It’s the end of the world and I don’t feel fine

The latest apocalyptic novel I’ve worked through is called The Carbon Diaries 2015.  It takes place near London a mere six years from now.  Britain agrees to carbon rationing after devastating storms have ripped through their coastal areas.

The story is told in the diaries of a 16 year old girl named Laura Brown.  As her family deals with lost jobs, failing grades and limited options since they cannot use many of their household items now that they are allowed only so much energy per month, Laura finds an escape in her punk rock band and her friends.  The book is shocking because it seems utterly plausible and believable.  Unlike other recent novels, the moon hasn’t moved nor have the lowlands flooded, the people of earth are simply waking up to a new world where climate change is undeniable anymore.  The potential responses to climate change in this book seem like real options.  The Brown’s have to deal with no heat in winter, no water in the summer and a devastating storm surge in the climax.  But just as in Life As We Knew It, the stark tone throughout the book shifts towards the end to reach a positive ending.  The author clearly wants to scare us into some action but not depress us so much that the information washes over us.  Since the prime audience is teens, this is probably appropriate, but I can’t help but wonder what conclusion we would end with if this was aimed at an adult audience.  I’d guess Laura’s world might be even more desperate by the end.  Since there is a sequel in the works, the glimmers of hope at the end may be short lived.  The author, Lloyd, walks a fine line between storytelling and polemic, but she succeeds in giving her readers a realistic portrait of what one potential future might bring for us.  And Laura Brown is a compelling character to share the ride with.

Music video roundup for June

There are several new songs and bands that I’m interested in lately and some seem up to the challenge in their videos while others are phoning it in.

Mykonos by Fleet Foxes – this video has some great origami animation.  Not how I envisioned the song but it works.

Show Me What I’m Looking For by Carolina Liar is a good pop song that is nearly ruined by the lackluster effort of the lead singer in this pedestrian video.  The song has a strong energy but the singer clearly doesn’t want to be doing the video and he cannot match the energy of the song.  Disappointing.

I also found this tune by Empire of the Sun that is crazy and fun.  Not sure if I’ll get tired of it quickly but they sound like Tegan and Sara and look like no one else, though I detect a little Flight of the Conchords.

Great audiobook – The Graveyard Book

Not only does Neil Gaiman write well, but he reads well in the audiobook version of his Newbery winning Graveyard Book.  This book tells the story of Bod, short for nobody, a child rescued from certain death by ghosts in a graveyard after his parents were killed by the nefarious Manjack.  Each chapter depicts a new part of Bod’s journey as he grows from toddler to preteen to teen as the book progresses.  Barring the first and last chapters, each section of the book is a mostly stand-alone short story featuring a new adventure about Bod.  A thin narrative runs through each that becomes part of the larger story later.  Bod is a singular creation.  He’s a boy living in a graveyard, learning how to hide and not be seen by the outside world and being raised by ghosts.  He is rarely rattled by any of the frightening events in his life.  He takes everything in stride and learns as he goes.  He’s a great character to spend time with. 

The fact that the book won the Newbery is certainly an honor, but only older, more mature elementary age kids will fully appreciate what Gaiman is saying here about growing up and what it means to be independent.  There are plenty of scary and violent scenes that may also frighten younger kids.  This is primarily a book for middle school age kids accustomed to the more frightening aspects of the later Harry Potter books.

Song of Susannah aka Will I finish the Dark Tower series?

I’ve been reading the Dark Tower series for most of my adult life it seems.  I’ve spend the last four slowly working through the sixth book in the series, The Song of Susannah.  I would have given up on most books this troublesome, but I’m persevering because I want to finish the series.  The magic is gone though.  This book has been pure drudgery.   He has been moving the characters around to set them up for the endgame and I’ve lost the narrative thread.  To top it all off, he’s given hints that he was going to write himself into the story and I’m finally to the point where this has happened.  I don’t like it.  There, I’ve said it.  I think this is why I’ve struggled to get into this book, because I knew this point was coming.  Of course, now that I’m there, the pace seems to be quickening and the story is more engaging, but this device just rips me out of this story whenever I think about it.  King seems to be telling us that he knew where he was going at one point, but that the story got too unwieldy for him and that he even lost his outline.  I guess he needed to get this out of his system, particularly after his accident, but I liked the story he had going, I was invested in it, I wanted to see where it ended.  But adding Stephen King the character unravels the tapestry of the story he created.  I can’t imagine that this is a real place with real characters when he tells us with every line that he made it up.  On some levels, it’s an interesting excercise, but a good yarn it is not.  Maybe the narrative can recover and it won’t take me another four years to finish book seven, but I’m not hopeful.

