I just read The Hunger Games for the first time, and despite the fact that I longed to edit nearly every page of it, I really enjoyed reading it. But I couldn't help but think as I read it what a terrible contestant I would be in a fight to the death.
For this reason, I present to you
TEN WAYS I WOULD DIE IN THE HUNGER GAMES
-Shot with blowdart while running for pink backpack with Hello Kitty decal at Cornucopia
-Knocked over head with rock when given away by aroma of shrimp and grits cooking over fire
-Speared while tucked into a tree writing a poem about my feelings
-Beaten to death when neon pink Doc Martens prove to be ineffective camouflage
-Bled out after shooting self in leg with crossbow sent by well-meaning fans
-Mauled in hand-to-hand combat with a groosling
-Gangrene from Bedazzler injury stemming from attempt to to sass up my uniform
-Poisoned by what appeared to be a wild katniss but was in fact a discarded tennis shoe
-Tried to make friends with especially cute tracker jacker
-Collapsed into immobile, sobbing heap the moment the games begin; dog-piled by other tributes
Discussion Question:
How would you die in the Hunger Games?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I read my first e-book this weekend.
My interest in e-books is well-documented. I love to talk peoples' ears off about the endless possibilities of digital publishing, but I was starting to feel like I was all talk. What if reading an e-book was just totally lame? How could I make such sweeping statements about the future of the publishing industry without actually experiencing an e-book firsthand?
My homegirl Serenity Gerbman recommended a book called Room (hardback here and Kindle version here) on her Facebook wall a few weeks ago. She called it her fiction pick of the year so far, which is very high praise from a well-read lady like Serenity.
I stopped by a bookstore to check it out. It's pretty new, so it's not out in paperback yet. Having approximately .5 inches of available space left in one's tiny shoebox apartment does not make a person want to stock up on hardcover novels. And anyway, it cost $25, which is just more than I can spend on a book right now. I put the book back on its stand and walked away with a sigh.
Nick got a sweet iPad for his studies at MIT, and we're both in love with it. On Saturday morning, curled up in bed in my pjs, I had a brilliant idea. I grabbed Nick's iPad, opened the Kindle app, and moments later, I was reading Room.
The premise is simple and intriguing: Jack and his mother have been locked in a room for all of Jack's life. Just like any good episode of Law and Order: SVU, the story is RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES, very clearly inspired by the abduction and rescue of Jaycee Lee Dugard. I have a little obsession with stories about feral children and children in captivity. Have you read this incredible article about Dani, a little girl in Florida who was neglected and confined to a room for most of her life?
I could not put this book down. I read it in two days in just a few sittings. It's narrated from Jack's perspective, and his gaze is unflinching. I cannot recommend it enough.
I hardly noticed that I wasn't reading a regular book. Nick has an iPad case with a cover that flips open just like a book, so it felt like a book in my hands. So much so that I kept reaching with my thumb and forefinger to turn the page. No eyestrain. Delightful.
The iPad Kindle app allows you to touch any word in the text and get a dictionary definition. Can you imagine what a learning tool that must be for younger readers? This feature helps me understand how interactive e-books could be. Classicists, imagine a dynamic Perseus-style text for reading. Social networkers, imagine discussing an interesting book with people from all over the world from inside the text itself. Kids, imagine reading texts above your reading level with effortless aplomb.
This is all well and good, but there's one test every reading platform must pass: can I read it in the bathtub?
The answer is a resounding YES. Nick, I'm sorry I took your fancy new toy in the bathtub.
...actually, I'm not.
Discussion Question [two-parter]:
A: Have you embraced e-books? Do you think the experience is comparable to reading a traditional book?
B: What is the funniest part of the "Gimme Pizza" video above? Please cite specific moments.
Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers by Kaki King
Appropos of absolutely nothing except the fact that I really dig this song
When I was home in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, my mom pulled me into the extra bedroom and gestured to a giant stack of white banker's boxes. "They're your books from growing up," she explained. "Do you think you could bear to part with some of them?"
When I was a child, my book collection was so vast that I created my own cataloging system (including my own non-Dewey, non-LOC system of alphanumeric codes) to organize them and keep track of the ones I lent out. When I pulled the lid off the first box of books in the extra bedroom, the first thing I noticed were the little white labels peeling off the spines, numerical codes scrawled in pencil in a child's handwriting. The bibliophilia I spoke of in this post was born in my childhood.
