztec and Maya 3. carnivorous plants 4. alien abduction" and "5. Greek mythology."  While uncovering a secret underground city is exciting, Ananka's life really starts turning upside down (in the best way possible) when she meets one of the city's primary protectors: Kiki Strike, a girl who no one seems to realize exists and who seems capable of disappearing at will.  Kiki Strike dresses in black, rides a Vespa, and is in the process of organizing a band of Girl Scout Drop-outs to...well, whether she's organizing them for good or evil is what Ananka needs to find out.

This book is crazy and original and just a ton of fun.  It's like dressing in black and roaming New York city and attending secret midnight balls on islands and meeting Russian princesses and hanging out in underground speakeasies.  Plus, if you've ever wanted to know how to foil a kidnapper, well...just guess where you can find out.

Playing THE WESTING GAME

When I was a child, my best friend and I started a detective agency.  We hung signs around our small town declaring our availability as world-class investigators who would solve a mystery for the (bargain) price of five dollars.  No one ever called, so we had to content ourselves with reading and writing mysteries instead.  I found my favorite all-time mystery novel around this time, and I've returned to it again and again in the years since first discovering it.  If you like a good mystery, no matter what your age, head straight to your local library or bookstore, and pull Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game off the shelves.

The Westing Game has a quirky, witty, knowing omniscient narrator, a narrator we never meet, yet one we can easily picture unveiling the tale with a mischievous smile.  This narrator wastes no time in presenting the mystery, opening the story with "a most uncommon delivery boy" riding around a Michigan town delivering six letters to six families inviting them to view Sunset Towers, a "glittery, glassy apartment house on the Lake Michigan shore."  Right away, there is much mystery to the scene.  There's the fact that "The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."  And there's the fact that the letters are signed by Barney Northrup, and "there was no such person as Barney Northrup" (1).  All this strangeness appears on the very first page.

All six families move into Sunset Towers, and sixteen members of these families soon find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery.  They're called on to solve the mystery of Samuel W. Westing's murder: the person that solves the mystery becomes heir to Westing's vast fortune.  Each player is given a partner, ten thousand dollars, and clues written on slips of paper.  The fun of The Westing Game lies not only in having access to every clue--reader's privilege--and trying to solve the mystery alongside the players, but in watching how the characters interact with each other as they try to solve the mystery of Samuel Westing's death.  Oh, and did I mention that according to Samuel Westing's will, one of the players is also the murderer?

So who are these players?  Well, by their own definitions, taken from what they write as their "positions," they are the following, written in their assigned partnership pairs (the parenthetical additions are mine):

Madame Sun Lin Hoo, cook (also wife to James and mother to Doug)

Jake Wexler, standing or sitting when not lying down

Turtle Wexler, witch (and, I should probably mention, a junior high school student)

Flora Baumbach, dressmaker

Christos Theodorakis, birdwatcher

Denton Deere, intern, St. Joseph's Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery (and fiance to Angela Wexler)

Alexander McSouthers, doorman

J.J. Ford, judge, Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court

Grace Windsor Wexler, heiress (apparently, Mrs. Wexler, wife to Jake, mother to Turtle and Angela, had quite a bit of confidence about her chances at Westing's millions when she filled out her position card)

James Shin Hoo, restaurateur

Berthe Erica Crow, Good Salvation Soup Kitchen

Otis Amber, deliverer

Theo Theodorakis, brother (to Christos)

Doug Hoo, first in all-state high-school mile run

Sydelle Pulaski, secretary to the president (no, not that president)

Angela Wexler, none

All of these characters are more than they appear, just as the mystery is full of twists and turns.  As the narrator describes them, just after they all move in (and they all do move in--in fact, while they're being shown around the apartments, their names are already printed on the mailboxes in the lobby), they are "mothers and fathers and children...And, oh, yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.  Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person" (5).

The Westing Game is original and funny and smart.  When I'm forced to try and come up with my absolute favorite YA books of all time--a difficult feat even for a list-lover like me--The Westing Game is on it without fail.  It was published over thirty years ago, but it becomes beloved by bunches of new fans even now.  I guess that what makes it a classic, a well-deserved term for an incredible book.  Check it out, and see if you can solve the mystery before anyone else.  Enjoy and good luck!