January Retrospective

 January was a busy and oddly rough month. Rando was in a mischievous mood and keep slinging the door stoppers at me. So I got through Swan Song finally and established that The Kingdom of Little Wounds is absolutely not YA. (I've put it aside for now and I'm pulling it from my classroom library.) I read two of my three TBR recommendations, three YA novels, six volumes of Fruits Basket, and a mystery for my Mystery class. All in all, 13 books which is none too shabby. 

Technically, only one of the Fruits Basket volumes was on the list, but my sister in law and my husband are interested in reading them so I started using them to break up my read of Swan Song when it's started grinding me down.

I really did end up enjoying Swan Song after all the drama of getting through it. My favorites from this month though are When We Wake by Karen Healy, Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline, and A Stitch in Time by Kelly Armstrong. I also really enjoyed my reread of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradly which I really didn't enjoy as much the first time I read it.

As a parting shot, rando put me on to another doorstop Caliban's War which is volume 2 of "The Expanse." I'll be reading that well into February. I have to laugh. I am absolutely looking forward reading it, but it's huge. I guess Rando's looking out for me, but it's uncanny that three of the four biggest books on the list got randomly selected this month.

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

 My husband has been trying to get me to read this book for the last 15 years.  Poor husband. Although, in my defense, there are a couple of really good reasons that it took me so long to read it. First, he made the mistake of comparing it to Stephen King's The Stand. It's actually a fair comparison but I didn't much like The Stand, so it wasn't really an encouraging statement. Second, it's an post apocalyptic door stopper. I'm pretty eclectic reader. I'll take on anything in theory but some sorts of books hit me hard in the mood and I've learned to be judicious about when I read them lest it leave me in a real funk. Several times I tried reading Swan Song only to find myself devolving into a real crappy mood. So I put it down. I put it down several times. Finally, third, Swan Song starts with a really awful first chapter. In a world of literature, it's got to be one of the top 10 worst first chapters. 

All that aside, rando chose Swan Song for me, I'm really trying to abide by the random choice system, and I sunk a week and a half into reading it. I finally got past that awful first chapter. The story spans about eight years starting with a doomsday nuclear scenario between the U.S. and Russia. There are six or seven characters that get followed from the crisis through the fallout and nuclear winter that follows.

There's a lot of good things about Swan Song, in fact there are a lot of things that make it a better book than The Stand. Most of the characters are all very engaging. Most of them are very normal people put in extraordinary circumstances and they react in believable ways for better or worse. There are a lot of examples of excellent people who become better more pure examples of themselves and there are plenty of examples of people descending into chaos. 

There are some pretty heavy theological themes running through the book. There is a personified force of evil and there is a pretty clear idea of an inner spirit or soul being an almost tangible thing. In fact, there are quite a lot of fantasy elements riddled throughout. There is one character who has a magical ability with plants able to get them to grow in adverse situations. There's another with a magical ring of glass that lets her see visions of distant places.

The whole thing builds to this massive, odd watershed moment where a decision has to be made for the human race. Extinction? or muddle on as they are?  

So, over all impression - pretty positive. I liked the story; I liked the characters. I still had to take a lot of mood breaks to read something lighter. It's a pretty grim book and there are precious few moments of levity, but it's worth it. I do worry though that, much like The Stand, I'm going to have a heard time remembering any details in six month.

If that happens, I guess I can always read it again in 15 years.

All You Need is Love . . . Disney Version

 I am in love with Disney's new movie, "Encanto." It just hit me to the core on story and the music is pretty awesome too. So, I was surprised by the odd lukewarm initial reaction to it. This is an amazing story about the power of family; what's better than that? Yet responses tended to be either my form of ecstatic approval or a complete underwhelmed "meh" response.  So, what gives?

I think it's a couple of things. I grew up at the end of the Disney classic era. All those silly princesses being saved by all those clean cut princes without a personality. It was all about the love story, and a particular sort of love story too. Pretty sheltered girl with special powers of niceness gets in trouble and needs a guy to bail her out and kiss her in the end. (Yikes, as much as I do love them, they make me cringe a little because it's so surface level. . .  there's no character growth in there.) There were some exceptions. We had 101 Dalmatians and The Rescuers with its Down Under sequel for example which were pretty straight forward adventure stories with only minor love story elements. Still tends to be pretty surface level. The later classics like Lady and the Tramp and The Rescuers series has some real character development for the male protagonists (the Tramp and Bernard respectively) but the feminine protagonists are still pretty static. They don't develop, they are pedestal stranded ideals.

