Bibliobibulae: Ladies Who Love Books

nerdphobia: dynamicafrica: “The white man is very clever. He...

sportula — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:58:31 -0400

dynamicafrica:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

RIP :(

Jurassic Park

sportula — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:39:23 -0400

It’s been a while since I could rattle off the names of dinosaurs with ease, but I have to admit there’s still a small part of me that is fascinated by them. Something about seeing a giant skeleton from millions of years ago makes me revert into being a ten year old again. I doubt I’m the only one, and that’s probably one of the reasons for the success of Jurassic Park. Most dinosaur related things outside of academia are directed towards children, so it’s fun to have a novel (and movie!) about dinosaurs that you can appreciate as an adult. Yet it’s something older kids can get into as well; I first read this book when I was twelve. Michael Crichton was great at creating an action-packed plot with quick pacing and interesting clues to what’s going to happen next. Obviously, any mystery aspect of the plot is kind of spoiled for most modern readers who have seen the movie or just have not been living under a rock since 1993, but still he did set up everything nicely. Despite already knowing what was going to happen, I was reluctant to set the book down and pretty much read it in one sitting.

That said, I wasn’t particularly invested in any of the characters. They’re all pretty stock action/sci-fi characters with little to no development throughout the novel. Granted, that’s because a lot of them are you know… dead… by the end of the book but it would have been good to see more from the characters than just concern about survival. As it is, they are there mostly to service the plot, or in Ian Malcolm’s case, to service Crichton’s message of “Hey, maybe let’s not fuck around with nature! That leads to bad things!” A message that got reiterated probably one too many times, but at least he was eloquent about it.

In any case, I had a lot of fun rereading Jurassic Park, and I am shamefully way too excited about its re-release into theaters.

"Literature is, in that way, a solitary act of being with your own conscience. And yet, reading is..."

sportula — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:03:30 -0500

“Literature is, in that way, a solitary act of being with your own conscience. And yet, reading is also a conversation — it’s a conversation over the ages. You are speaking to the brightest and the best without the cumbersomeness of their presence… We begin with the solitude of reading which leads to the necessity of leaking, as it were, the pleasure you have to friends and the people around you, which then leads us back again to going deeper into the work… Sometimes I think I would say that we should live with these things ourselves, and not in the public realm. But I can’t keep myself from conversation. I urge you to read in solitude, but I also want to pull you out of that solitude and create some sort of dialogue.”

- Paul Holdengräber (via austinkleon)

This is the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin! I have...

sportula — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:50:33 -0500

This is the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin! I have been there and it was amazing.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

sportula — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:44:45 -0500

Recommending humor writers is always an iffy task because what one person finds hilarious another person might find asinine. That said, Sedaris really is a brilliant humorist. I already kind of fell in love with him when I read Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, but I think I enjoyed When You Are Engulfed in Flames even more, perhaps because of its autobiographical nature, as I tend to be drawn to memoirs and biographies and the like. Of course, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is not exactly a memoir, but a series of essays that, rather than forming a complete chronological portrait of his life, give us brief snapshots of Sedaris’ personality and view of the world through various moments in his life, from falling in love with a spider to buying a human skeleton as a present for his boyfriend. Sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion while reading that he is stretching the truth a bit, but it doesn’t really matter because I’m laughing anyway. Perhaps more importantly, oftentimes I honestly could connect on a personal level to what he was saying. In reading about his ridiculous foibles and those of the people around him, I could recognize my own and have a good laugh about it, knowing that we’re all kind of a bit ridiculous in our own way.

Throughout the book, I constantly found myself going “Oh I like that quote!” and “I should write this one down!” because well, first off I’m a dork who actually does write down quotes from books all the time, but second off because Sedaris’ writing is the perfect mixture of funny and insightful, which is something that is harder to achieve than it seems. He has a wonderful ability to render ordinarily dull activities comical and to highlight the delightfully eccentric qualities of the people around him without sacrificing depth in his writing.

beatonna: A collection of classic book covers, from the 30s....

sportula — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:57:35 -0500

beatonna:

A collection of classic book covers, from the 30s. The beginnings of pictorial dust jackets!