My parents must have prided themselves on some of my early literary choices. I read To Kill a Mockingbird from cover to cover when I was 6, Uncle Tom's Cabin when I was 8, and the Illiad when I was 10. From the time I was big enough to hoist the heavy tomes down off the shelf, I was reading my mother's books of transcendental German poetry in translation and her dog-eared volumes of Colette. I devoured my father's Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking hardbacks and wax-stained volumes of Robert Frost.
But for every volume of Major Literary Significance that I curled up with as a child, I read at least ten or twenty ridiculous YA novels. My bookshelves were a sherbet-colored smear of tattered pastel paperbacks. Sacred above all others were my Baby-Sitter's Club books--I had over 100 of the regular series books, plus all the Super Specials, Mysteries, and Little Sister books I could talk my mom into buying me. They were arranged in numerical order on the top shelves in my room. I deemed my collection so vast as to necessitate their own coding system--dozens of books lined up in neat rows, spines labeled with code numbers starting in with BSC.
I don't remember getting a lot out of To Kill a Mockingbird at age 6 besides being frightened of Boo Radley, whom I thought was definitely a ghost. But my, oh my, did I ever get an education from those trashy paperbacks. I learned how to apply a tourniquet and the definition of the word 'cacophony' from Jessi Ramsey, Pet-Sitter (#22). On a trip to NYC when I was 11, having just reread the New York, New York! Super Special (#6), I impressed a room full of New York natives by identifying the word 'SoHo' as a portmanteau of 'south of Houston Street' (complete with correct pronunciation of 'Houston'). Perhaps that's why Harper Lee's magnum opus ended up in the donation pile (I can always grab another copy when I want to reread it), but I was not able to part with even a single one of my Baby-Sitter's Club books.
In honor of everyone's favorite multicultural septet of overly responsible prepubescent Connecticutians, it is my pleasure to present
IMPORTANT LESSONS I LEARNED FROM YA NOVELS
#1: I HAVE DIABETES
Anyone who has ever touched a Baby-Sitter's Club book knows The Truth About Stacey--she has juvenile diabetes. She can't have even a single one of the glorious sweets depicted on the cover, but look at that plucky smile! Stacey is from New York City, dammit, and she isn't going to let something minor like the autoimmune destruction of her insulin-producing pancreatic cells stop her from enriching Charlotte Johansson's miserable life with her Abundant Teenage Awesomeness.
In The Truth About Stacey, our protagonist spends much of the book puzzling over an assortment of odd symptoms--being constantly thirsty, feeling tired, etc. In what is easily the most unforgettable scene of the book, Stacey is invited to a slumber party at the home of ultra-bitch Laine, at which Stacey guzzles several dozen liters of Pepsi and proceeds to piss Laine's bed in her sleep.
During one red-wine-soaked evening with my best girls in Texas--Mary Jane, Sammy Jean, and Sam Hoekstra--it was determined that all four of us had come to genuinely believe that we had diabetes after reading this book. After all, what child has never felt sleepy or thirsty? I spent YEARS of my life inwardly convinced that my doctors had egregiously looked over my Type 1 diabetes and that I would have to take matters into my own hands and make the diagnosis myself, possibly after soiling myself in front of numerous Popular Girls.
#2: I WAS ADOPTED OR POSSIBLY ABDUCTED FROM MY BIRTH PARENTS
The Face on the Milk Carton tells the gripping tale of Janie Johnson, who is busy leading the normal life of a fifteen-year-old girl when she DUN DUN DUN recognizes her own face on her milk carton at lunch one day.
Since I'm guessing anyone who finds this premise even remotely intriguing has already read this book or at least seen the 1995 made-for-TV movie...
Look it's the girl from Life Goes On! And Kyle from My So-Called Life! Anyone? Anyone?
I'll go ahead and tell you what happens. It turns out that Janie's parents aren't really her parents--they're her grandparents. Or rather, they are the parents of the woman who kidnapped Janie from a shopping mall when she was a little girl. OH NO THEY DIDN'T. The Face on the Milk Carton ends with Janie making a tentative phone call to her birth parents, and Whatever Happened to Janie? picks up with Janie leaving the home she knows to go back to her birth family, and all the drama that ensues.*
After Janie sees herself on the milk carton, she conducts a little investigation of her own. She breaks into her father's office and rummages around in the drawers. There are no photographs of Janie from when she was a baby. She has no birth certificate. She doesn't look like either of her parents. Things start to add up for Janie. Initially she comes to believe that she was adopted.
