Posted by Erin
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:43:45 GMT
There's always something that makes me sad in Anne Tyler's books. In this one
, it was how generally well-intentioned the characters were, but how easily they misunderstood each other. Also how thoughtlessly the characters spoke sometimes. But what I love about Anne Tyler is how true to life her books are, maybe more in this one than in previous novels. The characters aren't quirky and weird, as in many of her other books; they're more subtly complex and ordinary.
It was one of those books where, days after I've finished it, I suddenly wonder, "What's going on with so-and-so?" And I'm sad to discover that the story is done. I don't know what else will happen to so-and-so, because she's not real.
My mom used to want me to write our family history. She thought it could be like an Anne Tyler novel. It probably could be--we'd fit right into her world, except for the Baltimore setting--but I'm not sure we'd be pleased to see ourselves so honestly rendered. Anne Tyler is good at the flawed protagonist.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:00:00 GMT
This short book by playwright David Mamet is a National Geographic publication about Vermont, where Mamet lived for forty years (I think). Jon and I have been fans of Mamet and of Vermont for several years now, so this was a treat.
Mamet's writing is almost like poetry, it's so concentrated. There are no meandering descriptions that invite you to get lost in the text. You have to pay attention to every word (or at least I did)--there's nothing extra. I liked it a lot.
In many travel books I've read, the author's descriptions of people and towns, especially small towns, are cute and quaint. They often end up sounding like caricatures instead of real people. (See Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, for example; I couldn't finish it, he seemed so condescending to those he was describing. I started to imagine how he'd describe me, and it wasn't good.) Mamet's characters, real people he lived and did business with, were respectfully and realistically portrayed. Mamet also describes himself honestly, or with some self-deprecation or humility. I don't know what to call it, but it makes him a trustworthy writer. Someone to listen to.
I shouldn't be surprised, though. His plays and movies (the ones we've seen) are amazing and important. But that's a topic for another time. Or for several other times.
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Posted by Erin
Fri, 08 Sep 2006 16:51:00 GMT
This is a novel for kids 8 and up, supposedly, though it seems too mature for that young. I really liked it. The main character is obsessed with Catholic Saints and being good, and sometimes he sees and talks to them. There's also a bizarre portrayal of Mormons in their neighborhood (the kid's intrigued, because they're Latter-day Saints, you know), which makes me really wonder if the author has met some LDS missionaries who were kind of odd. Or maybe he just made it up. Or maybe missionaries in England go by their first names (all Biblical) and live in suburban homes in threesomes eschewing material possessions.
There's a very good movie version of this, too, but it also may be too mature for young kids. We watched it with ours, but it won't be one of those that gets oft-repeated viewings.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:11:35 GMT
This was pretty good, though maybe not as compelling as The Giver. I'm eager to read the next somewhat-related book, Messenger, and see how it ties the two novels together. I look forward to reading these with my kids when they're older.
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Posted by Erin
Mon, 21 Aug 2006 05:45:24 GMT
I am grateful that the author of this book explains that while the novel is about a real person (Halide Edib, a famous nineteenth century Turkish woman), she has taken the liberty of changing many of the "details" of her life. But why!? Why must she do that? Why change what's already good, great, interesting? And while I'm at it, I don't think the time of death of Halide's stepmother, to whom she was supposedly close, is a "detail." Well, I should calm down. The premise of the whole book--Halide's "gift" for seeing dead people, which later turns into an ability to write really good fiction, if that makes sense--is a "detail" that's made-up.
Halide Edib sounds like a pretty interesting woman, in spite of how boring she is in the book. I'd like to read her memoirs someday, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Halide Edib. Or one of her twenty-five novels. She lived at the end of the Ottoman empire, her family members were both devout, traditional Muslims and pro-European progressives. She was the first Turkish girl to attend the American Girls School in Constantinople, and she taught English literature at Istanbul University.
