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Books from the Summer Bucket:Theories of Relativity

Theories of Relativity by Barbara Haworth-Attard is another of the young adult books I took home from my classroom for the summer.

I have a lot of students pick up books, read a few pages, sometimes a few chapters, get bored and try another book. None of them get bored with this one. It’s about a kid named Dylan who lives on the street in a big northern city. The author is Canadian so I suspect it’s a Canadian city, although I kept imagining Cleveland. Never been there, so I don’t know why, but there it is.

Wherever it is, life is tough. Dylan is a smart kid – he likes to read about Einstein – and he doesn’t want to be on the street. Everyone from pimps to pushers wants to recruit him, and they offer him some deals, but Dylan wants to maintain his independence and his freedom, things tantamount to suicide in his world. Some adults want to help him, but his pride interferes. He’s a kid with no hope and no chance.

The characters are lively and believable and the situations that Dylan finds himself in are downright disconcerting. Theories of Relativity falls into a category of books that I call “problem books” in that they attempt to educate young readers about very real problems for which there are no easy solutions. Perhaps reading this might give some kids hope and others compassion. Or, perhaps, a few hours of being entertained by a solid modern story. I guess it’s win-win.

Books from the Summer Bucket: Number the Stars

I have a whole set of Lois Lowry’s young adult novel Number the Stars in my classroom, which is why it’s one of the books I brought home for my summer reading.

The story takes place in Denmark in 1943. Word gets out that the Nazis will be relocating all of Denmark’s Jews, and ten-year-old Annemarie Johnsen and her family take in Annemarie’s best friend and neighbor, Ellen, who is a Jew.

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the Danes helped nearly all of Denmark’s Jews escape to Sweden and Number the Stars is a fictional version of that larger story centered around one child on whom many people’s lives come to depend.

The best thing about the book is the way Lowry evokes place. I have never been to Denmark, but Lowry’s descriptions of the small fishing village across the water from Sweden became as vivid as my own memories.

I also get hung up on weird details such as the apparently true ruse the fishermen used to fool the Nazi dogs so they wouldn’t smell the human cargo. A powder made of dried blood and cocaine would be sprinkled on something the dogs would smell. The blood would attract the dogs, and the cocaine would temporarily destroy their sense of smell. I’m not sure what it says about me that that detail is what sticks out from a moving and well-written book about human courage, but there it is.

Since I already have a class set, I’ll probably use this one next year with my younger students. My high schoolers will stick with Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Books from the Summer Bucket: Rumble Fish

I’ve never read The Outsiders (but it is in the Summer Bucket) so Rumble Fish is my first SE Hinton novel. It’s one of the many in my classroom and it’s relatively popular among the kids, but it was recommended to me by one of the staff who read it as a kid growing up in the Bay Area. Turns out everyone at my school who grew up there in the seventies had to read it.

It’s about a junior high kid named Rusty-James, the toughest kid on a tough street, who loves to fight and wants to be in a gang like his older brother, The Motorcycle Boy, once was.

Rusty-James narrates, and he tells of a few days in which he gets in a knife fight and the Motorcycle Boy comes back to town. Rusty-James idolizes the Motorcycle Boy, an idealized older kid who has it all from street smarts to book smarts with good looks and a rep for being a seriously dangerous dude. The Motorcyle Boy can do anything with his life, but he doesn’t want to do anything. Naturally, Rusty-James only sees the Motorcycle Boy’s rep and wants to be just like him.

SE Hinton does a nice job evoking a rundown urban wasteland full of kids going nowhere fast whose only hope seems to be in maintaining a tough enough rep to stay alive. It’s a pretty bleak look at the all-too-real problem of kids growing up without dreams or any kind of vision of what life could be like, and in Rusty-James’s idealized view of the Motorcycle Boy we see the peril of choosing the wrong heroes.

This is one I’ll probably consider having my kids read next year. It has a very nice (perhaps I should say “nicely written” since it’s not really very ‘nice’) ending, which I won’t spoil, and besides it’s a really good character piece.

