Audio books

I've decided I should use my commuting time wisely, so I've taken up listening to audio books. I'm a visual person and much prefer reading to listening, but I'm getting used to the audio.

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Short Stories. This was a collection of pretty typical Mark Twain stories. Some better than others, but on the whole, enjoyable.

The Uncommon Reader. This is a novella by Alan Bennett, and he was also the reader. This is a story about the Queen of England, late in life, discovering a love of reading and writing. One morning, she sees the mobile library parked outside the palace kitchens and borrows a book. It's a wonderful story of the transformative power of reading. I wasn't expecting the ending. It was an excellent book.

The Neverending Story. I can't count this toward my 50 books, because I've read it at least seven times. It was written by Michael Ende and translated by Ralph Manheim, and it's my favorite book. Since it recently came out on Audible, I decided I should listen to it. The reader was Gerard Doyle. He did a pretty good job, but there were a few names I would have pronounced differently. This is the story of fat, unpopular Bastian who steals a book and becomes entangled in a story in which he must save the world of Fantastica and the human world. Along the way he must learn how to love. If you ever decide to read or listen to it, you'll probably enjoy the story. If you decide to read it again, you find a whole symbolic layer. I love it.

The National Book Festival

I went to the National Book Festival on Saturday. It is an annual event put on by the Library of Congress and held on the National Mall. I look forward to it and always try to make time to attend. Authors from various genres give lectures, read from their latest books and sign readers' copies. 

I went to listen to Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum discuss the book they recently wrote together. I liked it so much that I braved the book sale tent to purchase a copy. I got it signed. They were both really nice guys.

Michael Mandelbaum & Thomas Friedman sign books

The lines for the book signings

The Capitol and festival pavilions

 I wanted to make sure I got to hear James Dashner speak. He was interesting and funny and nice to the kids. While I was listening to him, a friend I hadn't seen in months just happened to sit down next to me. Funny.

 James Dashner was also very nice when he signed my books. A very cool guy and an excellent story teller.

James Dashner signs books

 After getting my books signed. I made my way back to the Poetry and Prose pavilion to see if I could catch any of Philip Levine's talk. He is the Poet Laureate of the United States. I only caught the tail-end, but I liked what I heard. He said that when he writes poetry he likes to "make the words happy to be together."

Philip Levine

 I had a little extra time, so I looked through the schedule and author bios to see if anyone I might be interested in was presenting. I stopped in to see Maggie Stiefvater. She writes teen books and also plays seven musical instruments, speaks at least one foreign language, was a professional portrait painter, etc. I suck compared to her! She was also pretty funny. The kids were really excited about her. Someone asked her about writer's block. She said that she thinks writer's block is how her subconscious lets her know she's taken a wrong turn. Interesting. I might have to go find some of her books to read on my vacation.

Maggie Stiefvater

 I think everybody my age grew up reading Jerry Spinelli. He's great. Judging by the crowd in the tent, I'm not the only person who thinks so.

Jerry Spinelli

I decided against waiting in what was, no doubt, going to be a very long line to get my book signed by Jerry Spinelli. I decided to make my way back to the Poetry and Prose pavilion. I heard Margot Livesey speak about her new book which is a re-imagining of Jane Eyre. Sounded interesting, and I enjoyed her talk. She said that she has two computers: one for writing fiction and one for everything else. That seems like a good idea for a writer's brain. When she sits down at her fiction computer, her brain knows what it's supposed to do.

Margot Livesey

It was an excellent festival. If you ask anyone else they're experience, it will be totally different than mine. Awesome. It's great to see so many people excited about books and reading.

Crowds, pavilions, and the Washington Monument

A magic library card

Newbery Medal winner Jerry Spinelli wrote The Library Card as a challenge. He was to write several stories that had nothing in common but an enchanted library card. The result is a magic blue library card that travels through and changes the lives of Mongoose, Brenda, Sonseray, and April Mendez. These are stories that show the positive power and influence books, libraries and the people who love them can have on lives. The stories don't show us how these four kids' lives turned out, only the road down which the library card led them. A couple of the stories are sad, but all beautiful portraits of kids and their problems. Spinelli has a lot of love and empathy for his subjects. The novel has an After Words section at the end which included an interview with the author. There is also "The Book That Changed My Life" in which other authors write about books they love that influenced them. That was my favorite part of the book.