On a side note, have you ever noticed how many of the villains are female too? It's like we were being told as young girls that you can be a sickly sweet princess or evil broken (albeit powerful) bad guys. There's nothing in between.

I'm not going to go into the middle era. It was a bad, sad time with a few bright spots struggling under a shifting paradigm. Enough said on that. 

The new wave of Disney that started in my adulthood, now that's something special. Something happened and the love story started taking a backseat if it's even there at all. First glimmers start showing up as early as Aladdin in 1992 (I was 12 :-P). It's not perfect, Jasmine is still being a treated as an object, but at least she's fighting it and the main story is centered on Aladdin who needs to do some serious growing up and it's this maturing process that really is the main story. Pocahontas is a step backward in more than one way, but by Hercules in 1997 we can solidly say goodbye to the fainting violet version of a heroine. (Meg don't take sass from nobody!)

Somewhere in there, it seems like there were people at Disney insisting that there were other sorts of stories worth telling and slowly but steadily things got better. Rescuers and Rescuers Down under are about saving children from abusive situations and protecting endangered species. Buddy movies became a more common story line - Treasure Planet (2002), Chicken Little (2005) and Bolt (2008)  to name an early few. Special shout out to Zootopia (2016) that takes on the buddy narrative and issues of race all in one. Wreck-It Ralph (2012) and Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018) are about how to be a friend and how to stop being a codependent one. Seems way more important for kids to be seeing than that true love drivel. If we are lucky we have a solid romantic relationship in our lives, but friendship is what connects us to our communities. Good models for what that looks like are important.

The big change that happened for me though was in the way female protagonists got handled. Suddenly they have defined goals and it's not about finding a boyfriend (thank god). Mulan is about a young woman who bucks gender roles to save her father. Princess & the Frog (2009) features Tiana who is struggling to put enough money together to open her own her own restaurant. Yes, there's a love story in there but both characters need to do a lot of character growth to make it work. Tangled (2010) looks like a step backward until you realized that Rapunzel initiates all of the action until the last 10 minutes of the story. Poor Flynn is the helpless princess in that dynamic getting saved over and over by Rapunzel. Raya of Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) is a kick butt warrior for goodness sakes. This is much better than telling little girls that "someday your prince will come."

Finally, there's the non-traditional family narrative. There are a lot of orphans sprinkled in kids literature and movies. Disney dipped into that well too, but while finding family might be a result in those narratives, it doesn't tend to be the story. However, Lilo & Stitch (2002) is entirely about finding family even if you lost the one you were born into. Lilo's being raised by her sister after the death of their parents and Stitch is a critter created by a alien mad scientist who finds a family in Lilo. In fact, I think Lilo and Stitch is the beginning of the family focused trend that continues with Chicken Little (2005), Meet the Robinsons (2007), Frozen (2013), and now Encanto (2021). Another set of important models for kids. Family is tough and they aren't perfect, yet they are worth fighting for.

That's what I love about Encanto. It's not really an adventure story. There's no bad guy. It's about a family who's fallen out of whack and the kid (Mirabel) who's going to put it right. It doesn't really get better than that. I like where Disney is right now, but we gotta let go of the pedestal princesses to appreciate it.

A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

 I read my first gothic romance when I was 12. It was Wuthering Heights and I hated it, yet I couldn't put it down either. I also read Jane Eyre around then which was a much better experience. I've since read several fine examples of the genre and too my mind a gothic romance is something written at least a hundred years ago.

My TBR recommender, however, keeps handing me new books that new takes on the genre. They feature strong heroines and spooky ghosts which may or may not be real. While they don't have the depth of language that I love, they do tend to be a lot of fun.