The Devil in the White City

sportula — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:25:15 -0500

The Gilded Age is a fascinating time in U.S. history and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair often serves as a symbol for the era as a whole, appropriately so. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson provides a detailed but engaging account of the Fair from start to finish, and in case that isn’t interesting enough for you, he throws in a little murder. While Chicago’s architects, businessmen, and civic leaders struggled to make the Fair a success, on the outskirts of the fairgrounds an attractive young doctor, was building a hotel where he murdered a succession of people, mostly young women who had come to Chicago looking for independence and economic opportunity. Larson switches between these two main narratives, with the architect Daniel Burnham, the director of the Fair, and H.H. Holmes, the serial murderer, as the main figures. The two tales of the Fair serve to juxtapose the dark and light sides of both Chicago and the period well.

The Devil in the White City is a non-fiction piece, but it reads like a novel. In general, this is a positive thing. All too often, history books are too dry for casual reading, which is unfortunate, because, as Larson proves, historical events can be just as interesting and exciting (or horrifying, as the case may be) as fictional stories. Larson’s Chicago of 1893 is not an abstract idea you might encounter in a textbook, it feels like a real and tangible world, which it was. However, Larson can sometimes stray too much into speculation about events, particularly how exactly Holmes murdered his victims and his motivations behind the murders. Larson does admit to this in the afterword, but during the course of the book it can sometimes be a little difficult to tell when he is pulling a detail from a primary source or if a particular detail is something he is theorizing about. Speculation is of course one of the things that makes history fun but writers do have to be careful about not letting their speculations seem like irrefutable facts.

Personally, while there was a sort of morbid fascination with the Sweeny Toddesque murders committed by Holmes, I was mostly interested in all that went into building and operating the Fair, especially the fun tidbits like the one guy who showed up at the Fair’s medical center for “excessive flatulence” or Susan B. Anthony telling a conservative minister that she’d learn more from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show than from going to church. For other people, Holmes’ narrative is probably more exciting. Either way, I really loved this book and could not put it down.

Ptolemy's Gate

radicarian — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:52:30 -0500

I am sorely tempted to simply link this post and leave it at that (pay special attention to that last line there). This book is terrific, and I don’t know that I can say what I found so terrific about it without veering off into either spoiler territory or perfect incoherence, but I’ll give it a go.

A further three years have passed since The Golem’s Eye. Nathaniel has been promoted even higher since then, and he’s suffering under the responsibility, totally friendless, and forced to constantly watch his back. Naturally he passes some of the pain along to Bartimaeus as they struggle to keep up with multiple wars, commoner revolts, cranking out propaganda, keeping the Prime Minister’s favor, and following up one last lead on that Resistance stuff from last book. Kitty… well, she’s keeping busy. (Spoilers, but she’s being awesome, trust me.)

It’s like the other two: there is a plot in which things constantly get worse, interspersed with backstory (Bartimaeus’s this time, better integrated than in the last book, and… really good). Things blow up into a spectacular magical showdown. The characters are interesting and complicated, and interact in entertaining ways. Snark. Footnotes. Et cetera. The point is… it’s terrific, and a satisfying and worthy conclusion to a trilogy full of awesome. It’s clever and intense, and Nathaniel’s character arc over the course of the series is - well, I’m running out of positive adjectives. Imagine there’s a really fancy one here.

In conclusion: good book. Good trilogy. Fuck.

The Golem's Eye

radicarian — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:13:00 -0500

It’s been two years since the events of The Amulet of Samarkand, and Nathaniel has come up in the world. He’s apprenticed to the Security Minister, he’s become much more adept at magic, and while everyone he meets seems to hate him, he’s considered a rising star in the government. He’s tasked with hunting down the Resistance - and when some huge mysterious thing starts rampaging through London destroying magical artifacts, his superiors decide that’s the Resistance’s doing and clearly his problem. It isn’t them, of course, but it’s on him to prove that - and the real Resistance isn’t keeping idle while this happens. Naturally he’s going to need Bartimaeus’s help to sort everything out.

