Sunday Salon--British reading and Spring!

It's officially spring now, according to the calendar, but the season arrived here in Los Angeles about a month ago. My backyard wisteria is insane, and I'm enjoying all sorts of blooming around the neighborhood--tulip magnolias, lilac vines, cherry and plum blossoms.

I've managed to do a little bit of reading this weekend, moved the bookmarks forward in two different books. First off, I started Gervase Phinn's memoir of his career as a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales, called The Other Side of the Dale. The cover copy calls Phinn "the James Herriott of schools." I read and loved James Herriott's books about being a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales when I was a kid, so this sounded like a good bet. And while the stories don't have the drama of Herriott's, the writing does have a gentle wit that I'm enjoying.

I also (finally) started Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith, set in Victorian England. It's been sitting on my shelf for quite some time, and I know it's one of those books so many have recommended to me. So far it's really compelling, drawing me into the story of a Victorian con game, and promising some interesting twists and turns in the future.

YA for A

I've always felt that the best young adult fiction is worth reading again and again, no matter what age you are. The Los Angeles Times recently published an article about how adults are reading more and more young adult fiction, and that young adult fiction sales are up 30.7%, in an otherwise sluggish book market.

It doesn't surprise me a bit, considering the obvious success of crossover hits like the Twilight
and Harry Potter series, and the perennial appeal of books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond

After the LA Times article came out, cultural website Flavorwire published its list of top 10 Young Adult novels, and I liked the list--it has a few of my favorites on it, including The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, as well as two of my husband's favorites, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, which was also a sweet independent movie. Also on their list are a couple of books I've been wanting to read for quite some time, The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin, and The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.

The list didn't include some YA books I've heard a lot about lately, The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins, What I Saw And How I Lied, by Judy Blundell, and Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief series.

And then there are those books out there, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, and Black Swan Green: A Novel, by David Mitchell, that have young adult protagonists but aren't necessarily categorized in young adult fiction...

What are your favorite Young Adult titles? Do you feel they have crossover appeal? If so, why?

Booking Through Thursday--Illustrious

Today's Booking Through Thursday question is:

How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches?

I don't have a strong opinion about illustrations in my books. I guess it really depends on the book.

As a child, I loved the illustrations in my copies of Alice in Wonderland (the originals by Sir John Tenniel), and in The Borrowers (illustrations done by Beth and Joe Krush), because they were really beautiful drawings, and I looked forward to coming across them while reading. It was like getting a wonderful little surprise every few pages. So I remember the magic of illustrations very well.

I just finished Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids, about her life in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe, which had photos sprinkled throughout. It reminded me of those reading experiences I had had as a child, enchanted by the illustrations I would come across. That's because the pictures were so great in this book--allowing a glimpse into a life, and perfectly illustrating the text. They also felt necessary, because they were often mentioned in the text, and were part of the story itself.

But generally speaking, I don't want or need illustrations for a novel. The language paints enough of a picture for me.

Some British reading, and a whiff of Spring

I wish I could post smells on this blog, to give you all a whiff of the jasmine that is blooming in my back yard. It almost overwhelms me when I walk out onto my back deck. I know my friends on the east coast could use a little of the beginnings of spring we are experiencing here in Los Angeles...

I won't blame the spring-like blooming (though it could be my allergies...), but for some reason I haven't been in the mood to read anything heavy lately. I've been testing the heft of Wolf Hall before I dive in, and I think it might need a little leavening, so I used up the last of my holiday gift cards to buy a couple of other English books, but in a lighter vein.

The lovely Litlove recently posted about Gervase Phinn's The Other Side of the Dale, and it sounded interesting to me, because I almost always like stories about British country or village life, and because Litlove said it was a "delightful and soothing sort of book", soothing being something I look for when I'm not in the mood for heavy. Phinn was a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales, so he's called (on the front cover) "the James Herriott of schools"--and since I have such fond memories of reading James Herriott's books when I was a child, this sounds like it's right up my alley.

Another lovely blogger, The Indextrious Reader, posted about an English novel called Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942, by Joyce Dennys, a re-issue done by the Bloomsbury Group, which sounded intriguing. It wasn't available until later in the month, so I picked out another of their reissues--one with a whimsical title: The Brontes Went to Woolworths, by Rachel Ferguson. It's about three sisters growing up in London in the 1930s, and that's about all I know about it, except that I like the purple cover, so I'll let you know if I actually like the book or not.

There are several other British books I've been meaning to get to, like Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked, Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. More for the list!

One more photo for you, of the view from our front balcony, at sunrise:

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann--a review

It is August, 1974, in New York City, and daredevil wirewalker Philippe Petit makes an amazing, and illegal, walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This event is the cornerstone of Colum McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin, the strange and wonderful event that connects the story's characters. But the story is not about Petit at all, it is about the lives of a seemingly disparate group of New Yorkers whose brief contact with his wire-walk sets off a chain of events that changes or touches them all.

An Irish monk, John Corrigan, lives in the Bronx and concentrates his saintly impulses on improving the lives of hookers and nursing home patients. Despite his vow of chastity, he falls in love with a Guatemalan nurse.

