What have I been reading lately?

So much on this blog has been about writing, obviously, but a huge part of my writing life is reading—or what I like to call "research." (Mostly I read because I like it, but sometimes I do it to learn.)

Lately, it seems like my interests have been kind of random, but I've had a good run over the last few months and have read several I could easily recommend.

Crispin by Avi. A three-book YA series set in medieval England about a poor, orphaned peasant boy who's on the run. Much of the story happens with him running and hiding in the forest—several forests—starving and cold. After reading this for a while, I got so I was loudly encouraging him to steal and plunder. I just felt so sympathetic. And I slept so much better the night I read that he found a brand new set of clothes on a dead man and stole them. He was finally warm. Avi had me at The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which I haven't read since I was maybe 12, but I remember absolutely loving it then, and Crispin was fun too.

Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D. My dad handed me this book one day and told me I should read it, in case there was anything in it I could use for my book, and I totally appropriated a line from the prologue soon thereafter. I did tweak it, so I don't feel as guilty... But the whole book is fascinating. It's about "anomolous knowing," or knowing something but not having any rational reason why. It discusses ESP, telepathy, government "remote-viewing" experiments (where they had people with these special gifts legitimately finding out classified information for them), and how scientists grapple with these ideas when there is real proof. Some of the medical accounts were especially interesting—doctors who knew special ways to help people but were scared to tell anyone about it because it wasn't "scientific." So interesting to read about this from a scientist's perspective. I really liked the writing—it was indeed sciency but still very readable.

The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt. This was a fun story about teenage adventure and friendship. The main character's father had passed away and she finds an old journal of his, a book of lists, and one of my favorite parts is how this is the way she comes to know him. Very fun. It was clever and a quick, enjoyable read.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave. This one was great. Some heavy themes and some offensive language, but the writing was especially amazing and made me envious on several occasions  It was one of those where you say, "That's such a cool way to say that!" on nearly every page. I learned a lot about dual perspective (and a lot from the author interview in the back, actually), and it has one of the craziest non-linear but sort of linear timelines ever. The way the story unfolds is as clever as the story itself.

East by Edith Pattou. I'm not normally a huge fantasy reader—and, honestly,  I think of it as more of a fairy tale rather than fantasy—but I LOVED this book! It's a retelling of the Norse version of Beauty and the Beast, where a girl falls in love with a polar bear. *** Disclaimer: Whatever you do, do not watch a film version of the fairy tale because it is free on Netflix and you have read the book (The Polar Bear King) to your daughter because it is WEIRD. And campy and dubbed and pretty awful. *** But back to the book. I just thought it was a fun story and quite a page turner. A serious page turner. And those are just good fun, sometimes.

So what have YOU been reading lately?

Word News

A couple interesting things in the world of words happened recently. First, March 4th was National Grammar Day. I know you were probably all out celebrating, but I came across this post on Cake Wrecks and was nerdily delighted by it.

http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2013/3/4/grammar-geeks-unite.html

Also, the use (or misuse) of the word "literally" has always been an entertaining point of discussion, so I found this Slate article rather interesting and wanted to share.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/06/literally_definition_has_changed_over_the_years_dictionaries_recognize_this.html

And in case you were wondering, my goals for March are coming along horribly, thank you very much. (I should note for future reference to not make such lofty goals and then leave town. The goals did not fare so well that week, but I sure had a good time.) But all is not lost! There are still 10 days left in the month! That's enough time to get something done . . .

Mega March

So with the holidays, several bouts of sickness all around me and in me that needed attending to (don't worry, I won't go into the tuberculosis details again), and life in general, my writing has sadly been put on the very back burner over the last couple of months.

But I have big plans. I have renewed dedication and want to announce that this month will heretofore be known as MEGA MARCH. I'm excited about these plans on their own because I'm excited about my ideas, but I also know that I accomplish almost nothing without a goal or self-imposed deadline. So it's time to get down to business.

This month I will . . .

• Outline my next project (the first book in a middle-grade series that I will write more about later).
• Complete research for said project (it's set in 1910 for reasons that are somewhat elusive to me, but I think it's meant to be this way).
• Write the first five chapters.