As with the first book, the forward progress of the plot is broken up with flashbacks for the first two or three sections, and then once we know how everyone got to where they are, the momentum builds to a freaking awesome finale. I had a bit less patience for the format this time, perhaps because it wasn’t so novel - but when things get rolling, whoa, do they ever. There’s an interesting array of antagonists, some of them expected, some of them WAIT WHERE DID THAT GUY COME FROM WHAT THE HELL, and the intensity just keeps ramping up.

We get a new PoV character in Kitty, one of the Resistance members who showed up in the first book. Her parallels to Nathaniel are pretty clear - she’s a smart, stubborn kid, something unfair happened to her, and she is going to bring down the parties responsible. But her ideals are larger than herself, she’s tougher and less naive, and she’s not a little shit like Nathaniel. I feared her plotline would be too predictable, but it veered off early enough, and she’s a refreshing island of decency in a world where all the wizards and most of the commoners are total assholes. She is also a badass. Gold star for Kitty.

As for our original protagonists: Nathaniel has totally turned into The Man. He has nothing but distrust and contempt for his fellow magicians, but he’s trying to be just like them anyway. He’s completely absorbed all the government’s loathsome rhetoric about the inferiority of commoners. All he thinks about is getting promoted, gaining power and prestige, and he is terribly, TERRIBLY serious about it. But he is also a ridiculous fourteen-year-old tryhard with stupid hair. The contrast is fantastic. And Bartimaeus remains a shining pinnacle of awesomeness and snark, though some cracks are beginning to show…

The second book of a trilogy faces a lot of challenges, and book two is often the weakest installment of the three. But this one seems to have sidestepped the usual pitfalls: it succeeds as a story unto itself and as a continuation of the first book, and has kept my interest high for book three. Hats off to that.

Photo

sportula — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:38:25 -0500

The Amulet of Samarkand

radicarian — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:36:00 -0500

So: it’s much like late-20th-century England, only with a magical ruling class. Magicians derive their power entirely from summoning and controlling various kinds of demons - a very dangerous business. They are also the most incredible oppressive dickweeds toward commoners, but more on that later (OR IS THERE?). This story swaps between first-person chapters narrated by the djinni Bartimaeus and third-person chapters about Nathaniel, the twelve-year-old who summons him to steal the titular amulet.

AND THEY’RE BOTH PRETTY GREAT. Bartimaeus is clever and snarky, and his chapters have footnotes that range from funny to dropping in useful background on the world to both at once. Nathaniel… is a Smart Kid who I suspect resonates with other current and former Smart Kids the way he does with me. He’s got brains and the will to use them, but he’s impatient and proud, sensitive to slights, and doesn’t understand anything outside his own life and its narrow frame of reference. They are great individually and they are even better together. Particularly late in the book, Bartimaeus’s jaded presence is a refreshing counterweight to Nathaniel’s self-important righteous rage and angst.

It all goes along at a respectable clip, while in the background throughout parts 1 and 2 it’s gradually revealed why Nathaniel called up Bartimaeus in the first place. The final part rushes up to a pretty damn spectacular climax, after which… well, not everything is resolved. I have a fervent hope that books 2 and 3 follow up on all the interesting background stuff dropped in this book and that I’m correct in my conjectures as to what the larger plot arc of the trilogy will be. I feel as though my review of this book is incomplete until I can verify that the other two pick up these threads, but hey! That is where we are! I’ll have them read and written up soon enough, but in the meantime, my verdict is THIS IS A PRETTY DAMN GOOD BOOK.

Mr. Fox

radicarian — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:37:03 -0500

Celebrated novelist St. John Fox chronically kills off all his female characters, so his muse, Mary, comes to life in an attempt to make him knock it off with that misogynistic nonsense. While they square off in a game of trading stories, Mr. Fox’s wife, Daphne, starts getting suspicious of this Other Woman whom her husband keeps insisting “isn’t real.” She’s also been slowly realizing that he’s a dick.