Judge Solomon Soderberg sees Petit's wire-walk and wants him prosecuted in his courtroom. In order to hurry to Petit's case, he gives short shrift to the case of two prostitutes, friends of John Corrigan's, mother Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn. Soderberg lets Jazzlyn off but sends Tillie to jail. As Corrigan drives Jazzlyn back to the Bronx, they get in a terrible car accident, their van clipped by a car driven by a wannabe artist, Blaine. Blaine's wife Lara is in the car, too. Lara feels terribly guilty, and later seeks out Corrigan's brother Ciaran to make amends.

Other characters include Judge Soderberg's wife Claire, who mourns their son, killed in Viet Nam. And in Claire's grief group is Gloria, an African-American woman who also mourns her two sons, and who lives in the same building in the Bronx where Corrigan lived.
I won't go further into the plot, except to say that McCann elegantly weaves together the stories of his characters and has the mysterious forces of fate bring them together to experience both grief and redemption.

I was charmed at the outset by McCann's lyrical writing style in the very first few pages of the story--a beautiful description of the setting of Petit's wire-walk. Beautiful writing goes a long way with me, but this book has more. It has an elegant plot, woven together out of the stories of several characters. Some of the characters interested me more than others, but I found most of them engaging, and was always drawn in by putting the puzzle pieces of their relationships together.

I love the novel's atmosphere, and the vibrant images McCann conjures. I also enjoyed exploring the novel's themes of fate and whether or not things happen for a reason, and guilt and redemption. New York City is a character itself, and McCann captures its mysteries, both the pleasure and the pain of the city, very well. Maybe because this novel was written after 9/11, but set before it, there was something eerie about thinking of the Twin Towers as the center of this amazing but benign event that topples the dominos of the characters' lives, and rearranges them so completely.

My book group really enjoyed this novel, too. I'll look out for more of McCann's work.

To read next, and BTT snuck up on me--Encouragement

For our next read, my book group chose the book I was coveting last week--Just Kids, by Patti Smith. It's the memoir of her romance and lifelong friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and how they spurred each other to become artists. I had to laugh--a bunch of my book groupers had the same idea I did, so I didn't have to persuade anyone--they even brought the New York Times Book Review from that week, which featured Just Kids.

I also have a copy of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, on my nightstand. It's pretty hefty (um, 560 pages), and it's historical, but I think I'm up for the challenge. It's about Henry VIII, through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, his close advisor. I know it mixes fiction with fact, but I'm looking forward to learning more about this era of history by diving into this novel.

Is it really Thursday already? I don't know where the time goes. My book group friend told me her husband woke her in the middle of the night recently, to say he'd solved all their problems--he was just going to add another hour to the day between 3 and 4 in the morning. Sounds good to me! Here's this week's Booking Through Thursday question:

Suggested by Barbara H:

How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader?

In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.”

This is a tough question. Right now, I have two kids who don't read enough for my liking (and one who doesn't read yet!). My 13-year-old and his younger brother (10) both like to read, but both feel like they don't have enough time to read for pleasure, because they have reading to do for school. I don't get it, because when I was a kid, I was always trying to sneak more reading in.

I think my eldest really likes reading, but is seduced by social networking, video games, and other stuff that we didn't even have when I was a kid. My younger one doesn't like reading quite as much as his brother did at this age, but he does love a good story, and really gets into the books they read at school. For his "free reading" (reading he has to do for school, but he gets to pick the book), he most recently finished Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, which his older brother also loved, and he just had to read the last page aloud to me, because it had a surprise ending--gotta love that. But I wish he would pick up a book on his own more often. I'm not sure how to encourage it, other than getting more books for them from the library, and trying to provide them with some down time when they can read. I limit the "screen time" anyway, so that helps create time for reading. But I don't like to push reading too hard, for fear that they will just resist.

If anyone has any good tips to get kids to read more, I'm all ears.

Booking Through Thursday--Winter Reading

Today's Booking Through Thursday question is:

The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

Interesting--winter reading as distinguished from summer reading? I equate the phrase "summer reading" with vacation reading--easy-to-tote, easy-to-concentrate on beach reads. But my actual summer reading is more or less the same as my reading the rest of the year.

I can see how winter reading, defined here as the reading you want to do when it's cold outside and you're curled up with a book someplace warm, would be about comfort. I just posted about my comfort reads when I have a short attention span, like when I'm sick--cookbooks!

But on a typical cold, winter day (which we've been having more than usual this winter--cold and rainy days interspersed with our normal 70-degree winter wonders), I might curl up with something comforting, or something that really transports me to another time and place.

I have two favorite comfort reads, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, both by Jane Austen. I'd curl up with either, any day, blustery or otherwise.

I just finished Sally Gunning's historical novel Bound, which took me to colonial Cape Cod, and gave me a thorough yet entertaining picture of the life of an indentured servant then and there.

And I'm almost through Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which transported me to 1974 New York. This book, with it's poetic language and wonderful descriptions, is an immersive experience, and definitely worth curling up with.

But lately I have had so little time for reading, that any time with any book is an absolute pleasure.

Do you have any favorite books for a wintery day?