A Wrinkle in Time

For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of reading Madeleine L'Engle's young adult novel, A Wrinkle in Time, this year would be a great time to remedy that problem. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the book's publication. Wrinkle is one of my favorite books, and L'Engle one of my favorite authors. Here is an interesting column that might inspire you to meet Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin and all the other people you'll cheer for in the novel.

WICKED is good

I just finished reading The Maze Runner by James Dashner. By the end of the book, I wasn't sure that WICKED was good at all, but fortunately, there are two more books in the trilogy and this year there will also be a prequel, so I'll have multiple opportunities to find out.

The book begins when a teenager named Thomas, that's all he knows about himself, wakes to find himself trapped in a maze with dozens of other boys. The boys have been trying to escape the maze for two years with no luck when Thomas and a comatose girl arrive and they all learn this is the beginning of the end. They need to escape the maze or die.

This is a young adult novel, and I found it very enjoyable. The pacing and tension were good and the characters well developed, especially for a bunch of characters who had no memories of their lives before the maze.

The author is a fan of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and this book is similar in that a group of adults have decided to test a group of children to see if they are suitable for some unknown, but very dangerous, purpose. A theme I think will be explored in the remaining books is whether the end justifies the means. The Creators, who sent the boys to the maze and have done horrible things to them, seem to think (or at least say) that they are doing this for the good of the world. I don't generally think that the end justifies the means, so I'll be interested to see where this goes.

It's well worth the read. You can learn more about James Dashner and his books at: http://www.jamesdashner.com/.

Adventures, Fashion, Mystery, and Shame

Watched:

The Peacemaker – This is an older movie about terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons, with Nicole Kidman and George Clooney chasing them. Lots of cliché action scenes, you know, the car exploding in the background as they run away (jump!), the inevitable fist fight with the bad guy at the edge of a cliff, and of course, attempting to disarm the bomb while the time runs down. I’m married to someone who studies and works with issues of weapons of mass distruction, so when he finds another movie about nukes, we generally watch it. I didn’t love the movie, but it wasn’t terrible, and other than the F word several times, there wasn’t anything inappropriate.

Bill Cunningham New York – This is a nice documentary about Bill Cunningham, a fashion photographer for the “On the Street” column of the New York Times. I’ve seen people recommend this, people who are into clothes, and I figured that I would not watch it because I figured it would make me depressed about my whole sense of style and fashion, but I had a cold this week and while resting and watching endless TV, this came up on my Netflix, so I watched it, and it had quite the opposite effect on me. The thing about Bill Cunningham is that he seems very authentic, true to himself, and very respectful to people of all walks of life, and he would never make fun of anyone for what they were wearing, he just wanted to document it all. It was overall enjoyable, and not depressing. In fact, it made me feel even less like being a slave to fashion than I already do, but in a happy way, not in a rebellious, angry at the industry way, just like: well, I can wear whatever I want and if someone is judging me for it, it’s their problem, and I’m fine even if Bill Cunningham wouldn’t take my picture.

Read:

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing) – Pretty amazing story about an attempted Antarctic expedition, Shackleton and his crew were going to do the first transcontinental exploration. This is right around WWI, so they have no particularly advanced technological gear for dealing with the extreme conditions they would encounter. They didn’t make it across the continent, they didn’t even make a landing on Antarctica, but they all survived, sometimes because of luck, sometimes because of skill, sometimes because of sheer determination. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand when the author talks about navigation and maneuvering through the sea, because I’ve never sailed on a ship and I don’t know anything about these things, but that doesn't detract from it, and it was a riveting story.

How to Be a Pirate (Cressida Cowell) – The second book from the "How to Train Your Dragon" series. Hiccup has a grand adventure looking for pirate treasure, he's learning bit by bit how to be a hero, because it doesn't come easy for him. Another fun, quick read, and no techno-babble about how to actually sail and navigate a ship.

The Red House Mystery (AA Milne) – This was a fluffy, fun mystery from the author of Winnie the Pooh. It had lots of Sherlock Holmes references and a secret passage. I’m a sucker for secret passages. I actually listened to this book, I found a website where you can download free podcasts of books, they are mostly older and not under copyright. The ones I’ve listened to so far are all very well done. If there’s a book you want to read but you don’t want to spend money on it and the library doesn’t have it, and it’s a classic, I recommend looking on this website.