It is a peculiar setup - and one that will vanish almost entirely for dozens of pages at a time when Mary or Mr. Fox starts a new story. The bulk of the novel is taken up in these stories, and they’re all pretty damn great, though I was at a loss as to how some of them fit into Mr. Fox and Mary’s game or, in short, advanced the plot at all. They’re scattered across all time periods, too - the main story takes place in Depression-era America, but these stories make references to text messages or American troops in Iraq. I suppose that’s all to be written off as muse magic owing to Mary’s peculiar nature. Certainly they’re all thematically tied up together, and in each one, Oyeyemi does an admirable job of establishing all the ground work and winning sympathy for these new incarnations of the characters in a very short space. I really can’t complain; they work well even as relatively self-contained units.

Oyeyemi raises some interesting questions about what stories really mean and what responsibilities might come with creating them. All three principal characters are well-drawn and nuanced. It takes a while for Daphne to get into the spotlight, but when she does, she’s pretty swell… which just underscores the disservice her (well-drawn and nuanced) dickbag husband has been doing her. The writing itself is clear and charming and switches from bittersweet to snarky to THIS IS A FAIRY TALE (I do not know how to describe fairy-tale style, but you know it when you see it) with facility. If I have one quibble, it’s that the refusal to hold readers’ hands might go a bit too far. I appreciate that Oyeyemi doesn’t spell everything out and it takes a bit of work at times to figure out what’s happening and why, but there were places where, without having read THIS ONE PRECISE FAIRY TALE I’D NEVER HEARD OF, I thought I was missing out on whole reams of What The Hell This Book Is Getting At.

Overall, though? Delightful. Even without knowing exactly what was going on, it was a damn enjoyable read.

H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales

radicarian — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:45:00 -0500

Happy belated New Year, people! Like Sportula said, er, forever ago, I have been rather writing books than reading them of late, but I am back now to hold forth on subjects I know nothing about! Namely: WEIRD FICTION.

H.P. Lovecraft apparently composed several different lists of the best and creepiest stories he’d read over the course of his career, so he could recommend these stories to his various correspondents. This book is a compilation of all the stories he thus dignified. It’s divided into two sections, for the “literary” and the “popular” weird tale - the former apparently being Serious Business, while the latter is all commercial stuff that was published in Weird Tales magazine. Philistine that I quite likely am, I found the popular weird tales more interesting and frequently creepier.

With most of these stories, I was not even mildly weirded out for more than a moment. I am not an extensive reader of horror, early or recent; I don’t know if the problem is my expectations, a simple mismatch between my inclinations and the authors’, or poor execution. That said, below the cut are the ones that stood out to me:

“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe - because of course it is. Poe pulls off the atmosphere of dankness and madness so well that it’s creepy even before anything happens. BECAUSE HE’S POE.
“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood - two guys alone at night on a crumbling island filled with inhuman hostile presences, just lying around in their tent, utter sitting ducks. It maintains the tension quite well!
“Beyond the Door” by Paul Suter - a guy tries to figure out why and how his uncle died. This one’s a bit borderline for me, as I think Suter verges on spelling things out a little too explicitly toward the end. It feels a bit insulting to figure out what’s happened and then have the solution handed to you anyway in case you missed it.
“The Night Wire” by H. F. Arnold - an extremely brief story in which something strange happens and cannot be explained. It’s just… cool.
“The Canal” by Everil Worrell - weird guy encounters weird lady, makes rash promises; weird lady turns out to be much weirder than anticipated. I can’t really explain why this one appealed to me so much, but perhaps it just comes down to scary ladies. It’s also a bit more action-y than the rest.
“Bells of Oceana” by Arthur J. Burks - STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA… OR DO THEY?

There are 12 other stories in here that I was mostly “meh” on.

Generally speaking, the literary ones evoke an atmosphere, and then somebody dies, and they end. The craft might be superior to that displayed in the popular weird tales, but the stories weren’t as interesting overall and made less of an impression on me. I don’t know that I can recommend the book as a whole, unless you’re really hung up on the history of supernatural horror fiction or very badly need to know what Lovecraft liked to read, OR this is your cup of tea already. I can conclude that it is not entirely mine.

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919

sportula — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:06:48 -0500

Hello.

Yes.