The most recent example is A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong. On the surface, the premise is absolutely ridiculous. Bronwyn inherits the place of her girlhood summer home, Thorne Manor, after her aunt dies. Up until she was 15, the house was her favorite place and where she played with William, a boy who lived in the house 200 years in the past. Is she travelling in time? or is he just an imaginary friend? Who could say, but a tragedy in the summer of her 15th year ends the summer trips to Thorne Manor.

Bronwyn is an adult now and too old for imaginary friends but she does intend to fix up Thorne Manor now that it's hers. However, her plans are cut short when - surprise - William is real. Surprise again - she can slip between his time and the present. And surprise one more time - Bronwyn remembers  that she's in love with William.

Oh and there are ghosts. Actual, spooky ghosts that want Bronwyn to do something.

It's all preposterous. It really seems like there is too much going on there but somehow it all hangs together. The ghosts and the time slip are connected of course. The love story between Bronwyn and William helps, but what really saves it is Bronwyn's character arc. She's an interesting protagonist who is mature and highly relatable.

This isn't high literature and it probably doesn't really compete with the classics, but it is a lot of fun.

There's an Upside to Everything. . .

My school just went virtual starting today. We tried to maintain the in person campus but the Omicron spike hit our high school staff hard and finding subs (understandably) is hard. Teaching virtually is hard. I know learning that way is hard too, and there's been a lot of increasingly strident discourse on both sides of the issues of keeping the schools open during the spike. 

I don't love teaching virtually. It's isn't my favorite thing by a long shot, but I think we tend to lose sight of some of the unexpected benefits that did appear out of all this chaos. I'm going to list some of the positives that I've seen come out of the virtual classrooms

1. Digital monitoring and feedback - this sounds pretty 1984 but bear with me. I'm a language arts teacher, so no matter the format, my students do a lot of writing. When we are virtual, I monitor my students docs as they are writing which allows me to nudge them in the correct direction and also keeps them focused on producing work. You'd think I could do this same thing in the classroom, but strangely it just doesn't work as well. In general, the quality on first drafts goes up as a result.
2. Natural Motivators - In the physical classroom there is no real reward for focusing and getting done early. No matter what, they are stuck in my room. However, online my policy is if they finish the work early and I agree that they are as done as they can be, they can log out of class early. It's a powerful motivator for a teen stuck in their room around all of their stuff. It's amazing how focused they can be when the reward is something they want.
3. Comfort - our school has a pretty strict dresscode policy. For better or worse, we can't enforce that as much when the students are at home, so they take liberties. Usually they are pretty good and finding ways that are non-obvious on the screen. Honestly, when the students can lounge in comfy chairs wearing comfy clothes, they have an easier time focusing on the material. Honestly, I wish we could throw the dress code out the window. If I had my way that two page section of the handbook would be ditched in favor of: "dress in clean and mended cloths that cover all undergarments and do not feature offensive language or images. Skirts and shorts should be at least finger-tip length, shoes must be worn and conducive to travel between classes." Maybe I'm just too permissive.
4. Challenging Assumptions - The New York Times had an article about student behavior being more problematic since the beginning of the pandemic. I don't know what teachers are seeing in other schools with other populations, but what I'm seeing is my students are taking fewer things on assumption. A lot of school behavior runs on expectations - some of them good some of them bad. The pandemic has proven to them that there are other ways to do things, that the things they accepted as necessary can be adjusted. Right now, yes it seems like they question everything and because they are teenagers, they tend to come across as confrontational. However, I like that they are thinking things through more and asking questions (even if I don't love how they go about it.)

I'm not saying that these positives outweigh the negatives. On the whole, I'd vastly prefer to be in the same room as my students. However, it's good to keep sight of what positives are there because there is almost always something.

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Rando didn't pick this one for me. I jumped it up the queue because I have the school library's copy and I know there are at least three teens waiting for a shot at it. I didn't feel like I should wait for it to come up on the roll of the dice. This way I can hand it in on Monday when I step foot on campus.

When I encountered this sequel to Ready Player One, I had a "No way" kind of reaction. While the future of the original book is an incredible rich setting where I could see any number of possible spin off narratives being set, a true sequel with the same characters just seemed impossible. All the loose ends of the original narrative seemed tied up in a meaningful and satisfying way. Even so, I've been salivating to crack the spine ever since I swiped from the school library.