Those are lofty goals, but at least working toward them will help me make some progress—any progress—which will be a lovely change of pace from absolutely nothing.

Also, in VERY EXCITING NEWS (I had to include the excitement star because this is so amazingly awesome), a friend's book group, of their own volition, is reading Little Sun this month!!! And I get to attend their book group meeting in April and discuss it with them!!! I am EXTREMELY EXCITED, as you can see by all the caps and exclamation points. Can't wait for that. I'll let you know how it goes.

A laugh for today

Maybe some of you saw this list being posted here and there last week, but it made me laugh and I wanted to share in case you missed them:

8 New and Necessary Punctuation Marks 

We Desperately Need

It's hard to pick a favorite. The sarcastices are something that I've discussed at length with friends, how we need some kind of mark to show when we're being sarcastic so people don't get the wrong idea. The editor in me appreciates the hemi-demi-semi colon. The example on the Andorpersand made me chuckle, and the Morgan Freemark is just awesome. So pretty much I like them all. 

When the planets align

When I was finishing up the first draft of LITTLE SUN, I knew it still needed something. Since I had never written a book before, it took me a while to realize that, to begin with, I was a fairly bare-bones kind of writer. I wrote generally what happened and that was about it, kind of like a very thorough outline in prose form with some dialogue. I needed to add what often makes a book a book—the imagery. So one of my tasks was to go back through each chapter and flesh it out a little and describe this and that, sometimes what people were wearing, sometimes what they were doing, sometimes a look they had on their face. I don't like too much description, especially about the scenery or anything too flowery, but you need just enough so the picture you are painting is more easily imagined.

It was about this time that I started reading a book called The Garden by Elsie V. Aidinoff. It tells the story of Adam and Eve, God, and the serpent and all they go through in the garden, mostly from Eve's perspective and from a very different angle. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the story (one being how the serpent is Eve's mentor), but there were several elements I found fascinating. One in particular was how the author portrayed Eve's first experience with everything. The minute I opened the book, I felt caught up in the description and like I, along with Eve, was experiencing what it was like to feel and see and have a body for the first time.

“The Beginning” 

Something heavy on my center, smooth against my skin, shifting very slightly within itself, stretched and retracted, occasionally a tap to the side, always in the same spot. I breathed. Instantly the thing was still. I let out the air. Again I inhaled, deeply, and pushed against the heaviness as I filled my chest. The thing began to move. Slowly, stopping and starting, it wound back and forth across my thing, around my knee, down my leg. it slid over my ankle, passed gently by my heel, with a little touch to my instep along the way. There was a wish. Again, silence and dark. I felt light, unburdened, empty, as if I might float away. Soft things swept my face, my cheek, my ear, wafted across my nose. My hands rose from my sides and brushed them off. There was a tickle in my nose. I gasped, gasped again. A great noise burst from my mouth. My eyelids jerked open. And I saw. 

At first there was only blue, limpid and luminous, stretching wide above me. A white, fluffly mass appeared, scudded across the expanse, tumbled into pieces, and melted into the blue. I lifted my arms, spread my fingers. light came through them; the ends glowed pink. I curled a finger into my palm and felt it scratch the skin. On my arms fine hairs glimmered in the sunlight. Still lying flat, I turned my head to one side. Not far away several forms, tall and dark and topped with green fluff, stretched toward the sky. Scattered around me and floating through the air were weightless bits of pink, turned up around the edges: blossoms falling from trees; it was one of them that had tickled my nose.... 

That first day, of course, I didn’t not know it was the sky I saw, the wind that moved my hair, an apple tree that shed pink petals on my toe. Cloud, face, blossom: all were unknown. I had no knowledge, no words. Each time I turned my head and found, before my eyes, something I had not seen, the world expanded.  

From The Garden by Elsie V. Aidinoff

Anyway, the planets had aligned and it was perfect timing to read something with excellent imagery. Even though this kind of writing isn't really my style, it still helped me learn just when I needed it. Not only does reading something like this give you good ideas about new techniques and all that, but once you do it enough or become entrenched in it, it helps you start thinking that way, and the process comes easier and more natural. 