We do in fact still exist. It’s been a while since we posted, but I hope you can forgive us, as both Radicarian and I were participating in Nanowrimo, though she met with much more success than I did (LET ME BRAG ABOUT HER she got 75,000 words while I got 30,000). Still, while I sincerely doubt my destiny lies in writing novels, I do think it is a worthwhile exercise for any avid bibliobibula (or bibliobibulus) to try their own hand at writing. If nothing else, it gives you further appreciation for the authors behind your favorite books, and really, even those you don’t like.

Anyway, the book I have been reading for the past couple of weeks is Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann Hagedorn. In the United States we’re pretty obsessed with the Civil War and World War II, but we rarely talk about Word War I, yet that is a very important era in our history, not only because of the war itself, but because of what was happening socially, technologically, and economically as well. Savage Peace delves into those all of those aspects of the year 1919, the year after the Armistice with the Central Powers was signed. 1919 is probably most famous for Wilson’s push for the foundation for the League of Nations, but there was a lot more to that year. Hagedorn breaks the book down by each season of the year and follows the US’s transition from the infectious hope for a new world that swept up everyone at the end of war to the return of isolationism and the rejection of idealism by the start of the 1920s. Hagedorn covers a wide range of subjects from the lynching of black Americans to labor unrest, from the excitement surrounding the first non-stop transatlantic flight to the scandal surrounding the 1919 World Series, but though they may all seem to be unrelated events at first, together they form a picture of a year when America wrestled with itself, trying to understand the post Great War world.

Despite the fact that so much is going on in the book and there are a lot of individual historical figures Hagedorn talks about, she writes in such a way that the details don’t bog you down. She does not include details for the sake of making a fat history book; they all serve to help to enhance the reader’s overall understanding of the historical significance of the year 1919. We tend to trace a lot of our modern American values from World War II and its aftermath, but it’s clear from this book how much the First World War impacted the United States as well. In attempting to cover the year as whole, there are of course incidents and people that don’t get as much attention as they deserve, but Savage Peace is definitely a good big-picture sort of history that hopefully sparks interest in discovering more about those individuals and events.

"I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on..."

sportula — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:43:10 -0500

“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, ‘If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we’ll talk.’ All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don’t want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”

- Ray Bradbury (via bookporn)

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

radicarian — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:00:00 -0400

All right, Internet, look. I have just recently read this book for the second time in a little over a year. You’re familiar with Junji Ito’s short horror manga “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” right? (Of course you are. You’re the Internet. And that’s good, because I’m about to make a breathtakingly stupid analogy.) Perhaps you will understand why I cannot possibly be objective when I tell you that this book was like that: from the moment I was first told of it (a favor for which, Morri, I may never be able to repay you), I knew it was something I had to investigate. Once I’d opened it, I could not leave it for the world. And finally, I emerged from the experience capable of producing only a horrible monotonous drone and with my limbs curiously attenuated.

This book, in short, might as well have been MADE FOR ME. I initially read it early last September; I have found it no less brilliant on a second reading. I should, however, probably try to make some concrete points about it. To that end:

1. It is funny (and I have to stop myself from adding “as hell” because, enthusiast of contemptible wordplay though I am, there has to be a limit somewhere).
a. It occasionally stops being funny in order to discreetly stab you in the place where you keep your feelings.
2. Johannes Cabal himself is a fantastic character, indeed one of my favorites in the history of the universe.
3. EVIL CARNIVAL, GUYS. AN ENTIRE BOOK FULL OF EVIL TRAVELING CARNIVAL
4. No, but seriously. Cabal is fascinating. I would be sold even if he were ONLY about science, misanthropy, and raising the dead, but no! The wonders do not even stop there!
(One note less pertinent to this reading and more related to my first time through - his ultimate motivation isn’t revealed until the end, but by no means difficult to figure out beforehand. And yet even though I’d done so, the scene that confirmed my guess was STILL SURPRISINGLY EFFECTIVE.)
5. I am out of sensible things to say. This book has eaten my brain. Twice.
6. DRR… DRR… DRR…

I suppose one thing worth noting is the structure - it’s almost entirely episodic up until the last few chapters. Feature? Bug? Feature imperfectly implemented? I don’t know. I don’t really care. On a rational level I am aware that this book can’t actually be perfect, but my objectivity took a hike somewhere around page 27.