I think my students will be able to relate to this as well since so many of them are on the same dark road to nowhere as Rusty-James. Who knows maybe one or two will see in Rusty-James’s story a life they might themselves avoid.

Books from the Summer Bucket: Crank

If there is one book that all my students want to read or reread it’s Ellen Hopkins’s Crank.

It is 537 pages of scattered free verse poetry from the point of view of Kristina, a teenage crank addict (that’s methamphetamine to those of us who still have all our teeth). Kristina starts out as the perfect kid with a lot going for her. Then she goes to visit her ex-junkie dad who isn’t as ex- as they thought and she meets a boy who introdues her to crank, aka ‘the monster.’

Naturally, 500 pages of deadly downward spiral ensue. Kristina begins to change and starts calling herself Bree in a sort of Sméagol vs Gollum battle for her soul.

It’s fairly straightforward good-girl-in-trouble and speed-kills fare, but the writing is vivid and lively. Hopkins’s poetry is often spaced and arranged in ways that allow certain pieces to be read two different ways, which nicely reflects the Kristina/Bree split. For example, “Flirtin’ with the Monster”:

Life was good
before I
met
the monster

After,
Life
was great

At
least
for a little while.

I found myself interested in these kinds of splits that occured occasionally, nicely reminding us that Kristina was still in there somewhere or that Bree was waiting right around the corner.

The book doesn’t pull many punches and even manages to drop a few f-bombs, unusual in young adult fiction, but then within the context of the subject matter highly appropriate.

Considering that many of my students have lived through and are living through similar circumstances and quite a few of them have had personal encounters with ‘the monster,’ I give the book props for ringing true, and it should. It’s based on Hopkins’s own experiences with her daughter.

Books from the Summer Bucket: Murder on the Orient Express

Back in February, I had the opportunity to purchase a ton of books for my classroom. Well, okay, not a ton, but it did take two Old Navy shopping carts to get out of Barnes & Noble and I’m not just talking any old navy shopping carts, I’m talking the kind that could withstand a barrage of cannon.

I got a lot of books is all I’m saying.

I tried to pick ones that my kids would want to read so I got an eclectic mix of young adult, genre, poetry, and classics many of which I had never read, especially the YA and some of the genre stuff. The books were a hit and silent reading days suddenly became quite popular. Often the kids would want to talk about what they read, but I was too often clueless and so this summer I took home a large bucket full of the books that were especially popular.

My wife and I are blazing through that bucket and finding the joys of young adult fiction. My wife was even able to brag that she read five books on Saturday. Five whole books, I swear to God, five books. Since I’m also writing a book, I’m moving a bit slower on the reading, but I did just finish my first book from the Summer Bucket: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

I’ve never read any other of Christie’s novels (or any detective novel for that matter other than Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel), but it was fun. It’s about Hercule Poirot, apparently Chritie’s recurring detective who finds himself snowbound on the Orient Express with a murder to solve. It’s a clever story with a surprising ending. It’s an easy quick read also, which is why, I think, several of the kids found it so appealing.

I’ll probably read a few more Agatha Christie novels (including Evil Under the Sun, which is on my Lost list) simply to see if this was typical or a particularly unique work. Either way, Murder on the Orient Express had me turning the pages and looking forward to spending a little time each day on that fabled luxury train of the mid-30’s, trying and failing to stay one step ahead on Monsieur Poirot.

Unfinished Tales

There’s something deliciously perverse about reading JRR Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Perhaps it’s the secret glimpses into a writer’s process, or maybe it’s because I now know more about the royalty of Númenor than I do about the royalty of England (although the relevance is about the same). Either way, it’s an odd read.

There are really only three unfinished tales here: “Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” “Narn I Hîn Húrin,” and “Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife.” All three stories take place thousands of years prior to Lord of the Rings, and all three are imminently enjoyable despite their unfinished state. Of course, “Narn I Hîn Húrin” aka The Children of Húrin (see my post on The Children of Húrin) was recently published as a stand alone novel after the discovery of the rest of the manuscript.