As soon as I read these novels, it became clear to me that, like Janie, I was living with two people who were not my parents. I decided to do a little investigating. I found photographs of myself in early infancy, even of the day I was born. My birth parents had probably given those to the people who claimed to be my parents. I found my birth certificate too, but that could easily be faked. Even I had to admit that I looked like both of my parents, but they could still be my grandparents or maybe just my cousins.
I decided to confront my parents about my origins, nervous but steeled to learn the truth. I have no idea how they managed to keep a straight face as they informed me that I was definitely their biological child, no doubt about it. I think I pouted about it for a few days.
*By the way, Wikipedia informed me that two more books have been added to this series since I was a kid--The Voice on the Radio and What Janie Found. brb buying these immediately
#3: I HAVE SCOLIOSIS
Judy Blume's classic Deenie tells the story of a young woman and her struggles with scoliosis. Deenie isn't very smart or funny or athletic, but she is very beautiful. But her dreams of being a Fashion Model are threatened when she's diagnosed with scoliosis and condemned to wear a back brace every day to correct it. How will Deenie ever be cool when she's encased in a big dorky brace?
This is actually one of the most-banned books in America, for the sole reason that Judy Blume (GASP!) actually acknowledges in this book that young women masturbate. But it was not the passages about Deenie and her washcloth and her special spot that made the biggest impression on me. It was the scoliosis.
I was kind of morbidly obsessed with the idea of being fitted for a giant back brace that I would rarely be able to take off. I imagined a permanent excuse from gym class and the sympathetic, encouraging looks I'd get from my teachers. I decided that I definitely had scoliosis too.
The joke was on me with this one--turns out I do have slight scoliosis, as determined by my pediatrician. It is entirely possible that I requested the test personally. Sadly, my pediatrician did not prescribe me a back brace or even attention-garnering back surgery. He said it was minor enough to ignore. Charlatan.
#4: MY HOUSE IS HAUNTED
Even though mysteries have never really been my thing, I read my fair share of ghost stories when I was a kid. California Casual Dawn lived in a Really Haunted Old House that was once part of the Underground Railroad, as we learned in The Ghost at Dawn's House (#9). I also really enjoyed all of those goofy Betty Ren Wright ghost books, none of which were even remotely scary. My favorite was The Dollhouse Murders, wherein the dolls in a forgotten attic dollhouse start moving by themselves and acting out a bunch of creepy stuff.
Inspired by Dawn's fearlessness, I decided that it was high time someone did a little investigation into the paranormal activity that was happening at my house. Despite my parents' protestations that we were the first and only family to have ever lived in our house, I was pretty sure the house was probably haunted. One night, my bff Katie June and I set a number of ghost traps in the house--a blanket spread out perfectly flat in the hallway, a sink full of bubble-bath bubbles, a glass of water on the nightstand. The ghosts, we reasoned, would disturb these objects and give us evidence of their existence. We went to sleep.
We were right. The next morning, the flat blanket had indentations like it had been trod upon. The sink, once filled with bubbles, held only a few inches of cloudy water. The glass of water on the nightstand had vanished entirely. Katie and I were not prepared for our findings and were significantly rattled. My parents' house was definitely haunted--haunted by my parents, who stepped on blankets and cleared dishes, and by the laws of physics, which reduced the bubbles in my sink to a soapy film in the water.
#5: I HAVE CYSTIC FIBROSIS OR SOMETHING ELSE SURE TO KILL ME BEFORE PROM NIGHT
Even in elementary school, I considered Lurlene McDaniel novels to be a guilty pleasure. Darling Lurlene has written over 60 young adult books about disease and dying, and I have read a substantial percentage of them. They all have names like Letting Go Of Lisa and Telling Christina Goodbye, and most of them feature a budding friendship or romantic relationship that is threatened by the terminal illness of one or both parties. I could not get enough of these books growing up.
