On the surface, this looks like another disappointing week. Of the three books I'm going to talk about today, one of them is a hold-over from the previous week. I'm six books behind pace, which feels like a large number at this point in the year. And yet it feels like I've made more progress over the last week than is immediately obvious. For one thing, I'm in the middle of three books which should start wrapping up soon. One of the books (
Afterworlds) was just under 600 pages long and I've started gulping down reading again.
This week I will focus on building my writing back in, while holding onto the reading.
Half World by Hiromi Goto - This is something I picked up this year for my Fantasy Lit class, so it falls neatly into my exception about books related to professional life. Truly what I was looking for was a book that blended aspects of Japanese mythology into it's fantasy setting. While it does do that,
Half World isn't the best example probably. However, this is a very good book with an unconventional protagonist and an unusual premise. Melanie Tamaki is a child born of two beings which are strictly speaking what I would consider a type of ghost. In this world, spirits follow a three stage cycle of reincarnation. The human world is the realm of the flesh. When people die, their spirits go to the Half-World which is a kind of purgatory where the souls are purged of their trauma from life. They then go to the Realm of Spirit as pure spirits. When the spirits begin to fade, they are born again as humans. The realms are out of balance and require something impossible to happen to fix it. The characterization was vivid with even minor characters making a strong impression. It's a gritty, grim story with some irksome plot holes, but still very much worth a read. It turns out there is a sequel that I will have to track down.
13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher - this is a book surrounded by notoriety. When Netflix aired a series based on this book, there was a lot of concern. There is always a lot of concern when "the kids" are deeply interested in something with difficult themes. In this case, suicide. I remember sitting in a staff meeting where the discussion had long since gotten out of hand and thinking - nobody writes about suicide as a good thing. Its narrative use is as a tragedy. Which isn't to say that a teen can't commit suicide with the misguided hope of causing tragedy, but that almost certainly wasn't the aim of book or the TV series adapted from it. Nevertheless, everyone was concerned but realized that we couldn't stop them from watching the thing and we all resolved to be super vigilant for the warning signs of a teen contemplating suicide (which as high school teachers we should do anyway.) In time, the hubbub died down and we all moved on. Sometime during all that, I bought a copy of the book for my classroom library with the intent of reading it just in case. I finally got around to it this last week. The entire premise of this book is that after Hannah Baker's suicide, a set of seven audio tapes are slowly making the rounds to the thirteen people who played some particularly important role in the last couple years of her life. We hear these tapes from the perspective of Clay Jensen who is number eight on the list. As he listens to the tapes we hear both her words and Clay's recollections of events while he crisscrosses town to visit the important places on the tape. Clay is a nice kid and he was personally devastated by Hannah's death. This is a good illustration of how the small events and everyday cruelties of highschool weigh a kid down. It was grim, it was gritty, but it ended on a hopeful note.
Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld - At some point I decided that I would buy any book Scott Westerfeld writes for my classroom library...and because I just like the way his brain works. This is a massive book because it is really two 300 page novels shuffled together in alternating chapters. One book is about Darcy Patel who wrote a novel in a month and sold the draft to publisher for a massive amount. She's 18 and decides to delay college while she moves to New York and tries to be a writer for three years. The other book is the novel Darcy Patel wrote about a girl, Lizzie, who after nearly dying during a terrorist attack, gains the ability to cross over to the afterlife and guide souls on. She falls in love with another such person and discovers that her mother is haunted by the ghost of her childhood friend who was killed by a serial killer. It sounds like it should be a mess and hard to follow, yet strangely it all hangs together well and is an interesting insight to the writer's process of revision. Darcy's section is full of discussion about the Lizzie section. At some point I'm going to have to reread this for structure.
Heading into the next week, I'm still playing catch up and so much of the list is YA or otherwise very short. I'm having a startlingly difficult time getting through the complete volume 1 of Peter Porker.
Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham: The Complete Collection Vol 1 (Finished 2/5/2020)Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley (Finished 2/3/2020)- Revival by Stephen King
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven (Finished 2/4/2020)- Where Do You Get Your Ideas? by Fred White
Getting the Girl by Markus Zusak (Finished 2/2/2020)
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