Obviously, I didn't like this novel that much, though. The quote on the cover of the book says it's a "complex tale of intrigue, secrets, superstitions and veiled passions." Yes, it contains all of those elements, but somehow it wasn't as gripping as it should have been, especially when the author was making up a lot of stuff. I suppose I learned a few things, though. Kazan's brief history of the Ottoman Empire was just right for me, right now, knowing next to nothing about it. (Though I do know, from the They Might Be Giants song, that Istanbul used to be called Constantinople!)
A half-formed theory of mine is that if a good portion of the praise quotes on a book's cover come from other authors, it's probably not that good. I'm still testing the theory, but it holds true for this one.
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Posted by Jon Jensen
Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:44:00 GMT
I believe this book is the first book on homeschooling I've read cover to cover. Apparently John Holt's earlier book Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education is a homeschooling classic (specifically about what is perhaps unfortunately named unschooling). His protégé Patrick Ferenga has taken that book and updated it. Overall, I enjoyed it, but as I read it, I was glad I hadn't read any until we'd already been homeschooling for years. I came to basically the same conclusions, but in my own way.
I'll start with a few small and probably petty annoyances. One of the authors commented that nobody would need to "learn computers" at school because it's easy to teach yourself or take a community class. But what he actually meant was learning to use spreadsheets and word processors, hardly what I think of when someone says "learn computers". Programming, troubleshooting software or hardware, etc. are far beyond mere user semi-competence. Mind you, many of the best hackers are self-taught, so this is no endorsement of formal computer education (of which I have next to none anyway). But it's like the sizable difference between "learning to drive a car" and "learning how to maintain and repair cars".
On page xiv of the preface, I read: "It wasn't a single homeschooling encounter, book, or research paper that convinced my wife and I to try homeschooling ..." Yes, convinced my wife and I. Well, that was Patrick. Somehow I think John Holt wouldn't have made that mistake!
In general I feel the book oversimplifies a number of things, and is overly dismissive of formal schooling methods in general. I don't think (and the book doesn't present much evidence) that formal schooling is in all places and times inherently broken. I prefer to narrow the focus to the inappropriateness of formal education for children younger than somewhere around age 13-16.
But I'm sounding too negative. The book is actually quite good, and I particularly appreciated that it didn't advocate any narrow ideological point of view (religious focus, or highly secular, or elitist). Many homeschoolers seem to have a highly rigid approach that focuses on their chosen curriculum or methods, and finds all others inferior. This book is narrowly negative and expansive, in the sense that it explicates the case for keeping kids out of formal schools, but otherwise leaving the field of possibilities wide open. And that is the approach I too have come to feel is best.
I found Patrick Farenga was in his finest form here in the book's conclusion:
To repeat once again the idea with which I began this book, it is a most serious mistake to think that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that people do best when they are not doing anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done. It is an equally serious mistake to think that teaching, the assisting of learning and the sharing of knowledge and skill, is something that can be done only by a few specialists. When we lock learning and teaching in the school box, as we do, we do not get more effective teaching and learning in society, but much less.
What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent--in the broadest and best sense, intelligent--is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them. (pp. 278-279)
and later ...
... education is changing the definition of citizenship with very little debate. John Holt, in an unpublished talk to students in 1971, observed:
Thomas Jefferson felt that education was needed to help become and be what he called citizens. By "citizens" he did not mean what most of us mean when we call ourselves "taxpayers" or "consumers." A citizen was not someone who worried about how to "fit into society." He was a maker and shaper of society. He held the highest office in the Republic; public servants were his servants, not his bosses and rulers.
Being a citizen seems to mean merely being an "employed consumer" today. It is popular among today's educational policy makers to refer to children as "resources" to be developed, rather than as individuals to be nurtured. It is hard to imagine how teachers and students are expected to become citizens who "make and shape society" when so much of their time together is spent trying to "make and shape" the kids to fit the demands of twelve to sixteen or more years of school.