The book I remember as being my favorite McDaniel tear-jerker isn't by Lurlene at all--it's by Cherie Bennett, a Nashville native. I must have read Good-bye, Best Friend fifty times when I was a kid. This egregiously sad book tells the story of Star and Christina, who make friends at a hospice, Hope House. Christina gets better and moves out, and Star has to deal with the loss of her friend and her declining health due to cystic fibrosis.
I had never heard of cystic fibrosis, even in my extensive reading of my parents' Home Medical Guide, until I read this book. Good-bye, Best Friend taught me about the excruciating treatments for cf that involve basically being beaten on the back to loosen the mucus in your lungs. I also learned that you get to live in a big house with other sick kids, and it's basically like summer camp.
I used to lie face down on my bed and imagine blows raining down on my back, my handsome boyfriend Tad wincing at the sound from the other side of the drawn curtain. A milkshake or a backrub any time I whispered a feeble request for it. An asthmatic child, every time I had a coughing fit, I eagerly checked my palms for blood. I'm pretty sure I drew up a will for myself, specifying which of my schoolmates were to inherit each of my most beloved books. But not Good-bye, Best Friend--if I died of cystic fibrosis, I was definitely going to be buried with it.
But, as Mick Jagger reminds us, you can't always get what you want. I lived straight through prom night and beyond--no diabetes or scoliosis or cystic fibrosis or ghosts of escaped slaves or long-lost birth parents for this drama queen.
Now, hilariously, I work for a children's book publisher, and my lifelong penchant for reading silly YA novels has become part of my job description. I'm afraid my editorial opinion isn't always the most developed when it comes to YA--I will invariably prefer a fluffy, predictable novel with a likable female protagonist over anything educational. But you've got to go easy on me--my diabetes is making my scoliosis act up again.
Discussion Question:
Which YA novels had the biggest impact on you as a kid?
The publishing industry has its collective skivvies in a twist over this Alice in Wonderland app for the iPad. I'd explain it, but...a YouTube's worth a thousand words.
Just like that, these developers have challenged our idea of what it means to read. They've challenged the value of the static printed word. They've poised the question: What's so special about the way we've been reading for umpteen years?
Perhaps this is the moment when a Good Publishing House Employee would begin to wax poetic about the weight of a book in their hands and the rustle of the newspaper as they fold it and refold it over their coffee every morning and all that stuff that lovers of the printed word love to trot out when the subject of ebooks comes up.
It will come as no surprise to my readers who know that I am the Princess and I like Everything that I am a big fan of ebooks and Kindles and new media and all the possibilities that come with it. Perhaps it is because I am a student of the ancient world--ΠΑΝΤΑ ΡΕΙ and all--that I am not particularly attached to this or that form of expression so much as I am constantly dazzled by the possibility of the Next New Thing.
That being said, I am far from paying my last respects to our notion of the traditional printed book. Although I am willing to divest myself of a significant amount of my physical book collection (which, as you might remember, is organized by color) in favor of their digital equivalents, there are some books that will always be precious to me--that will always be more than just the sum of their pages.
Like my Juvenal books. The better part of my undergraduate career (and a significant portion of my graduate career) was dedicated to my obsession with this Roman invective poet. Since I was a little girl, I've always enjoyed reading the dirty parts of books. When it comes to Juvenal, it's all dirty parts. (If you've never read Juvenal, check out Peter Green's classic translation . I mean, if you're also a person who enjoys the dirty parts.)
Just a Bryn Mawr commentary, a Cambridge companion, a Penguin translation, and a Loeb. Fairly standard slacker Classics grad student fare. But when you take a look inside...
It's a whole world of ablatives absolute and chiasmus and satire. You can hardly read the Latin text for all my scribblings. I like to notate my Latin to facilitate reading--verbs underlined, relative clauses in parens, adverbs in boxes. This is not exactly the most scholarly practice, but neither is carrying around Loebs, so I've already damned myself.
Writing in books is sacrilege to many, but it is a holy act to me. It is living, breathing intertextuality, created by you and happening before your eyes. The scribbles all over my Juvenal books aren't just cheats by a lazy Classicist--they're a physical manifestation of my love affair with Juvenal. They're my little votive offerings for him.
I started this practice of annotating my books long before college. I've always itched to scrawl question marks in margins and underline memorable passages with wobbly, exuberant lines. In high school, when I fancied myself very much to be a serious scholar, I used to sit all day at Waffle House with a book, a cup of coffee, and usually a pack of cigarettes one of the older kids had gotten me from the Shell station next door, losing myself in whatever I had brought to read.