Most of the rest of the book reads more like history than fiction, and there are two kinds of history at work here. The first is the history of Númenor and Middle-earth, and the second is a history of Tolkiens’s process. Regarding the former, it’s fascinating to learn more about Middle-earth even if it is in essays about the Istari (wizards), palantíri (seeing stones), the founding of Rohan, and the geography of Númenor (the Atlantis-like island from whose ancient kings Aragorn is descended). It’s all interesting stuff for those of us who can’t get enough of Middle-earth.

For fans of Tolkien’s better known works, there are some interesting pieces here. “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields” tells how Isildur lost the One Ring (this tale was part of the prelude to Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring) as well as two sections narrated by Gandalf. In “The Quest of Erebor,” Gandalf explains his reasoning behind sending Bilbo on the journey with the Dwarves recounted in The Hobbit. “The Hunt for the Ring” has Gandalf telling of what transpired between Aragorn, Gollum, Gandalf and Saruman in the years between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring.

Equally interesting are editor and compiler Christopher Tolkien’s notes and commentary on the texts. It is here that we see the depth of JRR Tolkien’s creation. Here we learn that everything in Middle-earth has a history. Every word in the languages, the names of all the rivers and mountains. It wasn’t enough for Tolkien to just stick some syllables together to make up a word for something or slap a name on his map. All those places, all those words the characters speak, all their names had to mean something. They all have linguistic history and lore associated with them, and Tolkien spent much time working all of that out.

I don’t know if he intended for all of these notes and histories, essays, and explanations to be published, but they are fascinating nonetheless and they provide insight into the discovery of – for it does seem as if Tolkien was discovering rather than inventing – the most fully realized imaginary world ever created.

Inititially, I expected to enjoy the Lord of the Rings related sections the most, but it was the older tales that really hooked me. Perhaps beacuse they were new stories that added yet more depth to a world I have already come to know and love.

Through the Looking Glass – The Lost Season Three Finale: Theories & The Lost Books

Note: If you haven’t yet seen the Season 3 finale of Lost (“Through the Looking Glass”) you might not want to read this – major spoilers…

Season 3 of Lost ended with last night’s “Through the Looking Glass” and as the producers promised, it changed everything. As predicted, it left viewers wondering how the show can continue for its remaining three seasons considering that the castaways appear to have gotten off the island.

I’ve been saying for about a year (ever since I started studying the Lost books) that we were dealing with some kind of alternate or parallel timestream. Books like A Wrinkle in Time, Alice in Wonderland, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, and The Third Policeman all point that way. Some of this season’s books – A Brief History of Time, On Writing, and Through the Looking Glass (all links go to my posts on the books) – only reinforced that notion. And that’s just the books; I’m not even going near all the other alternate time references.

After “Through the Looking Glass,” I’m convinced that Lost is a time travel show. I started to see it about half way through last night’s episode when I began to suspect that the flashback wasn’t what it appeared to be. It was neither a flashback nor a flash-forward. In fact, the scenes on the island were the flashbacks and the stuff with Jack as a bearded drug-addled nut were the “present.” Surely Jack will start reading some Philip K Dick in Season 4.

The problem for Jack is that somehow he seems to understand that he didn’t come back to the same world he left. He is in a world where Christian Shepard is still alive (“Go up and get my dad, if I’m more drunk than him you can fire me” or something like that) and Kate is driving a nice car, apparently not a fugitive. It’s the world that Naomi and her rescue ship came from looking for Desmond. The world in which Oceanic 815 was found along with all the dead bodies.

Here’s how. The island exists between timestreams or parallel dimensions/universes (“snow globe, brotha”). The only way on or off the island is to go through the looking glass station (or possibly also along a very precise set of coordinates which would explain the Dharma food drops and Michael and Walt’s escape last season).

We know this because Charlie talked to Penny Widmore in the looking glass station – the link to the original timestream – and Penny had never heard of Naomi. I actually believe Ben is telling the truth when he says that Naomi isn’t who they think she is. Ben knows she didn’t come through the looking glass station and therefore can’t be from the universe/dimension/timestream that the survivors came from before being sucked onto the island when Desmond let the counter run down in the Swan Hatch as revealed at the end of Season 2.

