Five Skies

I hear, this is a good book. At least, reviews say it is, so it must be, because they say so. The problem is, I didn’t read this book, but listened to its recording instead. So what happens is, when an author reads his own book, it sounds really terrible. That’s because, an author is good at writing, and not so much at reading. So they have this terrible habit of reading, just a few words at a time, in order to make it very slow and clear, and easy to understand. What they don’t get is, when they pause, they just make our brains pause, and when they pick up in the middle of, the same phrase, we shake our head trying to figure out, what it was they said, and we miss most of the sentence.

Therefore, it is very difficult, to listen to an audio book, that is read by the author. It is sort of like reading paragraphs, that have commas stuck throughout the sentences, in weird and awkward places. Authors, take note. Leave the reading to the actors, and take the time you save, to write us something intelligible.

The Room and the Chair

To recap, when I want books from the library, I don’t go in search of a book. I go to the adult shelves, the young adult shelves, and the children’s shelves, start at A, and take home the first two or three books on each shelf that I haven’t read yet. I use pretty much no discernment except that I skip major fantasy in the adult section (because I find it forced and usually full of underlying moral “lessons”) and I’ve had enough of that one author who is just TERRIBLE (whose name I’m not going to mention because I think that might be mean and we all know I don’t want to be mean).

Well, I’ve given it a few tries, but I have officially knocked one more genre off my list of what I will read, and we have this book to thank for it. So: no more contemporary political/mystery/subtle-statement "thrillers". I thought perhaps I might eventually warm up to these newspapermen, army bigwigs, political underlings, and statesmen’s wives if I read enough of these books.

Nope. Sorry. Just couldn’t do it. Bored silly. Ain’t happening again.

Call me lazy, but if I just don’t care that much about politics in real life (hey, I research candidates, I vote, and I consider my part done) then why would I want to flood my imaginative life with them? I wouldn’t! These people bore and annoy and frustrate me on a daily basis. They flood the news and semi-intellectual conversations all around me. I don’t like it in my daily dealings and I don’t like them getting in the way of my reading enjoyment. So enough! No more politics in books! I’m not listening to their subliminal messages anyway! Bring me a nice unicorn and a clever caper by a kid named Zach, because that’s all I want when I read! Entertaaaaaaaaaaain me!!

Oh, so about this book (yeah, I forgot)- it’s one of those that has about ten major characters and the scene cuts from character to character to follow their part of the unfolding story. I didn’t really like any of the characters and I certainly didn’t care about the unfolding story (secrets in DC, of course), so I just kept skipping around to the parts that were following the only character I found interesting, which was the opening USAF pilot who ended up in a tree. That was sort of interesting. Then one of her friends died when they all went AWOL for sledding in Afghanistan or something like that… semi-interesting… and then I’m pretty sure she ended up dying. In this room. With a chair.

Not sure. Didn’t care.

Heyday

So here’s the thing about this book. I have no idea what it was about. Wait, I remember what it was about. It was about something… something… uh, think it was early America or something like that, maybe these people were early Americans, or maybe they came from Europe, possibly Americans in Europe who came back to America, I really can’t remember. It’s, oh, wait, it was gold rush time! I remember that. They wanted gold. I think they panned for it. No, they dug for it. No, they panned. They definitely panned. Yeah, that’s it. I’m sure of that. And they made their own little community, some sort of Utopia-commune-thing, but that was after mostly everybody died. And then I think everybody else died. Maybe not the last person. Uh, somebody had to live, right… somebody was telling the story… no, that was just an omniscient narrator, never mind. Everybody died.

So just to clarify, I hated this book. It was ridiculous. It was silly. It was stupid. I will give the author kudos for one thing, however. He really did his research on the time period. He definitely knew who all the major players at the time were. In fact, he knew them so well that he made sure his main characters ran into each and every one of them. Never (since Forrest Gump) have I met an entire cast of characters that was so lucky as to run into every famous contemporary on the globe. (And just for the record, Forrest Gump did it better.) Don’t believe me? Here’s a short and incomplete list of mid-century celebrities that our heroes (who all die, I don’t even feel guilty about spoiling that) encounter:

1. Charles Darwin (who apparently suffers from a severe case of indifferent flatulence)
2. Mr. Proctor (of Proctor and Gamble fame)
3. Cassius Clay (the first one)
4. Robert E. Lee (20 years before the war)
5. Stephen Foster (who conveniently hears them mention something about coming around the mountain)
6. John Deere (really?)
7. Noah Donner (a convenient survivor)
8. Joseph Smith
9. John Jacob Astor (thought he drowned)
10. William Tecumseh Sherman (I repeat… really?)
11. Prince Albert (sigh)
12. Brigham Young
13. Edgar Allen Poe (who initialized the Big Bang theory, did you know?)
14. Kit Carson
15. Allan Pinkerton
16. Horace Greely
17. John Charles Fremont
18. Abraham Lincoln (yep, just hanging out in a bar)
19. William Herndon (sharing a drink)
20. Charles Dickens
21. Walt Whitman
22. Alexis D. Toqueville
23. James Sheridan Knowles (look him up)

…And that’s all I can remember off the top of my head, and let’s all remember one thing: I have a very bad memory. So my hat’s off to the author. Congratulations on elevating your ridiculous, time-wasting story into a completely unbelievable piece of tripe. I look forward to ignoring your next literary installment. But not really.

The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister

This book came from one of my library-dash-to-all-the-shelves-and-grab-the-first-book-I-see trips. It's a kids' book that was sort of fun to read, but it surprised me a little bit. See, I grew up reading about Peter Rabbit and Ramona Quimby, who taught me such essentials as not to steal from my neighbor's farm and that toothpaste should remain in the tube until I'm ready to use it. This book was a little different. It introduced us to India (who was named after the ink, not the country, by her bohemian artist mother) and her (as we would call it in the Midwest) non-traditional family and lifestyle. So we've got the artsy mom (who leaves India to fend for herself when she's in the middle of a painting jag), the long-distance dad (whose new boyfriend makes India a little uncomfortable because of his Swedish accent), the boy who's her best friend (Ramona never got jealous when her friend Howie played with other girls) and the myriad of schoolmates and neighbors that make up her topsy-turvy life. Aw, that's sweet.

Hey, whatever, it was cute. It was just quite a far cry from the books I read when I was a kid where the most dramatic thing that happened was the kids got caught out in the rain while playing with their tin-can stilts- so it was sort of sad for me to realize just how far behind the times I really am. God save my poor children if I ever have any- they'll be stuck reading things like The Babysitters Club and Sleepover Friends and will miss out completely on all the enlightened books they could be checking out that would help them understand this new world we live in...

The Gift

One of my favorite “Chick Lit” authors is Cecelia Ahern. I read Chick Lit semi often just because I can blast through those pages like lightning and it’s a fabulous escape. It’s sort of like watching a sitcom on TV- just a distraction from the real world purely for the sake of being entertained. As long as there’s something more than just shoes, shopping, and sex in the plot of a girlie book, I usually enjoy it. Of course, finding quickie reads in the Chick Lit section that contain more plot elements than just shoes, shopping, and sex is pretty difficult since for some reason female authors think those three things all by themselves make up a riveting story… and I digress.

So enter Cecelia Ahern, because when it comes to Chick Lit, she’s pretty fresh. She writes very creative stories. Her characters are well thought out and believable. I haven’t yet found a *ahem* love scene that lasts more than a paragraph. Plus, she’s a very young woman and that tickles me a bit, because I’m sure that half of the things she writes about she hasn’t even come close to experiencing in her so-far short life. Her first novel was about a woman who had been married for 15 (ish? I can’t remember how long) years, had just lost her husband, and was probably one of the most believable characters I’ve ever read in a chick book. Watching this young author develop that character was sort of the equivalent to watching 16-year-old LeeAnn Rimes sing “How Can I Live Without You”… only Ahern actually pulled that character off and was a LOT less annoying. And I digress again.