(p. 285)
This book is not essential reading for people already homeschooling. But it's nonetheless worthwhile, and I especially recommend it for people who aren't familiar with homeschooling at all, or for homeschoolers whose teaching approach mimics the formal schools.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 05 Aug 2006 00:48:00 GMT
Filmed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, written and directed by an Afghan filmmaker, this is a film about a young girl who dresses up like a boy in order to get work and support her mother and grandmother. I've read a few books about Afghanistan in the last year or so--they've been enlightening, but I still don't really understand the culture there or in surrounding Islamic countries. This movie gave me more to look at than the books (and the cinematography is really beautiful), but while I can explain that women there are oppressed and treated as second-class citizens, I have the feeling I'll never know what that's really like.
What strikes me about the Muslims portrayed in this movie and in the books I've read is that they are extremely religious--praying five times a day and constantly referring to God and His will--and at the same time some of the meanest people I've had to think about. Especially interesting to me is how the women, very often treated badly by their husbands and other men, try their hardest to oppress and belittle each other.
Now I know my exposure has been limited to a movie and a few books. Here are the books I've read that deal with Afghanistan:
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (a disturbing novel that I didn't really like but made me read more about Afghanistan and other Muslim countries)
- An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot (nonfiction about a guy's travels to Afghanistan. The first visit he snuck in and lived with the mujahedin during the Russian occupation--when he was 19! because that's what everyone wants to do on Spring Break!--and the second time he traveled around the country ten years later, when the Taliban was beginning to take control. Beautifully written and fascinating.)
- The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (another fascinating nonfiction book by a female Norwegian journalist who lived with an Afghani family for three months. Really interesting, though also disturbing.)
Others that are related:
- House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (interesting because one of main characters is Iranian; it's well-written and seems to characterize the Iranian family really well. Otherwise, I hated this book, because how could the characters do so many stupid things?)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (I haven't finished this book yet, but it's good. Much more literary criticism than I expected, it's a memoir by an Iranian literature professor who holds a sort of underground book club for women after she resigns from her University of Tehran position because of political oppression.)
Anyway, I've barely begun to learn about Islamic culture and countries. There are certain topics that scare me because I know so little and there's so much to know, so I avoid them as much as possible until something makes me finally start to learn. And even though I didn't like the book, The Kite Runner inspired me to jump in, and that's something. (You'd think 9/11 might have gotten me started, but no.)
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Posted by Erin
Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:18:05 GMT
I read this over the weekend for a local book club, mostly motivated by a desire to refute someone's suggestion that it might be a "man's book." I'm not sure why I felt so compelled to argue about that particular issue, but whatever.
It's a coming-of-age story about a white kid who grows up in an igloo in Northern Alaska, uncool with the local Eskimos, who live in a village, and later uncool in the city of Anchorage. (He does become cool later, though.) It was really an amazing book: the writing was very good (it reminded me of the great writing in Peace Like a River, another excellent first novel), and it's a good, though sometimes depressing story (depressing mostly because of how the government so easily ruins native communities, just like in the old days, but with money and alcohol and free houses instead of guns and alcohol and jes' killin'em).
Anyway, it's amazing to read about life in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. And probably accurate, since the author grew up that way himself (and still lives in Northwestern Alaska). Worth reading.
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Posted by Erin
Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:33:58 GMT
I discovered an interesting exchange of letters between John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Mackey defends his company against Pollan's portrayal of it in the book, and Pollan almost apologizes, but not quite. Then Mackey replies again, but that's linked on Pollan's website. They're long but worth reading.
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Posted by Erin
Sat, 22 Jul 2006 02:15:37 GMT
What a great book! Targeted at young adults, it's about a young boy in a utopian society. This is, I think, the third time I've read it (for a book club this time), and it was still good. Some of the surprises were still chilling and horrific, even when I knew what was coming, or maybe partly because I did know what was coming.
There are apparently a couple of companion books to this one, not exactly sequels but somehow associated. They are Messenger and Gathering Blue. (All three are available as a boxed set.) I'm looking forward to reading them, especially after an article in Reason magazine recently, which was about children's literature with libertarian themes.
Posted in Books | 5 comments