Somehow Future Jack knows this. This is why he so desperately wants to get back to the island. He knows that he didn’t return to the world he left and his life is a shambles – or more of a shambles than it was – as a result. The only survivors whose stories we can glimpse at this point are his and Kate’s, and Kate seems to have it better than when she left Australia in handcuffs bound for the US under the watchful eye of that federal marshal who died in Season 1. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, this new timestream must look pretty good to Kate. I wonder if we won’t see Ben washing her fancy new car for her next season.

So who was in that coffin? Whose death would have such a terrible impact on Jack that he would lose all hope and come to the verge of suicide? I say it was Ben.

Ben left the island because he couldn’t stay. Everything blew up in his face (or rather the faces of The Others sent to steal the pregnant women) and with Locke still alive, The Others would know that Locke can communicate with Jacob now. They would also probably be pretty annoyed about the fact that Ben’s plans wound up killing so many of The Others. Ben’s only hope would be to leave the island and take his chances in the ‘real’ world. Probably by pretending to be John Locke, who probably doesn’t need that name anymore now that he can be the Wizard of O(ther)z.

Once Jack realizes the he has not returned to the world he left, I think Jack would understand that Ben was right about leaving and he has probably come to regard Ben as his only hope in getting back to the island so that they can escape correctly – back through the looking glass – and into their own timestream.

With Ben’s death – unmourned by the other survivors – Jack is on his own. So where does Lost go from here? Jack’s still lost, but not on an island. He’s a castaway in time and in order to save himself, he needs to get back to the island. But first, he’ll need to figure out a better plan than riding around in planes getting drunk and hoping they’ll crash. Fixing time itself seems the perfect thing for the man who always needs something to fix. There are certainly three seasons worth of stories there. At least.

I suspect that much of Season 4 will take place off the island, and we’ll get to see our survivors trying to decide if they like their new lives or their old ones better. We’ll see Jack trying to find information about Dharma, Widmore and Hanso. We’ll also see who stayed on the island. I’m betting Locke, Rousseau, Carl, Danielle, Rose, and Bernard stayed.

There are still many mysteries to solve. Why hasn’t Alpert aged? What was Libby doing in the mental hospital (perhaps that’s where they put people who claim to have come from another dimension)? What is the smoke monster? What about the four-toed statue? Jacob? The temple?

This show isn’t over by a long shot, but it’s following in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica’s third season when the whole show took a radical change of course, if only for a while. The rest of Lost will be about some of the survivors getting back to the island. And perhaps, The Others trying to prevent that from happening. Or, maybe the returnees will team up with The Others to keep the outside world off the island.

This was a brilliant episode. In fact the last two months or so of Lost have been the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s depressing to think it won’t be on again until February 2008, but I still have some books to tide me over:

  • From Season 1, there’s The Mysterious Island
  • From Season 2, I still get to meet Our Mutual Friend and Island
  • From Season 3, I’ll be wading into The Moon Pool, The Fountainhead, Evil under the Sun and, of course, rereading Through the Looking Glass.

I’ll read these between now and February, but I’ll probably hold my posts until then and do a kind of lead-up to the season premiere.

Here’s the link to the index of my Lost book posts.

For more good analysis of “Through the Looking Glass”, and predictions about Lost‘s future, please see:

The Lost Book Club: On Writing

I saved Stephen King’s On Writing, which was referenced in the Lost episode “Every Man for Himself” for the end of the season. When school gets out, I’ll start plugging away more seriously on my next novel, and I figured that perhaps King might offer some inspiration if not a swift kick in the proverbial pants.

King begins with a series of snapshots of his childhood and young adulthood leading up to the publication of Carrie. This is the memoir section of the book wherein King relates the tales of his wonder years interspersed with commentary about how these things led him to becoming the writer he became. From there, he shares advice and wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of writing. Some of it useful, some of it entertaining.