I Thought It Was Just Me: Women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame (Brene Brown) – This book is so, so good. Brene Brown researches shame and its effects on women and this book is all about how to build resilience to shame. Here is a good video of here explaining some of her research and it is a good introduction to the book. The book goes into more detail about how to identify when what you feel is shame instead of something else, like embarrassment or anger or guilt, and how empathy is the opposite of shame. She shares a lot of stories from the women that she interviewed, as well as some from her own life. Some of these stories hit me right in the gut, and some of them didn’t seem as applicable to me, but I could definitely understand why they were painful experiences. I would recommend this book to everyone that I know. If you have ever felt in some way that you are not enough, and it worries you because you think you're the only one (I’m raising my hand over here), read this book! I would be interested to see what my husband thinks of all of the topics in it, but he probably won’t read it because of the title, he seems to be under the impression that it is weird feminist stuff, and it isn’t.

How to Train Your Dragon and Real Steel

Book: How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell

Recommended to me by Annalisa, and I LOVE the movie. I liked the book a lot, and it was different than the movie, and since it is a kid’s book it’s an easy read. Looking forward to more of the series. Whenever I read a book about dragons, I compare it to my longtime favorite dragon book, Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. What do you think dragons would be like? Are they ferocious creatures that will destroy anything in their path? Are they nice, misunderstood creatures that just need to eat a lot? Are they intelligent? Can they talk to people? Another dragon book that I’ve liked is Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley, and I know there are others and I just can’t remember all of them. Do you like dragon stories? What are your favorites?

Movie: Real Steel

My husband figured I would watch this movie with him because it has Hugh Jackman and he might take off his shirt. So I did, and he did, and that was all good. As for the rest of the movie: Futuristic boxing robots, Human trafficking, Typical sports movie plot template, Special father-son and robot bonding. It was okay. 

Zero Day

This is a suspense/msytery/nuclear terrorist novel, written by David Baldacci. Our hero, John Puller, is an investigator for the Army's Criminal Investigative Division. He earned a chest full of medals for combat duty in various parts of the world before becoming more of a detective. But he can still handle himself in the field - dispatching bad guys right and left. This isn't great literature, of course, but it's well written and I love this kind of book. He is sent to West Virginia to investigate the murder of an Army officer and his family and becomes involved in a much more sinister plot involving nuclear materials. The rural town where the murder took place is in a region where coal is king and there is a lot of discussion about coal extraction methods and the environment. It's always seemed wrong to me that beautiful places like West Virginia have to be destroyed - along with the health of the people who live and work there - in order for the rest of us to have electricity, heat, etc. Should be a better way!

From Paris to Shangri La

MOVIES
Midnight in Paris. Wonderful movie! The opening is like a city tour of Paris and all the writers and artists that you meet in the midnight hours should give you a great list of classics and biographies to explore! It’s a love story, but not a “chick flick.” Highly recommended!

Cowboys and Aliens. We have a saying in our house when we’ve watched a not-especially-good movie but we didn’t turn it off and we didn’t really get bored: “Well, it was popcorn!” This was one of those flicks! Over-acted and unbelievable, but since it wasn’t rated very highly, not that much of a disappointment.

Bridesmaids. My hubby rented this because it kept showing up on the “best movies of the year” list. He didn’t make it very far, so it wasn’t even popcorn to him. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. It was a little hard to believe that our star thought she was ugly and that no man would want her and I did think that today’s women had gotten past the “have to have a partner…husband…whatever” to be happy. My favorite character was the overweight sister of the groom! I know she was over compensating for all the cruelty she must have experienced from her peers, but she was truly a beautiful person.

BOOKS
Just finished Clive Cussler’s, The Kingdom; A Fargo Adventure (written with Grant Blackwood). It’s a typical Cussler book, which is not a criticism in my opinion! The Fargoes are a husband and wife team who travel the world looking for ancient treasures. They don’t do it for themselves, of course, but to turn the artifacts over to the government of the country where they rightfully belong. Remi and Sam are extremely smart and athletic and have influential friends everywhere who can cut through red tape for them. That really helps when you are searching for an ancient “Golden Man” in Shangri La. The fun in these books is trying to discover what is true and what Cussler has made up. I used to have to take notes and then do research. Thanks to the iPhone, now I can just sit in my easy chair and find out if an island really exists and even find it on a map. Good adventure book with a little history included for free!