Documentary of Annie Liebovitz shows photography as an art

Watched a great documentary on Annie Liebovitz that shows her development as an artist and how skilled she is at what she does.  I was awed by how theatrical her photo shoots have become.  I know she gets criticized for her work with celebrities but she takes the jobs she is given and turns them into something remarkable.  I’m not saying every idea works, but she certainly has an eye for what works.  The shot of Kiera Knightly in a big poofy lined dress was stunning against the diamond tiles in the background.  To think that this “hippy” child of the sixties is doing expensive fashion shoots for Vogue is ironic and amusing at the same time.  Her ability to make people comfortable with her seems to be the key to her success.  When the subject lets down his or her defenses, that’s when she gets those iconic shots.  The actors know that they have “arrived” when she is doing a shoot with them.  She has so many iconic images, Demi Moore, Schwarzenegger on the mountain, Willie Nelson, the early pictures with the Stones, on and on.  I think my favorite was the Nelson Mandela portrait.  It was so simple, yet perfectly captured the man.  She does this over and over with so many people.  Watch this documentary and listed to the extras, there are a lot of great stories here.

Nick Hornby lets us peek at his reading list one more time

I feel guilty.  I’ve only read one of Nick Hornby’s fiction books and it did not blow me away.  His non fiction, however, is so much fun that I was greatly saddened to realize that Shakespeare Wrote for Money is his last collection of book reviews from the Believer magazine.  Hornby again gives us a snapshot of what he is buying and reading each month, while showing with wit and heart how what he is reading affects him in both good and bad ways.  There are many books that are on my short list of future reads because of Hornby’s reviews.

What’s even more interesting is that I saw Hornby speak at a librarian’s convention two years ago when he was writing this collection and his insights into Young Adult literature in this book are golden.  He talks about the event I saw him at and how meeting these new authors changed him.  He was amazed that there were so many groundbreaking authors and works that he had never heard of.  His publisher encouraged him to write for the Young adult audience with his last book, Slam, which led him to read some of the classics of YA lit.  He mentioned Skellig, Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, Weetzie Bat and more.  It is a lot of fun to read about his discoveries.

His insights into The Road are also profound.  The book had a big impact on me, but lots of people find it too hard to take.  Hornby is one of them.  One passage says a lot, “Yes, it’s the job of artists to force us to stare at the horror until we’re on the verge of passing out.  But it’s also the job of artists to offer warmth and hope and maybe even an escape from lives that can occasionally seem unendurably drab…It’s quite legitimate not to want to read the Road.  There are some images now embedded in my memory that I don’t especially want there.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you have a duty to read it.”

One of these days, I’ll pick up another of Hornby’s fiction books.  Until then, I’ll have to be happy with his musing on what he has read.  Here’s hoping that he’ll give it another go at some point.

Publishing adsurdities, part deux – Arffirmations & Raising a Jewish Dog

What can I say about these books.  I saw Arffirmations in a library catalog a while back and I caught the other one while looking for Arffirmations on Amazon.  I’m sure there is an audience for them.  Heck, I might even check them out if I saw them at the library just for a laugh.  They are still pretty wacky as published books go.

It’s all about opportunity, not genius according to Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is a very good writer.  Outliers is the third book of his that I’ve read and he can find all sorts of interesting data to support the fundamental theses in each of his books.  His theories in The Tipping Point have become a common part of our discourse over the years.  His basis point in Outliers is that success is never a foregone conclusion.  Yes, you need to be smart and hard working, but you also have to have the opportunities in life to PRACTICE the skill or trade you will become great in.  If his ideas are correct (and he makes a good case), it has big implications for education, public policy, parenting and all sorts of areas.  His stories of successful hockey players, Bill Gates and the Beatles are all fascinating examples of the importance of opportunity and practice.

Now, I imagine arguments could be made to refute some of Gladwell’s points.  Some of the chapters, while interesting, strike me as more of a stretch.  His points about Jewish lawyers, takeover law, and the skilled labor of textile workers are thin.  Gladwell suggests that since many Jewish immigrants had skill in textiles and started textile operations, their children would later go on to become doctors and lawyers because the value of hard work and creativity was passed to them because textiles required more creativity than other manual labor.  He may be absolutely right, but I suspect there are many other factors at play in these instances.  His arguments about Asian rice workers have similar problems.

Overall, Outliers was another fascinating read from Gladwell that reinforced my thinking about how damaging tracking can be in education.  It also made me wish we had the will and money to send our kids to school more days of the year.  This is can’t miss nonfiction that most anyone will enjoy, even if they disagree with it.