So! I just finished The Gift, a book I got from the library because all the Christmas readers had finally returned it. Yep, it’s a Christmas book. Yep, it’s chickie. Yep, it’s got a moral. Yep, it’s basically It’s a Wonderful Life meets Tuesdays With Morrie meets Eat Pray Love. Yep, we’re supposed to read it around Christmas time so that we remember what we have, understand the true gifts of both the season and life, change our way of thinking, become all around better people, blah, blah, blaaaaahhhhh… Yep, it was still an entertaining book and whadevah, it was a good time-killer. This one is not going to win a Pulitzer, but every author (apparently) has to write themselves a nice little seasonal lesson-learner, so I’ll give Ahern hers. As long as she goes back to writing the usual distracting non-moral-preaching stuff soon. Please. More story. Less preaching. (And yes, Cecelia… I did know exactly how it was going to end within the first ten pages, but you did mean for that to happen, yes? This wasn’t exactly Hercule Poirot…)

Matilda

I love Roald Dahl. Love, love, love him. I’ve loved to read his books ever since I was a kid, and not just the standard Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I read everything of his that I could get my hands on when I was younger. However, since my book availability was limited to what was in the library at school and the public library downtown (you know, it’s hard to drive that buggy all the way to the bookstore in South Bend) I actually didn’t read that many of his books until recently. But, last year I found a great boxed set of his books that were all illustrated by Quentin Blake so I nabbed it. It is full of gems that I didn’t even know existed. I’m sure there’s many, many more books of his out there that I haven’t found yet, but, well, I’m too lazy to actually go find them. My reading habits are still rather dependent on what’s really within arm’s reach. And my horse gets tired when I take him on long trips down to Powell’s.

So anyway, I just read Matilda for the first time and it didn’t disappoint. The thing that makes Roald Dahl’s books so enjoyable is that he has a ridiculous and impossible imagination. He’s always putting normal people into fantastical situations- not fantastic worlds, but fantastic situations within our regular, every day world. When you read a Dahl book you always end up wishing that you were one of the characters in the book rather than stuck on the outside looking in. This book is exactly like that- it’s so engaging that it seems perfectly acceptable to the reader that a brilliant five-year-old discovers she has telekinesis and thus saves the lives of everyone around her. Why not, right? In fact, why not just go a step further? Since this five-year-old can do it, why not just believe I have telekinesis myself? I bet I can put those books away back on the shelf just be thinking on it real hard. I can scrub the upstairs bathroom from the couch downstairs just by concentrating a bit. Why, I can lift that glass right off the counter and put it into the dishwasher with my mind!

Yeah, as the books strewn all over my floor, the shower door covered with water spots, and the dishes hiding my kitchen countertops can bear witness to, I have no such powers. But it’s still fun to imagine I do, and that’s what makes this book so cool. I’m a grown woman (well, almost) projecting myself into a five-year-old’s world thanks to one of the world’s greatest storytellers. So if you haven’t already, go read the darn book. Or, if you’re too mature to read a kids’ book, go buy it and give it to some kid who isn’t so old and crusty that they can’t enjoy a good story.

Baker Towers

Well, here we go. A new year, a new snark-fest. I’ll try not to disappoint.

Except, disappoint I will, because… well… I got nothin. I mean, really, nothin. This book was okay. There wasn’t much to it. It was sort of interesting, sort of boring, and sort of…long.

I don’t actually know exactly how long it was. It was a couple weeks worth of walks with the dog, as I was listening to it on my iPod instead of reading it on the page. Usually I find listening to books quite stimulating while I’m walking. Often I’ll walk an extra round around the block just because I want to know what’s going to happen next. But this time… meh…

I’m not going to deny it was an okay story. The book documented a couple generations of lives in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania. The theme was predictable- tiny town, no place to work but the mines, everybody tries to get out, nobody really makes it, the mine (the heart of the town, blah, blah, blah) ends up keeping everybody together, but not in ways that are really all that positive. We’ve read this story a million times before, right? Right. Nothing new here.

So here’s the thing that I can’t figure out about authors. They write these long epic tales about these horrible little towns that everybody in their right mind would try to escape because they’re, well, horrible. So authors, my question is: if everybody in your books is trying to leave your rotten little town, what makes you think WE want to go there? Why do we really want to spend days, weeks, whatever, investing our time in all these people that just waste away? October Sky, I get. Good job, Homer, you made your mark. But this- hey, dad dropped dead of black lung and older son skipped out and married a leech and younger son gave up altogether and daughters alternately had to take care of the family remnants, went crazy, and became a nurse that took care of more old men dropping dead of black lung. Grandson became a Hell’s Angel and then married dad’s long-lost love’s daughter, and oh, did I forget to mention mom went blind because she ate too much sugar? I mean… it’s just sort of depressing.

So why did I read it? Well…nothing better to do. Authors may be too lazy to write an original book, but I’m too lazy to go to the library and try to fish out one.