Harry Potter News: How did I miss this?

I don't know where I've been, but for all you Harry Potter fans, I'm sharing this lovely little link to an interview J.K. Rowling did a few years ago (that I only found out about recently) about what she thinks happened after the epilogue. So fun to see how she thought our old friends ended up.

Then I saw this link from NPR the other day about J.K. Rowling telling Harry Potter back stories — and that's when I knew I needed to post about Harry. There are more details when you click on the link above and when you click on "interactive project" below (which I confusingly got from the first link), but I loved these tidbits they included:

"An interactive project at The Guardian lets you scroll through the annotations online. Among other revelations, the notes on a first edition of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stoneshow that the original Hufflepuff mascot was a bear, not a badger, and that Quidditch was invented 'in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend.'"

Also, p.s., I love Book News from NPR. The end.

88 Books That Shaped America

Last fall, I saw an article in the newspaper about an exhibition from the Library of Congress at the National Book Festival featuring 88 books that shaped our country. It was a fascinating list, such a potpourri of topics and a refreshing change from the top 100 literary classics or top 50 YA fantasies or whatever booklist has been making the rounds lately. Nothing against those lists (as I love all books—almost), but it was nice to see a mix and to consider how each might have influenced our culture.

Also, I loved seeing books like Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, The Cat in the Hat, and Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures right there alongside Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. Awesomeness.

I also love to read book lists and scour them for books I have read, which makes me feel all smart and stuff. (Yes, I cut this list out of the newspaper and highlighted the books I had read. I'm that big of a geek.) This also gives me ideas for books to add to my To Read list. So for your reading pleasure, I posted the list below; peruse it and see what you think. Just for kicks, I bolded the books I have read and put a star next to titles I had read parts of. Because that totally counts for something. 

88 'Books That Shaped America'

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (1884)

"Alcoholics Anonymous" by anonymous (1939)

"American Cookery" by Amelia Simmons (1796)

"The American Woman's Home" by Catharine E. Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)

"And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts (1987)

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand (1957)

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison (1987)

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown (1970)

"The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (1903)

"The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss (1957)

"Catch-22" by Joseph Heller (1961)

"The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger (1951)

"Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White (1952)

"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine (1776) *

"The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" by Benjamin Spock (1946)

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan (1980)

"A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible" by anonymous (1788)

"The Double Helix" by James D. Watson (1968)

"The Education of Henry Adams" by Henry Adams (1907)

"Experiments and Observations on Electricity" by Benjamin Franklin (1751)

"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (1953)

"Family Limitation" by Margaret Sanger (1914)

"The Federalist" by anonymous (1787) * maybe?

"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan (1963)

"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin (1963)

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway (1940) *

"Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

"Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)

"A Grammatical Institute of the English Language" by Noah Webster (1783)

"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck (1939)

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

"Harriet, the Moses of Her People" by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)

"The History of Standard Oil" by Ida Tarbell (1904)

"History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark" by Meriwether Lewis (1814)

"How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis (1890)

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie (1936)

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill (1946)

"Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures" by Federal Writers' Project (1937)

"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote (1966) (Does watching the movie Capote count?)

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison (1952) *

"Joy of Cooking" by Irma Rombauer (1931)

"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair (1906)

"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman (1855) *

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) *

"Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy" by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

"Mark, the Match Boy" by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)

"McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Primer" by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)

"Moby-Dick; or The Whale" by Herman Melville (1851) *

"The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" by Frederick Douglass (1845)

"Native Son" by Richard Wright (1940) *

"New England Primer" by anonymous (1803)

"New Hampshire" by Robert Frost (1923)

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac (1957) *

"Our Bodies, Ourselves" by Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1971)

"Our Town: A Play" by Thornton Wilder (1938) (I've at least seen it performed. Does that count for something?)

"Peter Parley's Universal History" by Samuel Goodrich (1837)

"Poems" by Emily Dickinson (1890) *

"Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth" by Benjamin Franklin (1758)

"Pragmatism" by William James (1907)

"The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D." by Benjamin Franklin (1793)

"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane (1895)

"Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

"Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey (1912)

"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)

"Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson (1962)

"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats (1962) *

"The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner (1929) *

"Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams (1923) *

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)

"A Street in Bronzeville" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)

"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams (1947) *

"A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America" by Christopher Colles (1789)

"Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (1960)

"A Treasury of American Folklore" by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith (1943)

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) *

"Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader (1965)

"Walden; or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)

"Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak (1963)

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum (1900)

"The Words of Cesar Chavez" by Cesar Chavez (2002)

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?

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.

Favorite Christmas Books

Honestly, I have a lot of favorites, so here are just a few.

Classic story, love Jan Brett.

So this one's more wintery than Christmasy, but I still love it. I wrote more about this book and my love affair with snow in this post.

And even though I have certain feelings about the whole Santa Claus thing, I still like this book.

You?

Gullibility

The other night, I totally fell for it. In a Netflix series I had been watching, one of the characters died, and I totally took it seriously. I believed it and was seriously so sad. She was a vital part of the story, and I was totally baffled as to how the writers could possibly do such a thing. And the fact that I have used "totally" in nearly every sentence so far shows you how truly distressed I was. I avoided watching the show for the next few days because I was bothered. When I finally sat down and watched the next episode, it turned out that this character had just been in a deep coma or something and quit breathing, but she came back to life. Totally ridic—even for being set in a far simpler time, medically—but I'll admit I felt so much better.

And simultaneously so sheepish that I had fallen for it and let myself get so caught up in a silly show. It reminded me of how I was so sucked in to the beginning of the book Life of Pi that I actually thought it was a true story. (Read about it on the other blog here, but only if you want to mock me for being scared of a baby racoon—'cause that's what'll happen after you read this post.)

So while I was balancing feelings of both relief and chagrin, I started to chide myself for being so gullible. But then I thought, no. Maybe the getting sucked in and the believing is just the mark of good writing. I'd be thrilled if someone thought my book was a true story, at least sort of. Thrilled and then only slightly concerned. But maybe writers would consider it a compliment, so I'm not going to be embarrassed anymore. Just appreciative of the captivating and sometimes spellbinding fun and adventure literature (and Netflix) can bring to the world.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is not known for its amazing children's books. And I'm probably going to be too busy eating my weight in my mother's rolls to do anything about it, but if I have a minute, I may pull out this one-and-only classic from my childhood.

A very unusual holiday story, but you might say it's the perfect bridge between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Because witches celebrate too.

Do you have any Thanksgiving favorites I just don't know about?