The only meaningful conclusions I can draw from all this are as follows: if you are me, you need to read this book. I’ll probably have to come around and kill you shortly thereafter, because I don’t like having competition, but I’ll let you read it first, because I’m not a monster. If you are not me, consider reading it anyway, because it’s fucking fantastic. Then consider reading the other two. I will be over here waiting on whatever the hell a tenterhook is for book four. Thank you and good day.

Monster

radicarian — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:38:14 -0400

The premise is promising, the opening is an appealing blend of wackiness and people totally underreacting to said wackiness, and some of the concepts present in the background to make this world work are pretty neat. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of Martinez’s other books (and, full disclosure, made it 33% of the way into a third before quitting from boredom).Monsterhas a lot going for it, but in the end it didn’t work for me.

And most of what didn’t work for me was the humor. Sure, the protagonists take way too long to figure out what was happening and the explanation all comes pretty suddenly at the end; sure, Monster isn’t as interesting to me as Judy and I wish we got more of her and less of him - but there’s the core of a good story in here, with thoughtful (if not totally novel) bits about the pursuit of happiness and finding one’s purpose in life. My issue is that this core is wrapped in a bunch of predictable gags. I’m particularly irritated by the subplot with Monster’s girlfriend - a succubus who’s under contract to date him because it keeps her out of Hell. Basically, take every boring sitcom trope about girlfriends being a pain in the ass, and add brimstone. “OH NO BETTER USE A COASTER SHE GETS PISSY WHEN YOU LEAVE RINGS ON THE FURNITURE. ALSO, SHE’S A DEMON.” “ISN’T IT IRRITATING WHEN THEY WANT YOU TO PICK UP THE DRY CLEANING AND DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU’RE A BUSY GUY AND SHIT HAPPENS TO YOU? ALSO, SHE’S A DEMON.” “SHE USED TO DRESS ALL SEXY BUT NOW YOU’VE BEEN DATING FOR A WHILE AND SHE STOPPED TRYING AND JUST WEARS T-SHIRTS. ALSO -” you get my point, I trust. It’s not funny in its original form, and giving the girlfriend incendiary powers and a literal sixth sense for when Monster has seen someone else’s breasts does not suffice to make it so.

In all? Not terrible - but not as good as it could have been, which in some ways is even more frustrating.

Lucky Girl

sportula — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:01:00 -0400

Mei-Ling Hopgood was born in Taiwan, but, along with her Korean brothers, was raised by white parents in America. By now, such a family does not seem unusual at all, but in the 1970s, the practice of Americans adopting children from Asia was rare, and Hopgood was one of the first children from Taiwan to be adopted overseas. For the first twenty years of her life, she lived without any contact with her birth family, but as a college student, she was reunited with them. Her Taiwanese family is large, boisterous, and welcoming, sweeping her up in a whirlwind of emotions and excitement. It is interesting to see her reactions to all of this, because not only is she discovering a new family, but a new culture. As a child and a teen, she never really gave much thought to her origins, except in trying to avoid being “too Asian” in a predominantly white Midwestern town, so traveling back to Taiwan was a bit overwhelming.

Hopgood’s training as a journalist shows in her writing, particularly when she discusses American cultural attitudes towards adoptees (i.e. our fascination with the longing for one’s biological parents and the quest to find them), but that doesn’t mean the book feels impersonal. I found Hopgood really relatable, even though we share very little in common, as she writes about her experiences with clarity and honesty. The issues she discusses, particularly in regards to families formed from adoptions and the racism, whether subtle or not, of many white Americans towards Asian-Americans, are important, but she never comes off as preachy. It’s more “here are my experiences and how they fit in with the experiences of others I’ve met.” While Lucky Girl may not be the most profound memoir ever written, it is definitely worth the read and I’m glad I picked it up.

30th Annual Banned Books Week | September 30th - October 6th,...

sportula — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 09:04:50 -0400

30th Annual Banned Books Week | September 30th - October 6th, 2012
“Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.” - Lyndon B. Johnson

Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2011

sportula — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:38:15 -0400

neil-gaiman:

Out of 326 challenges as reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom

ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence

My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit

What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit

Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Reasons: offensive language; racism