Kind of like how I felt like my humor reached new heights when I watched all 10 seasons of Friends back-to-back while nursing during Anna's first year. Maybe my time could have been more productively spent, maybe not.

Literary paradigm shifts

Now that I begin to type this post, I realize the title may be a bit misleading. There's really nothing too drastic I'm going to discuss here, but it sure sounds exciting, doesn't it? Anyway, I've recently been thinking about a few times when I saw film versions of books I had read, or vice versa, and realized I was pronouncing or imagining how words were spelled totally incorrectly. (And, interestingly, all of my examples are British. Maybe it's just an accent thing.)

We all remember Hermione from Harry Potter, don't we? I'm pretty sure I read the first few books pronouncing her name like "Her-mee-un," which was my own interpretation. Even after I read the book (Book 4? Book 5?) where it points out how to say it, it still took me a while to change over.

Then I read Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility a couple years ago, after having seen the movie numerous times. I thought one of the main characters' names was Edward Ferris because that's how they pronounced it in the movie. But when I read the book, I saw that his last name was Ferrars. I seriously read for a few chapters, trying to figure out where Edward Ferris had gone and who this Ferrars guy was.

And then I saw the recent production of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit. (If you haven't seen it, watch it now. Do it.) It's about a man who is in a debtor's prison, which they called the "marshalcy." That's how I saw it in my head, anyway. Because, you know, marshals have to do with the law and policing and stuff. But when I read about the story (because I haven't actually read the book), I saw that the name of the prison was called The Marshalsea. It was a total paradigm shift, for me, realizing that it was a proper noun.

It's weird when this happens. These weren't earth shattering experiences, but they definitely changed my views about things in these stories that seemed pretty cemented in my head. Has anything similar happened to you?

Unbroken: A Review

So I finally got on the boat (got on the bandwagon? caught the boat that I missed?) and opened the copy of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken that has been sitting on my shelf in my proverbial "to read" pile for many, many months. I don't know what took me so long. So many people recommended the book to me, but I also knew it was going to be a difficult read, content-wise, and I think maybe I just wasn't ready to jump right in to a long story of suffering, violence, and cruelty.

And I was right. It WAS a difficult read. Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was a bombardier during WWII. His plane crashed in the Pacific and he lasted 47 days on the water, only to be captured by the Japanese and sent to several horrible, awful POW camps where he was starved and beaten and continually hunted by a certain maniacal Japanese guard.

It's a gripping story, but I also feel like I had to read it while keeping some distance—skimming over especially difficult parts, purposely not fully processing the extreme brutality of it all because I didn't think I could handle it. I couldn't believe real people acted the way they did and that kindness and compassion were so rarely seen. I had to keep telling myself that I know he survived because we have this book as proof, but I eyed the pages left with wariness, knowing that they meant the suffering continued.

So yes it was challenging, but I'm so glad I read it. Besides the cruelty and suffering, the name of the book tells the real story. Despite all he goes through, the main character survives and his spirit remains unbroken. I just read a passage that basically sums up the major theme of his time in the prison camps: "The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it." But even so, he survived. He survived unbelievable thirst and starvation and sharks and disease and cruelty.

There have been many beautiful parts, like when Louis is floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean for days on end with sharks constantly circling and, dying of thirst, he prays for the first time in his life and it rains. And he prays two more times, and it rains two more times. Or like when he and his fellow crew member enjoy a brilliant sunrise on the water that they know was a gift from a compassionate divine being. Or like rare kindnesses shown by a few compassionate guards. And many others, which I won't ruin here in case you haven't read the book yet, but I was grateful for the hope they offered. Though these experiences ravaged Zamperini and so many others, it is a wonder to read about what the human body and spirit can endure.

This story is especially touching because Anna's great-grandfather, who passed away last month, also flew on bombing missions in WWII and was the lone survivor when his plane crashed over Germany. He too was a prisoner of war and overcame incredible odds to escape and make it home. Reading Unbroken made me want to read the book about Grandpa Joe's experience again, which is called A Distant Prayer. It's pretty amazing, and he was an amazing man.