The most vivid portion is the end. This is the project he was working on when he was hit by a van while walking along a Maine highway back in 1999. He was very nearly killed and spent months in and out of surgery and in rehab learning to walk again. The end of the book, fittingly titled “On Living,” describes how getting back into writing helped him through that event. It’s powerfully written and terrifying in the way that reality often is.

On the whole, I can’t say I learned much that I didn’t know about the craft – that section of the book is thin and frequently not much more than an arrow pointing to Strunk & White – but what I got was a wide open sense of anything being possible. That kick in the pants to get me going this summer when I will have the time (starting next week) to finish the next book. Indeed, King himself describes the book as a permission slip:

…you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.

King’s unabashed belief in the literal magic of writing is a sentiment that I share, and probably the one thing, that more than anything else keeps me banging out these words despite the fact that so few wind up reading them. It is still worthwhile and as much my work as the things that pay the bills.

The optimism and inspiration are the best parts of On Writing.

This magic is also where On Writing connects to Lost when King explains what writng is.

Telepathy, of course.

He explains that the writer sends his thoughts out across time and space to readers scattered around the world and existing in different times. King points out that he is writing in 1999, but that the book won’t be released until 2000 so all readers are at least a few years down the timestream from him. Here king gets at the permanence of writing and suggests the great dialogs that have gone on in print for thousands of years much like (I think) Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose who described libararies as great silent conversations.

To illustrate his point, King sets up a little thought experiment and this is where King’s telepathic powers manifest themselves on Lost island:

Look, here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot stub which it is constantly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.

He then argues that most readers of that paragraph will fixate on the ‘8’ on the rabbit’s back, and it’s this thought that creates the telepathy. It’s this image that the writer has projected into the reader’s mind. I agree; it’s what jumps out and creates the sense of mystery that will keep me wanting more. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the numbers, I want to know why it’s there.

I’m sure Sawyer did too.

In “Every Man for Himself” – an episode that also references Of Mice and Men (“Tell me about the rabbits, George”) much more explicitly than it does On Writing – Ben has Sawyer strapped to a table. He appears to have just come out of surgery. Ben shows him a rabbit in a cage and proceeds to give the cage the kind of shaking that kills babies. The rabbit dies. Ben tells Sawyer that the rabbit had a pacemaker just like the one he’s had implanted in Sawyer, which will explode if Sawyer’s heart rate goes too high as it might if he were to try to escape or sleep with Kate. It’s a clever scene, but what stands out is the blue ‘8’ stenciled on the rabbit’s back. Later, Ben tells Sawyer about the rabbits, or at least rabbit-8 when he confides that there were no pacemakers; instead, it was an elaborate con designed to break Sawyer’s will.

Referencing King’s thoughts about writing and telepathy appears at first to be a clever and subtle reminder of the apparent, though unexplained, role of telepathy on the show. More interesting, though, is the way it begins to lay the groundwork for seeing Lost as a show about time travel, which I think it is. I’m not sure we’ll see characters time traveling as in Back to the Future, but I think we will see (and have already seen) their consciences and thoughts projected through the timestream, which is really what King was talking about so I’m chalking On Writing up to being yet another literary hint about alternate or parallel or shifted timestreams on Lost.

There’s something else, too, aside from the fact that this bit of On Writing is another rabbitcentric literary reference joining Of Mice and Men, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Watership Down (all of which makes me wonder when Donnie Darko, a time travel film laden with rabbit symbolism will show up on Lost) and that’s The Stand.

I’ve never read The Stand, and it hasn’t shown up on Lost, but I do know that the show’s creators have said that it is an influence on the show. This is interesting because in On Writing, King devotes some time to describing the problems he had in completing that novel. He said there were too many characters, too many storylines. In the end the solution was to blow a bunch of them up.

Sound familiar? That would resolve many of the storylines and propel the other ones towards conclusion. As season 3 of Lost closes out in tonight’s “Through the Looking Glass” with the survivors hoarding dynamite and making plans to “blow the Others to hell,” I can’t but think that this sounds an awful lot like King’s recollection of how he moved The Stand to conclusion.