Actually, I have a bit of a secret connected to this series. I first tried to read Ready Player One the year it came out and I simply couldn't get into it. I don't know if it was my mood at the time or what, but I tried reading it at least three times and ended up abandoning it each time. Of course I couldn't admit that to my students who were all pestering me nonstop to read the thing. There was a lot of cryptic smiling and nodding that year. I'm not sure why I couldn't just admit it to them, except to say that I really didn't want to let them down. It wasn't until six years later in 2017 that I actually managed a successful read and discovered what all the fuss was about. 

Cline's vision of the future is bleak. The Earth is suffocating under the weight of a human population grown past the ability of our little rock to sustain. The one glimmer of positivity is the online worlds of the OASIS which is a kind of full dive virtual reality environment with dozens of worlds and games embedded into it. Wade Watts, aka Parzival, is the awkward geeky protagonist who wins the fantastic prize of inheriting the fortune of the OASIS creator in the first book. It's a great adventure story that reads like an homage to the foundations of gaming and 80s pop culture. 

Ready Player Two opens just nine days after the end of the first book where Watts discovers a new kind of gaming rig that allows the user to actually experience the online world with all five senses. The downside is a temporary but complete division from the physical body leaving it defenseless and resulting in horrific brain damage if the device is improperly removed or if contiguous connection to OASIS extends past 12 hours. Despite the dangers, launching this product revolutionizes the experience and becomes wildly popular. It also triggers a new cryptic quest seeded in the system before the creator's death. Unfortunately, it also triggers a malevolent AI of the OASIS creator who has some. . . demands.

So yes, this is another adventure quest fraught with real world consequences just like the first book. I say that, but despite this being a very similar narrative in many ways, I think it's a stronger book overall. The characters in the first book were a little two dimensional which didn't matter because it was a fast paced adventure. Watts, who is sort of a everyman representation of the gamer type in both the positive and negative ways, somehow manages to acquire and maintain relationships with a diverse group of people who for the most part seem to ignore his tendency to say 'the wrong thing' on a regular basis.   Ready Player Two is still a fast paced adventure but this time our protagonist goes through a much more complete and satisfying development arc. Watts/Parzival is a socially awkward geek who is handed everything he thinks he wants only to screw it all up within the first 20 pages because, let's face it, he's an immature idiot. Over the course of the adventure Watts comes to terms with his flaws and mistakes and puts in a lot of work to become a better person and make amends.

It's almost too bad that I can't tell people to just skip the first book and start with Ready Player Two but alas, reading the first book is truly necessary to understand all the ways that Watts messes up his life. At least it's not exactly a hardship.

Postscript: I cheated... a little. I started Ready Player Two on December 29th and finished it late on the 31st. I'm still counting it as my first book of 2022 because that's what I read while I waited for the new year to roll in. Rando chose A Stitch In Time by Kelly Armstrong as my next read. 

Goals 2022 & The January List

A new year and new goals. It's always exciting to think about especially after a year when I pretty much achieved all of my goals. Goal setting is a reflective process. What went well? What do I want to do better? 

I used to read 100 YA  a year as part of goal to help students find books that they like. After a few years of that, I was having a hard time finding 100 YA books that I wanted to read. I had "caught up" so to speak and I relaxed a bit on the voracious YA binging. I turned to other things, but I've found myself a little out of touch again, so I'm readopting the 100 YA goal. (I have at least 50 sitting around between my stacks at home and classroom library)

YA tends to be a fast read and I don't want to be in a position of only reading YA, so I'm upping the overall goal to 150 books for the year. I'm going to continue to prioritize gifts. I've really been enjoying being able to tell people when I've finished the book they picked for me. I'm also going to commit to reading at least half of my books from the stacks sitting around in the house.