Shannon Hale treads a familiar path in her new “Book”

When I first looked at the synopsis for this book, I thought it would be another story about a princess in trouble.  Fortunately, Hale tells the story from the maid’s point of view as it is truly Dashti’s story we follow.  I was also worried that a story told in captivity might get boring after a while, but the author thankfully breaks her characters out about halfway through the book.  Book of a Thousand Days is the diary of Dashti, a mucker maid who has sworn an oath to stay with Lady Saren.  Saren has refused to marry Lord Kasar, the man her father has betrothed her to and he locks her in a tower for seven years because of it.  Dashti chooses to be locked in there with her and the first half of the book is their struggle to survive in the tower with rats and diminishing food stores.  Saren’s other suitor, Kahn Tagus, comes to visit, but Saren forces Dashti to pretend she is her, as they have never actually spoken or seen each other.  Eventually, the girls find a way out and travel to Kahn Tagus’s kingdom.  There, they work as kitchen maids, as Saren is too scared to reveal her true identity.  As Lord Kasar attacks Kahn Tagus’ kingdom, the action heats up and Dashti plays a pivitol role in the proceedings.  

While the book takes a while to get going, the characters are well drawn and compelling.  Dashti is a fine heroine that most any reader will identify with.  The romance strains credibility at the end, but I needed to remind myself that the story is based on an obscure Brothers Grimm tale set in the Asian Steppes.  Avid fantasy readers at the middle school level are the primary audience for this book.  It is an intense tale about captivity and cruelty, but mature elementary students could handle it as well.

My favorite movies of 2008

Meant to post this after the Oscars, but best laid plans and all.  Still need to see a lot of the better movies from last year and what I did see leans heavily towards the Tween fair, go figure.

My top movies of 08 are:

1. Iron Man
2. Young at Heart
3. Dark Knight
4. Frost/Nixon
5. Slumdog Millionaire
6. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
7. Kung Fu Panda

Worst five movies from last year or biggest disappointments:

1.  Cloverfield
2. Mamma Mia
3. Indiana Jones
4. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
5. Tale of Despereaux

In general, I thought it was a weak year for films.  There are a lot of ho-hum films on the list, but nothing that really blew me away.

American Teen – mediocre documentary, felt more exploitative than enlightening.
Bedtime Stories – Not a big Adam Sandler fan but this was perfectly acceptable and the kids liked it.
Burn After Reading – Had some very funny moments, but veered wildly in a different tone half way through.
Cloverfield – Huge disappointment after some good marketing, some ridiculous scenes and weak acting.
Dark Knight – very good film, though the action sequences had too much going on.  Ledger did some amazing work as the Joker.
Definitely, Maybe – Nice romcom, perfectly acceptable.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall – thought that this would be another forgettable flick, but it’s actually resonating with me a bit.   Russell Brand was unforgettable too.
Frost/Nixon – Who knew that preparing for an interview could take on so much meaning.  Good film.
House Bunny – throw away film but not as bad as you would think.
Incredible Hulk – strong recovery from Ang Lee’s poorly received film
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – a weak ripoff of National Treasure of all things.
Iron Man- probably the most fun I had at the movies all year.
Kung Fu Panda – another great animated flick, this time with Jack Black
Leatherheads – ok, but not great, the actors have played these roles many time before.
Mamma Mia – I thought I liked this more than I did, but the singing did not hold up.
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – really liked the book, but the movie is lacking.  The two actors don’t make me believe that they are falling in love.
Nim’s Island – weak teen fair, but the kids liked it.
Other Boleyn Girl – not sure anyone was playing the right role in this but I guess everyone looked good.
Quantum of Solace – Bond may be going too far towards realism here.  He rarely has a light moment, but when he does flirt and sleep around, it is wholy unbelievable.
Ruins – not as good as the book, but it held up.
Slumdog Millionaire – an amazing film that deserves its acclaim, though I had others I liked better.
Speed Racer – not as bad as I was led to believe
Spiderwick Chronicles – ehh, its ok.
Tale of Despereaux – Animation was good, but the story was too diffult to follow.
10,000 BC – pleasant surprise in this caveman tale.
21 – good solid film about card counting
27 Dresses – fair to weak romantic comedy.
Vantage Point – Looking at a murder from various points of view.  Again, low expectations that were exceeded.
W.  – Josh Brolin is worth the price of admission, unfortunately no one else is.
Wanted – Fun concept about bullets that can bend, another comic movie.
Young@heart – one of the best things I saw last year.  Really makes you feel for these older people who are trying to find something that will keep them engaged and living.  Music allows them to keep going.

There are lots of films I still want to see from last year like WallE, The Reader, Valkyrie, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express.  Hopefully, I can see them soon, before the summer onslought ensues.  Here’s hoping for some more good things to come in the new year.