I suspect some storylines will end tonight and what remains will be the situation that propels Lost to its ultimate conclusion in 2010. Hell, I’m predicting mass doom.

Be sure to check out:

  • Pearls Before Swan for more thoughts about On Writing. (h/t as well since this is how I learned that rabbit-8 was referencing On Writing)
  • Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels also has a theory about the season finale: mass doom… or mass rescue?

Click here for my Lost Book Club index page.

Ain’t Nobody Doing No Influencing Here. No Ma’am.

This is amazing. It’s from an interview with writer Shiela Kohler (who?) about the apparently dying institution of print book reviews and the emergence of lit blogs via Critical Mass (h/t to Conversational Reading for the link):

Q. Does your work get reviewed/discussed much on literary blogs? If so, how do those reviews compare with print reviews of your books?

A.Occasionally someone may mention my books in a blog. I believe the dangers of this indiscriminate reporting on books is that people who have no knowledge of literature can air their views as though they were of value and may influence readers. Critics may not always be right, of course, but at least they have read and studied literature, the great books, and have some outside knowledge to refer to when critiquing our work.

Sometimes a writer’s own words and arrogance will turn me off their work faster than any bad review of their work in print or – perish the thought – on some dirty blog rising from the fever swamps (like so much poison gas) to taint the discourse of the learned and influence the unwashed masses with his irrelevant and dangerous opinions. Sheesh.

The Children of Húrin

Venturing deeper than The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings into JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth is to enter into one of the greatest literary achievements ever: a fully complete world with history, mythology, scholarship, languages and legend. It is utterly breathtaking to read the great tales of the first age in The Silmarillion – stories of ancient battles and great heroes that were thousands of years old when Lord of the Rings begins. Indeed it is this vast work of myth hiding underneath Lord of the Rings that creates the illusion of depth and history that makes Tolkien’s world feel so much richer than most other fantasy worlds.

The rabbit hole goes deeper for those inclined to read the verse versions of some of the tales in The Lays of Beleriand or the earliest imaginings in The Book of Lost Tales. I have those two, but haven’t yet gotten to them. I’m working on Unfinished Tales now, but it’s the most finished of those unfinished tales that has recently gotten me interested in going deeper than The Silmarillion with The Children of Húrin, until now known only as one of the unfinished “great tales.”

Apparently after many years of studying his father’s papers and unfinished and unpublished manuscripts, Christopher Tolkien has managed to put together a complete version of this great tale of the First Age without having to do any editorial invention or interventions save for the occasional transition.

The Children of Húrin takes place in the First Age of Middle-earth, nearly 6500 years before Lord of the Rings and recounts the tragedy of the great warrior Húrin, who after being defeated in battle by the Dark Lord Morgoth is forced to watch as his children- primarily his son, Túrin Turambar – live their lives and battle against the curse of Morgoth that has been placed upon them.

Tolkien’s Túrin, son of a great man, raised by Elves and filled with both wrath and pity, reminds me of a darker version of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. Unlike Aragorn, though, Túrin’s life is cursed. He leaves the Elves after a misunderstanding leads to violence and lives among outlaws where his adventures bring him heartbreak in increasing measure until he must finally face the dragon Glaurung whose torments have fallen heavily on Túrin.

The cool thing about The Children of Húrin is its accessibility. It’s intended as much for the hard core fan who already knows the story (from its peicemeal presentations in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Lays of Beleriand and The Book of Lost Tales) as for the casual reader who has read Lord of the Rings but nothing else of Tolkien’s work. Despite the fact that the story has been around for decades and that many people are already familiar with the saga of Túrin Turambar, it is nice to have the work presented as a consistent whole and makes a wonderful addition to the Tolkien canon.

As interesting as the story is, I found myself equally enjoying the appendices in which Christopher Tolkien explains the process of putting the story together as well as how this completed version differs from the other unfinished versions.

The book itself is a handsome hardback with black-and-white illustrations by Alan Lee with occasionaly full-page glossy color paintings of key scenes. Reading it made me wish more books were so beautifully presented, but then Tolkien books are special.