I've additionally realized that there are several categories that I would like to read more in. I'd like to make more time for nonfiction in general. For all that I rarely read nonfiction titles, I actually do enjoy it. Within that umbrella, I'd specifically like to read more professional literature that relates to teaching. Not necessarily pedagogy books, but they certainly count. I also have an entire three shelf bookcase crammed with cookbooks that I intended to read. Aside from nonfiction, I'd like to be reading more plays. Historically, reading plays is one of my least favorite genres, however, now that I'm involved in the high school's drama program, I feel like I need a broader base of background knowledge. Lastly, I've started several series in the last couple of years and left them hanging. I'd like to continue working on them while I still remember the early books well enough to avoid having to do a reread. I'd like to say that I'm going to read at least 10 each next year in those categories, but the numbers don't work out unless I go over goal. Who knows, maybe I will. 

There are four things that worked well or started in 2021 that I will continue 2022. First, I'm going to continue with TBR.co. While I've had some frustrations with the recommendations I get, overall it is succeeding in pushing me into literature I wouldn't normally try and in most cases I'm enjoying it. Second, I've really been enjoying having books on the list that Ryan picked. However instead of five per month, I'm going to reduce it to two. Third, I managed to wedge in a couple classics last year. I really enjoy classics and so I'm going to try to read at least six of them in the new year. Lastly, I have been aware for a while that even though I'm at least passingly interested in every book that I put on my lists, I tend to avoid certain reads and some books would languish there unread month after month. Late in 2021, I figured out a solution using a random number generator to select books off the list. With allowing only a few exceptions, sticking to the random selections means that I'm not subconsciously avoiding titles. 

In terms of writing. I miss my blog. I think it had definitely turned into a grind and the break was good, but it's time to go back to writing more about my reading. Even if no one else is reading my natterings, it helps solidify what I've read in my own mind. So I'm going to continue with the monthly retrospectives and book lists. However I'm also going to add at least one book review a week and one reflection or personal essay per week. I can always write more, but I'm going to commit to this as a minimum. 

January List

I've started fresh. There are only a couple books on here from last year. Each month I'm going to have a list of 30 titles, 15 of which will be YA. The other 15 will break down to 2 Ryan pics, 1 classic, 2 nonfiction, at least 2 series books, and 1 play. The other seven books will be whatever tickles my fancy at the time (which will include my TBR.co reads). I will try to keep the list in that structure every month. Clearly, I'm not going to read 30 books in a month unless I somehow find myself laid up in traction with nothing else to do. However, with the increased load of YA, I will naturally read more per month. That being said, if the random system averages out the way one expects, eventually I will need to up the number YA on the list to get my 100. We'll see how it goes.

1. Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed* (YA)
2. Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson (YA)
3. A Stitch in Time by Kelly Armstrong (finished 1/1/2022)
4. Far From the Tree by Robin Benway* (YA)
5. The Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan* (Series book 3)
6. The Homesteader's Kitchen by Robin Burnside* (gift, Nonfiction)
7. The Pants Project by Cat Clarke* (YA)
8. Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (finished 1/1/2022)
9. The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susan Cokal* (YA)
10. The Poet by Michael Connelly*
11. Caliban's War by S.A. Corey* (Gift, Series book 2)
12. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Corey Doctorow* (YA)
13. The Wild Things by Dave Eggers* 
14. When We Wake by Karen Healey* (Finished 1/29/2022)
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller* (Classic)
16. The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard (Finished 1/7/2022)
17. Kim by Rudyard Kipling* (Classic)
18. The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour* (YA)
19. Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays edited by Eric Land and Nina Shengold (Play)
20. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (YA)
21. Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon* (Finished 1/17/2022)
22. An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn* (Series Book 3)
23. City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab* (YA)
24. Otherworld by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller* (Finished 1/3/2022)
25. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas* (YA)
26. The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas* (YA)
27. Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci* (Nonfiction, gift)
28. Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall  by Williamson (Ryan Pick)
29. The Dead Girl in 2A by Carter Wilson* (Gift, YA)
30. The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters (TBR)

Ok, so I have some hold overs - things I need to read post-haste for one reason or another. I'm putting them down here. They are a part of the random system...but I might bump them for whatever reason. It's a practicality measure.

1. Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (finished 1/26/2022)
2. Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (pre/re-read for my mystery lit class)
3. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith* (pre/re-read for my mystery lit class)
4. Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya - Volume 1 (Finished 1/1/2022)
5. Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf (Professional Development, slow going but I'm already past the halfway mark and I don't want to put it down)