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Sunday, June 26, 2011

BW26: Y is for Young Adult

Deep in the Forest by Movito

We are halfway there, my darlins.   Are you enjoying the ride, exploring new books or different genres, expanding your horizons?     Reading is such an adventure - for us, for our kids.    For my last class, I had to read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"  which was one of the most challenged books in the past due to the subject matter and the use of the 'n' word.   The class discussions were interesting because we were  1)  given the task of pretending we were a teacher trying to convince the school board not to remove the book from school curriculum and 2) responding to the other students as a parent who wanted the book banned. 

It was an interesting exercise because it made me look at both sides of the issue - the pros and cons.   It also confirmed my belief that books should not be banned.  However, what should be done is make sure books are age appropriate. There are just some books I think should be reserved for college age and adults, rather than middle age or high school students, because of their maturity levels. 

When I was in high school, 11th grade, two  of the books we were assigned for an English class was "The Clockwork Orange" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."   My parents were totally against me reading either book and when the school refused to substitute another book, they had me transferred into another class.    This was during the time period when Go Ask Alice came out about a teenage girl who was a drug addict.  That was considered one of the more controversial books during the 70's.   I did read Go Ask Alice - doubt my parents ever knew, because I didn't tell them.  However, never had the desire to read Clockwork or Cuckoo's Nest.

I recently came across an article in the Wall Street Journal  entitled "Darkness Too Visible" about the darkness prevalent today in young adult books.  Many young adult fiction authors took to their blogs upset by the article, in defense of their books.   There are several links so take your time, check them out and come on back, let me know what you think.

Go ahead. I'll wait.  (examining finger nails.)  You back! Good.

To be honest, there are quite a few young adult novels with themes I won't read because of their content. But the same goes for adult novels as well.     There are always going to be books that some will consider too dark, where another person will think of it as the best book they ever read in the whole wide world.  It all depends on your perspective.   Is it any reason to ban a book, remove it from the shelves.  No.  It just means as a parent, we have to be diligent in paying attention to what our children are reading and open and willing to discuss whatever comes up.  

Compared to Clockwork Orange or the other books of the early decades, are they more dark or just as dark?

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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.


If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

BW25: X is for Xanadu

Courtesy of ZedZap

Hello my darlins.  Happy Father's Day to all the dads.   I have fried my brain this week working on the last paper due for my humanities class.  Instead of a final we had to write a project paper and my subject was George Bernard Shaw.  Interesting, scary, dude.  I am now technically done with all my classes to earn my Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts through Excelsior College.   Officially I have to wait for my advisor to review everything and send out my graduation application packet, which will take a couple months.   So, I will leave you with a poem to mull over and think about, while my brain recovers.


Xanadu - Kubla Khan

by 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 



In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.


If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.


Sunday, June 12, 2011

BW24: W is for what shall we read next?


Despite all the books we have on our shelves, sometimes nothing sounds good.  And you sit there and stare at the pile, wondering what am I in the mood for? What should I read next? Well, I discovered through Jenners of Life With Books, (she's a hoot by the way, be sure to check her blog out) some widgets that will help you decide or pick something new to read.  Great when doing a theme based book challenge. 

Whichbook.net is an interesting search engine with 12 choices and their opposites from such as happy  or sad, beautiful or disgusting, easy or demanding, etc.  You get to make up to four choices, then press go and see what books come up.   I recently discovered through this process a really interesting book called Salamander by Thomas Wharton.  It's on my shelves waiting to be read.  You can also come up with some rather interesting finds and unusual names.   

Picking 'happy', 'larger than life', 'optimistic', and 'short', the first thing that came up was "The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam" by Lauren Liendenberg.   Stop. I know what you're thinking but nope.  There isn't anything hinky about it. I looked it up and sounds rather interesting.   You can get lost for a while, plugging in various choices and seeing what the engine comes up with.   A fun diversion and who knows, you may just discover a new author or interesting book.

Other interesting book search engines:

The Book Seer

What Should I Read Next

Library Things Zeitgeist

Or pick a book randomly using Random.org and New York Times Best Seller Listing.  Plug in 1950 to 2011 into the Random generator, then go to the New York Times list, pick the year, then your birth month and see what comes up. 

Have fun! 

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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.


If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.







Sunday, June 5, 2011

BW 23: V is for Virginia

Virginia Woolf
I found this essay by Virginia Woolf on the love of reading. It speaks for itself and gives us plenty to think about our reading journeys.


 The Love of Reading
by 



At this late hour of the world's history books are to be found in every room of the house - in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper - one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it. 

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that. And so, too, with the lesser writers. Each is singular; each has a view, a temperament, an experience of his own which may conflict with ours but must be allowed to express itself fully if we are to do him justice. And the writers who have most to give us often do most violence to our prejudices, particularly if they are our own contemporaries, so that we have need of all our imagination and understanding if we are to get the utmost that they can give us. But reading, as we have suggested, is a complex art. It does not merely consist in sympathising and understanding. It consists, too, in criticising and in judging. 

The reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this second process, which we may call the process of after-reading, for it is often done without the book before us, yields an even more solid pleasure than that which we receive when we are actually turning the pages. During the actual reading new impressions are always cancelling or completing the old. Delight, anger, boredom, laughter succeed each other incessantly as we read. Judgment is suspended, for we cannot know what may come next. But now the book is completed. It has taken a definite shape. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in several different parts. It has a shape, it has a being. And this shape, this being, can be held in the mind and compared with the shapes the essays of other books and given its own size and smallness by comparison with theirs.

But if this process of judging and deciding is full of pleasure it is also full of difficulty. Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics and criticism abound, but it does not help us greatly to read the views of another mind when our own is still hot from a book that we have just read. It is after one has made up one's own opinion that the opinions of others are most illuminating. It is when we can defend our own judgment that we get most from the judgment of the great critics - the Johnson's, the Dryden's and the Arnold's. 

To make up our own minds we can best help ourselves first by realizing the impression that the book has left as fully and sharply as possible, and then by comparing this impression with the impressions that we have formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of the mind - the shapes of the books we have read, like clothes that we have taken off and hung up to wait their season. Thus, if we have just read, say, Clarissa Harlowe for the first time we take it and let it show itself against the shape that remains in our minds after reading Anna Karenina. We place them side by side and at once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as the angle of a house (to change the figure) is cut out against the fullness of the harvest moon. 

We contrast Richardson's prominent qualities with Tolstoy's. We contrast his indirectness and verbosity with Tolstoy's brevity and directness. We ask ourselves why it is that each writer has chosen so different an angle of approach. We compare the emotion that we felt at different crises of their books. We speculate as to the difference between the 18th century in England and the 19th century in Russia - but there is no end to the questions that at once suggest themselves as we place the books together.

Thus by degrees, by asking questions and answering them, we find that we have decided that the book we have just read is of this kind or that, has this degree of merit or that, takes its station at this point or at that in the literature as a whole. And if we are good readers we thus judge not only the classics and the masterpieces of the dead, but we pay the living writers the compliment of comparing them as they should be compared with the pattern of the great books of the past.

Thus, then, when the moralists ask us what good we do by running our eyes over these many printed pages, we can reply that we are doing our part as readers to help masterpieces into the world. We are fulfilling our share of the creative task - we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer. That is one reason for reading books - we are helping to bring good books into the world and to make bad books impossible. But it is not the true reason. 

The true reason remains the inscrutable one - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. 

When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick - the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this - we have loved reading.

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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.


If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.