It was at the Waffle House that my love affair with Doug Parker began. In 10th grade, our young history teacher Ms. Doochin (who, in retrospect, was significantly younger than I am now when she taught our class) gave us a photocopied packet of Doug Parker's translation of Lysistrata to read for class. The text was saucy and raw and fascinating, but I was intrigued most of all by the lengthy passages that had been bowdlerized by Ms. Doochin's thick black marker lines. Knowing my affinity for the dirty parts of books, it will not surprise my readers in the least to know that I went straight from school to Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of the translation in its unedited format and from there to Waffle House to make astute observations such as:
in case you can't read this, the lines are as follows:
STUDENT: Those are graduate students doing research on Hades.
STREPSIADES: Hades? Then why are their asses scanning the skies?
STUDENT: Taking a minor in Astronomy.
and in the margin, my notes: "har har har"
This is actually from The Clouds, which I also read that night
I fell so head-over-heels crazy for this book that I even wrote the following ridiculous inscription on the Table of Contents:
"watching the masterful translation of complex wordplay makes me want to give these translators the Nobel Prize." yes, I actually wrote that
Why, then, are there two precious copies of this book on my shelf?
I learned some years later that Doug Parker was my academic great-grandfather; that is, he was my Greek teacher's Greek teacher's Greek teacher. When I got the opportunity to meet Dr. Parker at my first ALA meeting in New Orleans, I exclaimed YOU'RE MY ACADEMIC GREAT-GRANDFATHER! before either of us had said our names. He grinned.
Fate brought me to the University of Texas for graduate school, where I had the opportunity to take a few classes with Doug and even, dare I say it, had the opportunity to become his friend.
Doug Parker with Mary Jane and Katie Jane
still haven't given him that Nobel Prize yet
It's hard to put my relationship with Doug Parker into words. There's a spark--a crackle. We have the familiarity of friends or lovers from another lifetime. The afternoons I've spent with him, munching on muffulettas or smoking in the sunshine, always talking poetry, always--translating Juvenal or talking hip-hop--those are moments I will keep forever in these books.
the other copy, with Doug's signature
* * *
So all of this is to say that I have a new love in my life.
I have had a crush on this book for ages--ever since I heard an epic NPR piece about it a couple of months ago when I was making the 4+ hour drive home from Franklin. Here's a very concise little blurb from Elle that sums it up nicely:
"Ambitious, thought-provoking, and comprehensive, A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, features more than 200 essays on poems, letters, novels, memoirs, speeches, movies, and theater, by writers ranging from Bharati Mukherjee to John Edgar Wideman, reinterpreting the American experience form the 1500s forward."
It's basically 1100+ pages of 200+ incredible modern writers analayzing 200+ of the most interesting textual moments in American history. For example, the first chapter deals with the first time the word "America" appeared on a map. Such an ambitious and intriguing premise, right? And it's gorgeous.
Look at that cover.
Look at that little red America and the rainbow sprinkling of stars on the spine.
Maybe it's just because I saved up all my Swagbucks for a month to buy this, but I have not been so excited about a book in ages. I am delighted in the extreme. Another reviewer called it "a DIY college course unto itself" and frankly I'm a little miffed that they stole my idea. As soon as I heard about it, I imagined it as a syllabus--my companion to a self-taught course on America's literary history. I have long, lazy plans to read every text discussed in the book, maybe in order, probably not.
I drew a bath last night and spent a little while reading a couple of the essays that caught my eye. The article on Little Women recast my four beloved girls in a new light for me, and for the first time I considered Domestic Space and Women as Other and all that academic stuff in Little Women. Usually I am too busy weeping over Beth or swooning over Professor Bhaer's dramatic return to notice such things.
The piece on Lolita is even better, if you can believe it. It really places Lolita in context in a way that I've never understood it before. One phrase from the essay stood out as an almost perfect love song for my fatherland:
the vulgarity of American beauty and, equally, the beauty of American vulgarity
I cannot WAIT to write all over this thing.
In case you need one of your own:
Discussion Question:
What are your most precious books?
. I mean, if you're also a person who enjoys the dirty parts.)
Posts
